ZANG TUMMM TUMB ARTICLES “the first draft of history”

FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD

The fact that their first single, ‘Relax, offended Mike When Two Chins Go To War Read, is neither here nor there. More important is how quickly FGTH dropped the macho gay leather angle (see picture) as soon as they got the merest hint of daytime airplay.

While rocks earlier outrages were often genuinely stupid or simply drunken, by the Eighties everything had got a lot more calculating. FGTH and later SSS were simply artificial confections of what they thought had gone before. Actually nothing had really gone on before and FGTH and SSS were both too careerist to do anything remotely serious.