This was our first dance at my wedding, so certainly you can hear it, and use it, as sincere – but I’d be hard pressed to claim it’s meant to be taken that way. Or rather, sincerity is there in “The Power Of Love” if you want it, but the band aren’t using it the way you might expect.
I remember fierce anticipation for this song, and watching the slow, reverent video, and being weirdly unsettled and baffled: where was the confrontation? What were Frankie trying to do? I didn’t know anything about camp, and certainly there’s elements of camp in the supersaturated images and drenched production, but my original reaction was the right one: there’s something wilfully contrarian about the year’s most tabloid-ready band producing such a stately, solemn record. Their sincerity is a weapon: say you’re going to follow your records about sex and war with a record about religion, and you wrong-foot people into expecting the Pope wrestling Mohammed in a jelly bath.
If you disliked Frankie this all must seem an absurd stretch – they just made a pompous third single, that’s all. And fair enough: but “The Power Of Love” sounds like religion, or religion as experienced by the non-religious Brit, an osmosis of hymnal tempos and Hollywood technicolor devotion, simultaneously bogus and grand. Holly Johnson does what he needs to, leading you through the song without cracking a smile: Trevor Horn’s orchestration has an aloof, marbled beauty. God is not mocked. But perhaps He is trolled.
Score: 7
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Incidentally, this is MUCH TOO LONG to be a first dance – you feel very exposed. I had a wonderful wedding day but little thanks to Frankie, so I was easily able to split my happy memories of the event from my rating of the song!
It wasn’t the 12″ version was it? That goes on for 9 minutes.
Sounds like bad form on behalf of your guests Tom. As much as it is enjoyable to watch the squirming of the newlyweds, I’ve always been led to believe people should start joining in at around the second verse stage.
People joined in around halfway of course! but it takes a good while to get there
this was first dance at my brother’s wedding too. rest assured no one at all joined in with the mortified shuffling, nor for the second song (he and his wife picked one each) minnie ripperton’s “loving you”.
pop fact#4 (at the time) was that this took them level with gerry and the pacemakers re #1 on first 3 singles.
#6 I went out and bought “Welcome To The Pleasuredome” in hopes that they would make it a fourth. No luck.
Referencing the Fantastic Four (“Flame on!”) and The Perils of Penelope Pitstop – what’s not to love?
OK, you could say it deals with religion, but only in the sense that it’s saying love can do all those things that religion is supposed to – a neat extended metaphor. Like their first two singles, this one plays around with the form you’d normally expect – it returns to the hook line now and again, but in between there seems to be a free flow of ideas rather than a conventional verse.
This was a brilliant move from the Frankies – the first two singles had been quite different from each other (dance and rock, broadly speaking) and this sort-of power ballad was a total curveball, and works like a dream for the time of year it was released.
And need we point out that this was the single with which Frankie Goes To Hollywood matched Gerry and the Pacemakers’ achievement of reaching number one with each of their first three singles? (Edit – oh no I needn’t since Alan got there first.)
This being Frankie, you have to wonder whether “make love your goal” has an implied comma or dash in the middle. With the heavy emphasis in Johnson’s delivery on MAKE LOVE, I rather suspect that it does.
I always felt that the religion angle was a bit tacked-on. But it was Christmas and I’m sure ZTT thought that the accompanying Frankie Goes To Bethlehem video would be that final push to ensure the coveted End Of Year Number One slot. Fate (or God) had other plans…
The Power Of Love is simply nothing more than a great love song and didn’t really need any extra conceptual gubbins. Their finest moment, I reckon.
credit should go to Anne Dudley (of Art of Noise) for the orchestration (in this and previous Trevor Horn productions) – she later released an album: ‘Ancient and Modern’ which combined English Hymns with Philip Glass-like arrangements – very soothing.
what was (mildly) subversive about this tune was its blurring of sacred and profane love. Its celebration of the artifice and excess of Christmas emphasised the camp spectacle of what was considered straight culture.
I’ve always liked this best of the frankie troika, much as i love them all: perfectly delivered sentimentality crystallised into an ikon
didn’t the FIRST version of the video have a final reveal of a gorgeous little black baby jesus? or was that the power of our will to be trolled manifesting in mass hallucination?
This was another number four for Frankie in Oz, where the tailor-made Christmas pop song has never been as big a tradition (no procession of ghastly Cliff singles for us, thank you). It’s always been hopelessly muddled in my mind with its bunny-baiting namesake, so I came to it today reasonably cold. It’s the first Frankie number one that doesn’t feel ground-breaking, and the first that stretches Holly Johnson’s vocal powers beyond their limits; he doesn’t sound weighty enough or angelic enough for the song’s aspirations, and his previous strengths of dirty enough and shouty enough sure won’t cut it here. Only a 5 from me, I’m afraid.
Has anyone else seen the Frankie Say posters around London at the moment? Is there a big reissue push coming on or what?
The only one of the three Frankie Number Ones I own, and I rather liked its wrapping paper box design (outer of pink crosses and hearts, inner the sleeve shown above). Parents liked it, I liked it – sister hated its sappiness. She had just been dumped by her boyfriend. It turned a band hated by my parents into one they liked – a feat most notably later performed by Eminem and his sappy number one.
I played it at that wedding, and remembered how long the intro was, and that beyond a drunken lurched shuffle, it is also impossible to dance to.
Tom OTM about the wrongfooting effect that the single’s lack of irony had upon us kids of 1984. What it does share with its two predecessors is, of course, a sense of vastness and gravitas. You rather have to surrender to the will of this to enjoy it – I can’t imagine it ever playing in the background. To this effect, I found that there was something slightly embarrasing about this as a twelve year-old. The sort of thing that demanded that you had to defend it.
Apart from the video, I suppose that the only religiosity to be found in this is in the slightly old testament phrasing, “purge the soul” – a steeper order than most love songs!
Shouldn’t that illustration of the sleeve strictly show the Frankie insignia-adorned envelope that it came in?
Advertisingwatch: Durex, circa 1995! A couple look at each other through a greay big steel fence than eventually get to the end of it and embrace. This combination of image, product and music always struck me as a bit jarring.
TOTPWatch: As we all know what’s coming next, heres the listing for Xmas 1984.
25 December 1984. In the studio were; Frankie Goes To Hollywood (performing all three hits), Howard Jones, Duran Duran, Nik Kershaw, Culture Club, Thompson Twins, Jim Diamond, Paul Young and Band Aid! The Appearing Artists were the hosts. IIRC this all-star spectacular was broadcast live, with Wham! due to appear but held up in traffic, and it was, alongside ‘Doctor Who – The Caves of Androzani’ that March, just about the most exciting thing that I’d ever seen on television.
Fantasy cover version/alt performer alert: The Smiths!
The only one of their chart toppers that was an actual “song” and not just a string of slogans, And a lovely song it is too, at the time I don’t remember being puzzled or let down that Frankie had made a “conventional” love song while the previous two had been grand conceptual pop events. In some ways I thought it was just as much a piece of conceptual art, except that it was Frankie doing “sincerity”.
re 19 – to my ears the lyrics to this are another set of slogans (religious and popular) – tongues of fire; the hooded claw; make love your goal; vampires – with the orchestration blending the two together
“The Power Of Love sounds like religion, simultaneously bogus and grand” explains my dislike of Let It Be, Bridge Over Troubled Water, and this. Bit of an overcooked dirge to my ears; certainly not as much fun as Huey Lewis’s song of the same title.
And it isn’t straight faced, is it? Rory points out Holly’s “make love” smirk, pretty lame in a world where sex and horror were new Gods.
Still, I don’t want to piss all over Tom’s first dance! “Ours”, sort of accidentally, was The Hollies’ I Can’t Let Go which didn’t involve a clinch but made it a cinch for everyone else to join with gusto in on the second verse.
#20 dead right about the slogans. I find myself involuntarily quoting this record a lot, in situations both appropriate and inappropriate – and when I realise what I’m doing it takes a real effort not to run through the whole lyric in one go.
(as if to prove it, I just did the same with the above, typing ‘when the chips…’ instead of ‘when I realise…’)
I guess I don’t remember this seeming as ‘out of character’ for Frankie as the lead essay describes. The 12″ mix included a dj impersonator reprising the on-air banning of Relax (check), followed that with the Reagan impersonator doing various stuff including the Lord’s prayer, (double check – recall that part of the standard left-ish criticism of Reagan/Thatcher was that they shared a simplistic, unhelpfully Manichean/’cosmic war of good and evil’ world-view – reprised by Bush 2 – that would probably kill us all), and IIRC the marketing included Frankie sending vibrators stamped with “Frankie presents the power of love” to 100(?) or so djs and sundry other tastemakers (triple check/strike 3).
In sum, this struck me as business as usual for Frankie, and then, since it was rather good, as Frankie firing on all cylinders. I don’t even rate the ‘music style’ change as that significant, since, really, Frankie’s musical genre was just max-ed out/studio/technology/Horn-prog-soul. ABC got ‘All of my Heart’ buffed to an incredible high gloss by Horn/Dudley, Frankie now got the same luxe treatment for their song. Slightly sick-making possibly (pop as high manipulation gets old, and the Smiths were definite ear relief at this point), but for me it’s a killer:
9
A non-charter in the U.S., but I remember seeing the video. Surprising that it didn’t chart here, it’s a power ballad, and American radio is a sucker for those. But maybe Frankie’s image was too much for America by this point? I’ll echo Tom and give it a 7.
@#21 Wichita Lineman. In some parts of the world, Frankie’s PoL came out in 1985, making that year the year of *three* PoL’s, all of which got at least close to #1! Not just the Huey Lewis one you mention, which was fun alright, but also Jennifer Warne’s (which has since been immortalized as the soundtrack for a chilling scene in Michael Haneke’s early masterpiece _The Seventh Continent_). There are at least three distinct, great, high-charting ‘Look of Love’s out there, but they didn’t all happen within 12 months of one another. Weird.
OK, so the lyrics do have a lot of slogans, or at least memorable phrases and images strung together. But at least they’re strung together with some semblance of trad pop song structure so it flows.
A little disappointing after the fireworks of their previous effort but a pretty decent single all the same. I didn’t twig any religious connection until seeing the video and it did seem a little tacked on although any attempt to subvert the increasingly cloying traditional Xmas single was welcome.
Swanstep #25 – it wasn’t Jennifer Warne but Jenmmf mmf aarggh hop hop…
Not much to add – others have got there first. I recall George Michael sourly celebrating them not getting the christmas number one. He must have been rueing not releasing “Last Christmas” a week earlier.
I think Frankie did well to make it to the top since this was released only a fortnight or so after the LP which most people found disappointing and over-priced. I remember retailers over-ordered it and were left with a lot of spare copies. There was enough good material to make a cracking single LP but their talents seemed over-stretched on a double. I’ll be kind and not mention their second album.
@Erithian. Ah yes, I indeed had the wrong Jen. (He steps gingerly back from the pile of carrots and fur…)
@(overlord) Tom. Have been chortling all day about the thought of someone using Two Tribes for their wedding dance ever since reading PoL was yours. In the gag-ridden rom. com. s/play of your life perhaps…
This is an entry for completeness, really, as unlike Frankie’s other two number ones, this one sailed right over my head.
Two reasons for this, I think. One, the lease on my flat in St Neots had expired which meant that I was living in Notting Hill permanently now and reverse commuting while I looked for a job in London. This meant getting up at 6.30 to the sound of Farming Today on Radio 4, and returning at about 7.30 pm to relax in the jukebox-free Sun in Splendour in Portobello Road (which used to be a really good pub in those days, with an excellent pint of draught Bass). So no opportunity to hear any pop.
The other, I suspect, is that this one hasn’t endured in the non-pop-enthusiast canon.
Knicker-flash: By this time the pub quiz team at the Wheatsheaf was so far ahead in the league that we’d already won it by the beginning of December, so I was able to tell the guv’nor that I’d fulfilled my promise and would now retire from the side. The champion-of-champions knockout the following spring was another story – I came out of retirement to lead the team to the championship of East Anglia!
#11: And to Titian for the cover art! I remember being intrigued enough by this at the time to find out what it was. It’s called Assumption of the Virgin and was painted for a church in Venice (early c17). The record’s not bad either-7 seems about right.
For me, this is one of those records you like for unfathomable reasons. Never liked Frankie, don’t like power ballads, don’t like long songs… For me the bit that makes it work is the “I’ll protect you from the hooded claw…” part.
The orchestration and (to some extent the tune) remind me of a Bond theme for some reason – Frankie could have done a great Bond song
#32: sorry, that should be early c16…
This one’s OK, maybe more of a drag than I’d like. What makes this song intelligibly Frankie–and thus nicely off-putting in spite of the surface conventionality–isn’t the band’s history or even the lyrics so much as Holly Johnson’s hypervivid and horny vocals: when he sings “love is danger, love is pleasure,” it sounds like he’s gagging for Jesus.
What took it up to another level for me was the sudden outburst at “my undying, DEATH-DEFYING love for you!” The phrase “death-defying”, sounding straight out of Marvel Comics, was so of a piece with the “Flame On” and “Hooded Claw” references I alluded to above, that, bizarrely, it’s only just occurred to me: gay love must have seemed almost literally death-defying in the 80s. “Love is danger” indeed – in that context the song becomes a bold and brave statement.
Good observation, Erithian. At the time, this felt to me like a fractional step down from “Relax” and “Two Tribes” – a 9 rather than a 10 – but I’d now rank this as my favourite FGTH single.
The song also took on another dimension when I saw Holly Johnson perform it at London Gay Pride in 1997. It was the last performance of the day (following three-song sets from Erasure and Pet Shop Boys), and halfway through it, the end-of-day fireworks display started up at the other end of Clapham Common. This all seemed to trigger off a mass hugging and smooching session amongst the crowd: everywhere I looked, pairs of men and women were locked in embraces. We’d just had a change of government, many promises had been made, and optimism was in the air as we sensed a sea change in public attitudes. It felt like a vindication, after years of struggle. With all this in mind, the song took on a newly anthemic quality – a perfect soundtrack for that particular moment, of that particular month, in that particular year. I duly bawled my eyes out – not for the first time, since the Erasure and PSB songs had been equally well-picked: A Little Respect, It’s A Sin/I Will Survive (medley), Go West and Somewhere (from West Side Story).
So when I hear “The Power Of Love” now, I link it to the new dawn of 1997 rather than the bleak chill of 1984. Yes, the lyrics are somewhat stylised and overblown, but they suit Holly Johnson’s performance style down to the ground. He delivers the song like some sort of benevolent deity, blending Olympian detachment with more touchingly earthbound qualities, and for me the strategy pays dividends. It’s the one Frankie song which lets you in emotionally, and as such it’s the perfect conclusion to the trilogy. Sex, death and love: where on earth do you go after that?
(Answer: the dumper. And yes, the album was a total damp squib. But you can’t have everything…)
@Erithian 37. I’ll see your ‘death-defying’, and raise you an ‘envy will hurt itself’. That’s a really surprising, odd line I think, and a strangely moving one. It allows ‘let yourself be beautiful’ to not sound soppy immediately after it. Good stuff I reckon.
#36/37 – It’s only just occured to me, the similarities between this and New Order’s contemporaneous ‘Thieves Like Us’, in their – alarmingly and thrillingly – committed testimonies of felicity to the idea of love; “It’s called LOVE! and its so uncool”… “Love is the air that supports the eagle”, etc
#38. Ha, ha – I was one of those smooching couples, and it was indeed a beautiful moment. Although, as a straight man smooching a (I think) straight girl at a celebration of being gay, the beauty was tempered by the thought that maybe I was treading on cultural toes.
I’m sharing in the sense of mature embarassment at my adolescent inability to get this song. I’d bought various 12″ mixes of Relax and Two Tribes and was hoping for similar energy for the third song of the trilogy. And was duly disappointed, indeed baffled by what seemed to me then an unmistakeable stumble for this very sure-footed outfit.
And now it seems swooning and rich and full of sincerity, even if decked out in tragic camp grandeur. The hooded claw, as has been said above, makes this a fantasy world/utopian song that equates love with saving the world; and if that isn’t a gay trope, I don’t know what is. It’s all about mythical creatures, ‘dreams’, ‘angels’, before its rush into the purely metaphysical towards the end (‘sublime/divine divine’).
In particular the song came out as the AIDS crisis was really beginning to hit. There would have been around 100 diagnoses in Britain at this time and the tabloids regularly used the phrase ‘gay plague’, adding to the sense of fear and stigma. I guess there was an aspect of that at work here; the privations of this world requiring a projection into another, better world.
It remains the greatest triptych of pop singles, one of the most ravishing of all pop schematas; after tackling sex and war there was only religion left – only religion? – and so the video for this particular “Power Of Love” depicted Holly Johnson as an avenging angel. Chris Barrie returned for the 12-inch to recreate Mike Read’s “Relax” ban (much to the chagrin of Read, who had in the meantime done the voiceover for the TV adverts for Welcome To The Pleasuredome and would have been more than happy to come in and redo it himself) and then Reagan again, musing on faith and the passing of beliefs and people.
And yet, as befitted what surely and knowingly was intended as the last will and testament of this thing called New Pop, faith and belief were finally all that mattered. Just as the Martin Fry of “All Of My Heart” finally faced the fear and looked himself in his postmodern mirror, realising that, yes, although love can be analysed, disseminated and deconstructed, it cannot necessarily be put together again, and that the only way to stay meaningfully alive is to surrender to it and embrace it, there is no apparent irony in the Holly Johnson who sings on “The Power Of Love,” cajoled by Horn to sing better than he’d ever sung before. There is a glimpse of his impish grin in the opening pledge of “I’ll protect you from the Hooded Claw/Keep the vampires from your door” but this doesn’t even begin to mask the real and warm smile of reassurance which lies beneath.
Johnson has never been as astute and deft a wordsmith as Fry, but this works to “The Power Of Love”‘s advantage; the lyric is largely composed of slogans and homilies – “Love is the light,” “When the chips are down,” “Let yourself be beautiful,” “Make love your goal” – but Johnson’s blunt candour pulls the song through; on the verge of tears in the line “Sparkling love and flowers and pearls and pretty girls,” his double octave-leading emphasis of “death defying” to reinforce “undying,” the comforting arm around the shoulder of “This time we go sublime.”
What it all conveys is a desire for the revelation that sex can be beautiful and not tacky, that war and death can perhaps both be defeated. And Horn’s production and Anne Dudley’s string arrangement rise with an urgency especial even for them; for both “The Power Of Love” may be their finest hour. Listen to how the strings cushion the suddenly ajar door of Johnson’s first “Make love,” coming in to the solitary acoustic guitar, how the track crescendoes after the second verse, following which there is an unsettling moment as a Fairlight-manipulated Johnson vibrato is echoed by sinister low fuzz guitar as if he’s about to be atomised – but no, we return to the piano of “Moments In Love,” the guitar now high and yearning, the final pause before Johnson, Horn and Dudley (and Morley) summon up everything they know for the rapturously cathartic climax; as everything rises on Johnson’s “dove” one feels the Earth’s axis momentarily disturbed. That having been achieved, Johnson walks off into the long, echoing distance, Dudley’s strings engendering a near-unbearable sadness of sustenato (but isn’t this supposed to be a happy ending?) before Johnson repeats his opening promise and the dream fades into warm unreality.
For the dream was over, and everybody involved in “The Power Of Love” knew it; for those fortunate enough to have experienced the miraculous magic of New Pop it is almost impossible not to become tearful when listening to this record, for it carries within its generous arteries the portents of its own end – it is saying goodbye to New Pop, reluctantly relinquishing all its unfulfilled dreams; and yet the Frankie Goes To Hollywood trilogy ended up being as close to perfection as New Pop could possibly get.
Once you’ve reached the top, of course, the only way to go is down. But, to paraphrase Larkin on the Beatles, what if New Pop couldn’t get down? Instead, it proceeded to spread itself over the landscape in ways unexpected yet inevitable.
You could make a case that ‘Slave To The Rhythm’ was the climax of, and farewell to, New Pop. Lessons have been learned – to “Never stop believing” and entrust yourself to the rhythm – a combination of awe, sex and dancing. It seems to point towards a way ahead to me, even if the 1985 listener couldn’t yet tell what would be on that horizon.
Extremely good point, and that journey in Popular terms will culminate (and find its true progeny) in entry #956 (phone the advance ticket hotline now!).
#44 Perhaps we could settle for “coda”…?
This was also played at our wedding and “I’ll protect you from the hooded claw” became our phrase to the extent that our kids (not born until years’ later) recognise it even today.
I’d just like to add, somewhat late, that this is a maddeningly beautiful song. FGTH was the moment I found my own musical identity from my older brother (who hated them) – and the sheer shock and awe of the first two singles was a wonder to behold. But I never for a moment felt let down by the 3rd – it always seemed to me to fit – it was as swooning and consuming as the previous two, but in this case the sonic payload shared equal billing with the sentiment – and Holly Johnson on this really earned his place as a great pop vocalist. This will be being played in another 50 years.
Don’t worry about late comments garax – always welcome, they’re displayed on the site’s front page so they might revive the thread!
A perfect hat-trick for Frankie. A change of style, but I never found it a let-down. I prefer this to the repeated thump of ‘Relax’. If they’d left it here things would have been fine, but they chose to release yet another single the following year which stalled at # 2. So we had three # 1 singles from a # 1 album in ’84, but a # 2 to round off the deal in ’85. I think the biggest surprise was that this didn’t go in at # 1 (# 3). If it hadn’t been for ‘Band Aid’ and ‘Wham!’ (pesky kids?) this may have wound up the Christmas # 1 (which feels like the target they were shooting for).