0425. Frankie Goes To Hollywood
Welcome To The Pleasuredome

Quite frankly, this probably isn't what you'd expect from a gay dance-pop band: a debut double album that's not choc full of only love (or sex) songs.
Instead it's got a relatively wide scope, dealing with fear of nuclear war, rough sex, and of course love. Inerspersed by the voice of a narrator sounding very much like Ronald Reagan.

This, however, suffers from the same problem as friday's entry: some discrepancy between versions released as singles and versions appearing on the album generating annoyance in the album buying part of the audience. An annoyance that, in this case, was soothed by The Power Of Love being the same on single as on LP as well as a very good song (though pigeon-holed into the Christmas lista by its nativity-scene video).

Two big surprises are the covers of Edwin Starr's War, here in the (...And Hide)-remix, and Springsteen's Born To Run. Okay, these versions are not as great as the originals, but once again: it's not what you'd expect.

What you would expect is stuff like Krisco Kisses and Relax (Come Fighting), both sex-songs, but where the former was probably by far the worst track on the album, the latter was banned by the BBC, hit number one in the charts and one of their top songs. By the time Welcome To The Pleasuredome got released tensions were running high and the group imploded two years later, after the release of their second album and a long time of disagreement between lead-singer Holly Johnsion and the rest of the band.