FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD – “Two Tribes”
In 1982, armageddon came to the pages of 2000AD. The Sov-Bloc, sworn enemies of Judge Dredd, invented a missile defense shield that allowed them to strike at Mega City One with impunity. They did so, having first maddened and weakened its already-decadent populace. In one memorable scene, as the missiles fall, citizens in as yet unbombed zones take advantage of the radiation heatwave to strip down and dance, singing a catchy tune called “Apocalypso”. It was a typical 2000AD touch, absurd but with a kernel of resonant truth. In the face of certain annihilation, what else to do but dance it on? “Two Tribes” – as thrill-powered a record as has ever hit the top – asks the same question and gets the same answer.
The first three Frankie singles, according to their ideologue Paul Morley, took on the biggest themes going: sex, war, religion. But which was which? “Relax” restaged sex as an arena fight, with the British public as the scandalised and delighted audience, thumbs twitching up or down. “Two Tribes”, on the other hand, takes the “Relax” blueprint and makes it even sleazier. More driving and more grandiose, yes, but Holly Johnson’s barks and gasps sound just as depraved, and the crazed robo-bass that thunders through the track – black leather on metal hips – gives “Two Tribes” an anchor in rock’n'roll “Relax” had lacked.
Like several hit records, “Two Tribes” is notionally about the futility of war: like few of the others, it reacts to this with a nihilist lust. If sex and horror are the new gods – and the lipsmacking way Holly asks the question leaves no doubt it’s rhetorical – then what better way to worship than a world sacrifice? Like a Shangri-La’s record, “Two Tribes” taps into pop’s doomed-youth death-drive, except it’s not just some Jimmy or Johnny on that fatal motorbike ride, it’s all of us. The video ends, modestly, with the planet exploding.
The song stayed on top for weeks, then months, thanks to the string of 12″ remixes ZTT rolled out to the public. Each emphasised different elements in the song, threw particular spotlights on its madness: one looped the band’s unbothered scouser voices from an interview: “My name’s Pedz, my name’s Mark, my name’s Nash…MINE. IS THE LAST VOICE YOU WILL EVER HEAR.” Another took the record’s bombastic intro and built it up into Wagnerian muscle disco. A third made too great a use of a somewhat ragged Reagan impersonator. You got the feeling that somewhere there must exist the perfect mix, the one which caught the very best moments of each version. If it were ever played, perhaps the world would end.
The single mix almost works as this imaginary highlights reel – the inhuman bass keeps the juxtapositions and sudden flourishes from seeming too wild, and only the abrupt ending lets you down. Horn had really cracked the technology by now, too, not just triggering the right samples at the right time but making them work in the song’s headspace, so the Eno-esque synth washes float over the hi-NRG thunder like battlefield mist, and the symphonic blurts sound like Pedz (or Mark or Nash) had stepped forward and simply pulled a full orchestra out of his pocket. As that summer wound on and the holidays started, I went round a friends’ house and saw the new walkman he’d just got for his birthday. I asked to give it a go and this was inside, on tape – the first thing I’d ever listened to on headphones. It was the most exciting sound I had ever heard. Still is.
10
Certainly nobody banned it. The main controversies were i) around the video, which was a bit of a feeble one and everyone involved – makers and banners – were going through the motions on it ii) genuine crossness at how badly FGTH were scalping the public with the endless 12″s (they changed the chart rules I think).
Only anticlimactic if “Holidays In The Sun” is an anticlimax post “God Save The Queen” I think.
“The Power Of Mutual Co-Operation Strategies”
(The Bunny’s Dilemma)
Can’t remember if I said this on the “Relax” thread: I meant to — I think Frankie’s relationship to “Rave Culture” was
(a) some of Frankie themselves were regulars at gay dance clubs, and
(b) Trevor Horn had a deep but rather abstract understanding of where the technology was taking music which is more like an evolutionary convergence — the multiple mixes, the sense that everything is done in the studio, in layers relating to timed effects, build, groove and so on, the indifference to “song” as a formal skeleton at any stage — but he WASN’T a DJ, even if he know what DJs were doing, so while it’s a kind of mainstream precursor of rave in some ways, a lot of it is subtly off (and in fact NOT so subtly if you know a lot about club music)
I *loved* the whole “too many mixes to keep up with” thing: it really appealed to me, more than anything else about them I think (not sure if i bought *any*).
“one is all that you can score” is a slogan-sharp flip of the WarGames “The only winning move is not to play” tag. WarGames was out (in the UK) in 83.
Paul Rutherford made a couple of (probably quite good!) house tunes e.g. ‘Get Real’
may be interesting to compare Horn with rising contemporaries SAW wrt getting a handle on the changing dance culture. Horn surely loved Dead or Alive.
WHERE NONE IS A NUMBER
SAW: Well, “rising” in the sense they had so far worked together on Cyprus’s entry in 1984 Eurovision, and THAT’S IT. The record they made with Divine wasn’t out till July (acc.wiki). I think the grasp of what was to come goes the other way round: except they WERE DJs (or were anyway much more locked into the sensibility).
we’ll get the ‘too many mixes’ thing on another big 80s #1. i wonder if it actually hampered the 12″ sales tho, preventing them from surpassing ‘Blue Monday’ (tho Relax and Two Tribes obv sold a lot more overall, both in the top 5 biggest-selling singles of the decade iirc) which ended up with the similar achievement of having had more remixes of it released than any big hit.
I always thought it was “a point is all that you can score.”
I’m not sure how I feel about Two Tribes these days. At the time I got carried away by the whole gynormousness of the whole, yes, event. The biggest sounding record was the biggest selling record about the biggest issue in all of our lives at the time. Straight in at the top and then Number One for nine whole weeks. It was hard not to by dwarfed by it all.
And now? Well, there’s not much of a song there, is there? And now that nuclear paranoia is no longer an ever-present fact of life, it feels more of its time than perhaps any other 1984 Number One. Some pop songs grow in stature as the years go by, Two Tribes feels like one that’s shrunk.
Re 20: “Penthouse suites, cocaine and champagne” more likely to = somebody droning on with ferocious urgency about brand identity than to be the precursor to great sex or anything else. And as assorted folk have pointed out, the fact that she was shagging dear old Bob Elms extinguished any mystery remaining around Sade after you’d heard her soporific tunes.
lex have you listened to very much Sade? Her music is much more about loneliness, bare feet, skunk, and being sad.
THE INDIE OF SOUL
Yes, shagging this would wipe away all sophistication I think.
As it happens, SAW’s first release did pre-date “Two Tribes” by a few weeks or so: “The Upstroke” by Agents Are Aeroplanes, which was conceived as a direct rip-off of “Relax”!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwF8F8fc-so
(Also, SAW/Divine’s “You Think You’re A Man” started getting radio play round about the same time as “Two Tribes.”)
btw – is Corinne Bailey-Rae the Sade of today?
I don’t mind either of them – although neither of them are as ‘sophisticated’ as they are often portrayed
Appreciating Sade for being decadent, then dismissing FGTH (probably the most decadent ensemble ever) is totally off the mark.
I have some real love for this mostly because of a very memorable scene in the Comic Strip’s TV movie Supergrass. Actually it is the only thing I remember about the whole film: Robbie Coltrane in a suit carrying a guitar case along a sea wall/jetty as waves crash across it, soundtracked by “Two Tribes.” You can watch it now: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gL9XM2_S_sM.
Well, I absolutely love New Pop and don’t go at all with this style over substance argument. In great pop there is plenty of room for both.
But this. THIS!
This is such a non event as a piece of music. A real non-event. The moment where Horn’s production brilliance spilled over into parody. The incessant bass riff is great, but the rest is a drag. I admire the ambition, but a song as sleight as this comes nowhere near carrying it off.
I am genuinely surprised at the enthusiastic response to this one. I think it must be partly an age thing to an extent – in early/mid teenage a gap of only 3 or 4 years can make a significant difference. I still loved pop in 1984 but New Pop, rather than being at its peak, seemed well past its sell by date by now.
most urgent, er point, is that it does indeed appear to be ‘(a) point’ is all you can score. judging by the miming on display in the ToTP videos on YouTube it’s definitely plosive looking with a swallowed to non-existent ‘a’. the rest of the world is not so sure acc to google:
“one is all that you can score” 242 results
“a point is all that you can score” 349 results
the lousy lyrics sites fall in the latter camp, and although they do just rip each other off i see more reputable sites there too including (ahem) MTV with a “gracenote” credit.
doesn’t stop the rest of the world having another view. FOR TWENTY FIVE YEARS.
and the same gracenote credited lyrics do include the backing line “sock it to me biscuits, now”. so i’m still not 100% convinced
I’d say “only” a 9.5 from me, but at the time I would have gone up to 11.
I haven’t heard the 7″ version in a long, long time so it never really occurred to me to think about how much or little of an actual “song” there is to this. To me it’s always existed in long, epic, widescreen form (either the Annihilation Mix or the OTT 16-minute Cassette Mix) way beyond the pop song structure of verse-chorus-hook etc. Is there a “song” in all the mayhem and effects? Probably not, just a couple of refrains repeated over and over again and enlarged to Cecil B. DeMille size by Trevor Horn.
There was more that one version of the video too, wasn’t there? Around this time my friends and I used to drink in this bar/club off Regent Street which had a big screen that was always showing a long version of the video which used cut and spliced old clips of Richard Nixon to great effect. One of the first vids I ever saw that did that sort of “mash up”.
that’s the video linked in the main post BTW
#43 – well I would see this as a last hurrah of New Pop, rather than Mike’s peak, but he’s a bit older than me and ‘was there’.
To be absolutely honest with you, I’m quite glad to see the back of NP. Amazing at the time, the records absolutely stand up, but surely it wasn’t meant to become the slightly sniffy measuring stick it has sometimes been in these comments boxes? Not getting at you in particular Conrad – we’ve all been at it – but all this ‘what was real New Pop and what wasn’t’ is a bit, I dunno, puritan for my liking. Like it was Power Pop or something. I’d known this was likely to be a 10 from decades off, and now it’s exploded over yr screens in purple praise I’m really keen to be getting onto the less historicised, more contestable second half of the 80s!
I’d never heard the term ‘New Pop’ until a couple of years ago so talk of it has been a little lost on me although I can see what the tunes tagged with it have in common, just about.
OK, re-reading that I’ve been way too harsh (crabby after 5 hr journey home from work, plus internal issues surrounding quite different bits of writing I’m doing about other bits of ‘pop history’).
Conrad’s comment wasn’t saying anything LIKE what I was reading into it, and I’m obviously getting this sense of New Pop evolving into a critical cult from somewhere else completely. (I’d say Rip It Up And Start Again, maybe, except I’ve never read it!)
The cult of new pop is about to enter Momus’ “anxious echo” land? I won’t change my mind and I’ll always stand by new pop, but 80′s nostalgia? It’s about time it goes back to rot in hell.