‘Relax’, by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, was the first single by a band with openly gay members to top the UK charts; Soft Cell’s ‘Tainted Love’ had hit the Number One spot in 1981, but at the time of release singer Marc Almond had not come out (even though he would do so later). Both lead vocalist Holly Johnson and backing singer Paul Rutherford were out and proud, and the song’s video – set at a Bacchanalian orgy inside a gay nightclub where the band were surrounded by S&M acts, water sports and cross-dressers – left little to the imagination. Shocking, offensive and gloriously hedonistic, ‘Relax’ was famously banned from the BBC by Radio One DJ Mike Read, an act that propelled the single to the Number One spot where it stayed for five weeks. ‘I don’t regret what I did,’ Read told Jamming! magazine in May 1984. ‘From the outset, the band were very open about what they were about and the simulated sex scenes on their video made it clear that “Relax” was about gay sex’. ‘It’s only dirty if you have a dirty mind,’ Johnson told Judy Cantor of the Associated Press. ‘You really have to have a mind like a sewer’.21
During its run as the nation’s biggest-selling song, the nation’s broadcaster refused to play it: Top of the Pops, the most-watched music show of the day finally relented in time for their Christmas edition, but while ‘Relax’ was Number One it would not be shown. Within a few months ‘Relax’ had sold six million copies. The single would stay in the British charts for a year.
It was not the first song to be banned from the airwaves, nor would it be the last, but the ban helped Frankie become a massive, menacing, multi-platform phenomenon. In 1984, you couldn’t move without bumping in to someone wearing a FGTH t-shirt (everything from the straightforward Frankie Say Relax to the incendiary Frankie Say Arm the Unemployed) or go to a club without hearing the latest remix of ‘Relax’, ‘Two Tribes’ or their cover of the Edwin Starr hit ‘War’. The newspapers may have been shocked, but the kids dancing in the discos and queuing outside the doors of the record stores to buy their debut album Welcome to the Pleasuredome didn’t care a jot about Holly’s homosexuality. It was all about the music – and if that music happened to upset your parents, or a bore like Mike Read, then all the better. Johnson and Rutherford were part of a new generation of LGBT performers who were not going to apologise for being ‘different’.
The first band since fellow Liverpudlians Gerry and the Pacemakers to score a Number One hit with each of their first three singles (‘Relax’ also stole the top spot from fellow Liverpudlian Paul McCartney), Frankie broke records and broke rules. ‘The word “gay”, at least in the record biz, is no longer pop poison. In fact gay has cachet – witness the success of the Smiths and Bronski Beat’.22 Frankie were different: Johnson and Rutherford being so outrageously open about their sexuality should have limited their appeal, but it had entirely the opposite effect. Frankie Goes to Hollywood records were bought by New Wave fans, by indie kids, by rockers and by the people who bought dance records. The group appealed to both gay and straight audiences. They courted controversy in a way no act had done since the Sex Pistols eight years earlier. Breaking big in a vacuum caused by novelty acts like Black Lace and Renee & Renato (in exactly the same way that punk filled the void created by Brotherhood of Man and the Bay City Rollers), Frankie were all kinds of dangerous.
It may have appeared that Frankie were the post-punk Monkees, a group manufactured by studio wizard Trevor Horn and PR man Paul Morley, but Johnson and the rest of the band had been around for a number of years before hitting the big time: Johnson had been a member of Liverpool punk band Big In Japan and had issued a pair of solo 45s; Rutherford had been a member of local synth band Hambi and the Dance and, before that, the Spitfire Boys with future Banshees drummer Budgie. ‘You don’t start thinking you’re going to be famous; it’s just a bit of fun,’ says Rutherford. ‘It’s not born out of a hunger to be famous, it’s born out of a love of music – I don’t think anyone imagined that they’d have a record deal when they were 17 – it was quite amazing. I was too young to sign the record deal, my mum and dad had to sign the contract!’ The Spitfire Boys released one single, the Sex Pistols-inspired ‘British Refugee’/‘Mein Kampf’ in 1977.
Frankie had been together for a few years and had already recorded a spot for Channel 4’s hit pop show The Tube and two sessions for Radio One DJ John Peel before Horn and Morley (and their label, ZTT) signed them. ‘Morley had his strategy all worked out,’ Paul Rutherford confides. ‘He wanted us to be like the Sex Pistols – all the outrage, controversy, but this time with all the sex.’ Johnson and the others had been in a band called Sons of Egypt. When Rutherford returned from America, he sat in on their rehearsals and started to sing with them. ‘I thought I’d see if I could help them get a gig, which I did. Hambi and the Dance had signed a really big deal with Virgin; they had a tour lined up around England and Europe, and it was like “do you fancy doing BVs [backing vocals] for us?” The punk thing had died a little bit really and it was something to do so I said “yeah”! So I went off on tour with them and that’s how I got Frankie the support.’
*
1984 was a watershed year for LGBT acts in the UK. In the list of the 100 best-selling singles of the year, ‘Relax’ and ‘Two Tribes’ take first and second place respectively, and advance orders for Frankie’s debut album Welcome to the Pleasuredome, topped 1.1 million.23 The previous year had seen Culture Club top the list (with ‘Karma Chameleon’), but the only other LGBT acts represented were Kajagoogoo (led by gay singer Limahl) with ‘Too Shy’, Marilyn (‘Calling Your Name’), Wham! (although George Michael had yet to come out), Elton John and Tom Robinson. In the Top 100 for 1982, just three LGBT acts – Culture Club, Soft Cell and Wham! – made the cut, although at the time not one of them was out. Besides Frankie, 1984 saw both Wham! and George Michael as a solo act, Queen, Bronski Beat, Limahl (solo with ‘Never Ending Story’), the Weather Girls, Hazel Dean, Elton John and Culture Club score huge hits, plus Evelyn Thomas chart with Ian Levine’s gay disco anthem ‘High Energy’. Unemployment was out of control, with more than three million on the dole and a quarter of under 25-year-olds unable to find work. Thatcher’s Britain was failing the young. What they needed was escapism, and what they craved was glamour.
Suddenly, everyone was wearing make-up, and trying to work out who was who (or who was what) was becoming harder. The Cure’s Robert Smith and Human League’s Phil Oakey could be seen on Britain’s TV screens in lipstick and lace; camp had gone mainstream, with Boy George and fellow Blitz Kid Marilyn appearing on the front cover of every magazine and on everything from Saturday morning kids’ TV shows through to prime-time chat shows. Marilyn, born Peter Robinson in Kingston, Jamaica in 1962, was dubbed ‘the unacceptable face of pop’ by Britain’s tabloids, viewed as the sexy counterpart to the cute and cuddly Boy George. The two had shared a squat together prior to George finding fame, but it had taken an appearance in the video for the Eurythmics’ single ‘Who’s that Girl’ for Marilyn to be discovered. His biggest hit, ‘Calling Your Name’, was written about his friend/nemesis. Soon others would try and jump on the gender bender bandwagon: singer Peter Helliwell, of the band Wide Boy Awake (who, naturally, featured ex-Ant Kevin Mooney in their line-up), reinvented himself as the androgynous Damian Grey. Damian may have felt that ‘Boy George has as much sex appeal as a fish dinner,’24 but any hope he had of being the Jobriath of the 1980s fell at the first hurdle.
In Frankie’s wake, another Liverpudlian act, Dead or Alive, would reach Number One with ‘You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)’, bringing an infectious collision of Hi-NRG beats, Blitz Kids glamour and high camp to teatime TV. The British singles chart had never been so gay. Dead or Alive’s singer was Paul Rutherford’s friend Pete Burns, the former record shop assistant whose fierce look and uncompromising ‘screw you’ attitude had singled him out as one to watch long before he was seen performing ‘You Spin Me Round’ on Top of the Pops, as Boy George recalled: ‘In the 70s I really wanted to go to Liverpool because I’d
heard that this club, Eric’s, was the place to be. He walked up to me and said: “you’ve copied my look”!’25
Paul Rutherford explains:
Me and Holly and Pete were just being who we were. You’d walk down the street in Liverpool dressed to the nines and didn’t actually care about it. I’d been bullied at school so I’d got quite used to that – that stuff used to go way over my head … we wanted to be noticed and we were going to be as outrageous as we wanted to be. It’s a very defiant, Liverpool act. People used to come in to Probe [the record store where Pete Burns worked] to throw beer cans at us and call us queens and we’d fight back. We weren’t scared; we were determined. I think that’s why that whole thing happened in Liverpool, people became very defiant and it became this really great scene with people dressing up. The gay thing and the punk thing were always very close anyway, even in London with the Banshees hanging around the gay clubs. It was the gay clubs where you could find these people wearing make-up, just hanging out there.’
Originally formed in 1979 as Nightmares in Wax (their first single, ‘Birth of a Nation’ was issued in 1980), the band’s debut album, Sophisticated Boom Boom, featured their first proper chart hit, a cover of the KC and the Sunshine Band disco floor-filler ‘That’s the Way (I Like it)’, but it was ‘You Spin Me Round’ (included on their sophomore effort, Youthquake) that made him a star, spending almost a year in the charts. Ironically, when the band was signed to Epic, the company went into overdrive to market their bisexual frontman as the next Boy George. ‘Everywhere I went, people were asking me to sign autographs as George,’ Burns admitted in his 2007 autobiography Freak Unique.26 A media-manufactured feud followed, and ‘gender bender’ became part of the English language, but the hits soon dried up. Unperturbed, Burns and Dead or Alive concentrated their efforts on Japan, where the band enjoyed superstar status.
But for Pete Burns the price of fame was too great. Flamboyant and outrageous on stage, in private he found it hard coping with notoriety, and his obsession with his looks saw him spend any money he made on plastic surgery.
Burns died suddenly, of a massive heart attack caused by a pulmonary embolism, on 23 October 2016, sadly in the week that he was due to release a career-spanning 10-CD box set. His old adversary Boy George described him as ‘one of our great true eccentrics’. Marc Almond added, ‘we’ve had some mad times with Pete but he was a one-off creation, a fabulous, fantastic, brilliant creature and always sweet to me.’ A few days after Burns’ death, in a last act of largesse towards his old sparring partner, Boy George offered to cover the cost of the funeral.27
Despite what seemed to be blanket acceptance at home, when the time came for Frankie to try to crack the States, things changed, subtly perhaps, but perceptibly. The homosexuality of the two singers was toned down (something that pleased their three heterosexual bandmates), and because MTV refused to air the original video for ‘Relax’, an anodyne version was issued in its place. Despite choosing to make their live debut in the United States – before their biggest audience had a chance to see them in action – ‘Relax’ stalled at 67 on the Billboard charts. ‘Two Tribes’ fared little better, rising to 45 (‘Relax’ was repromoted in 1985 following the release of Welcome to the Pleasuredome, and this time hit the US Top 10). ‘The gay thing was played down because of the boys in the band really, they weren’t gay and being Liverpool lads they really didn’t want that badge,’ reveals Rutherford:
But we were so busy just doing it that we really didn’t have time to take stock of what was really happening. We played up to it a hell of a lot! That was our nature; throw a few beers down our throats and we were off again. We were just a big bunch of Liverpool lads getting pissed and then the two gay ones would come along with their arses hanging out! It was fun, and it was funny but we soon got bored. It became as though we were being gay on demand. It’s America, and you’re not going to go on TV unless you play by the rules: we weren’t very good at being told what to do, so we ignored all that … we wouldn’t make excuses: it wasn’t us. That’s what Frankie was really, an exercise in being really honest. That’s why we split up in the end, because we were very honest with each other!’
‘Rage Hard’, the first single from their second album (Liverpool) peaked at Number Four in the UK in 1986, and the album itself reached Number Five. A worldwide tour was lined up to follow the release, but by April 1987 Frankie Goes to Hollywood had broken up – dates set for Australia had to be cancelled after the group split into two factions – Johnson versus the rest of the band. ‘We had a very big career in a very short space of time,’ Rutherford explains. ‘We burnt ourselves out quite quickly. We fitted a lifetime in to those few years. It was exhausting but we didn’t care, because it was also fun.’ The same hypocrisy that had forced Rutherford and Johnson back into the closet saw MTV ban the video for Queen’s single ‘Body Language’ because it showed Freddie Mercury in a women’s sauna,28 yet the broadcaster was happy to show all four members of the band in drag – and Mercury crowd surfing over a sea of nubile young men – when it programmed the film clip for ‘I Want to Break Free’ on heavy rotation.
The rise of two of the most influential American bands of the decade was aided by the massive amount of airtime afforded them by MTV. And like many others who came to fame in the decade, they would also have their lives forever changed by their run-ins with HIV and AIDS: one would lose a beloved founder member (and brother), the other would become one of the most outspoken acts of the century, with much of its political activity directed towards HIV and AIDS awareness and prevention. Both acts hailed not from New York or Los Angeles, but from Athens, Georgia: the B-52’s and R.E.M. Both acts would produce some of the most defining music of the American indie/New Wave scene – and both featured LGBT members. In the case of R.E.M. it was ‘equal opportunity letch’ Michael Stipe. Hailed as the politically aware voice of a generation, Stipe was the only queer member of the planet-straddling colossus; in the five-piece B-52s, singer and percussionist Cindy Wilson was the only straight member. Stipe came out, identifying himself as queer, at the height of his band’s fame: when a gaunt-looking Stipe appeared at the Grammy Awards in 1992 wearing a baseball cap with the legend White House Stop AIDS emblazoned on it, rumours about his sexuality and health began to circulate. He really had little choice but to say something, but when he did, he did it on his own terms. He wrote in The Guardian shortly after the twentieth anniversary of the event:
It was September 1994, and my band had released the two biggest records of our career. With Out of Time and Automatic for the People, we had sold more than 25 million records worldwide, and we were ramping up to tour for the first time in five years. I was more famous than I could have ever imagined. For the promotion of our next album, Monster, and its world tour, I decided to publicly announce my sexuality. I said simply that I had enjoyed sex with men and women my entire adult life. It was a simple fact, and I’m happy I announced it.29
Formed in 1976, with four of the band’s founding members gay or lesbian, the B-52’s odd mix of surf guitar licks and Yoko Ono-inspired vocals singled them out as at odds with the rest of the world even before the media started to pry into the various members’ private lives: debut single ‘Rock Lobster’ sounded nothing less than otherworldly. Sadly, while recording the band’s third studio album Whammy! guitarist Ricky Wilson discovered he had contracted AIDS. He died on 12 October 1985 at just 32 years old. The group had enormous success worldwide with hits including ‘Love Shack’ (the video for which featured an early cameo from RuPaul) and ‘Roam’; singer Kate Pierson, who married her girlfriend Monica Coleman in 2015, added her distinctive vocals to fellow Athenians R.E.M.’s multi-platinum album Out Of Time, including on the worldwide hit ‘Shiny Happy People’.
‘These 20 years of publicly speaking my truth have made me a better and easier person to be around,’ wrote Stipe. ‘It helped develop the clarity of my voice and establish who I would be as an adult. I am proud to be who I am, and I
am happy to have shared that with the world.’ San Francisco-based Mark Eitzel, an occasional collaborator with R.E.M.’s guitarist Peter Buck, outed himself a decade before Stipe felt comfortable enough to do the same. ‘I didn’t get a good reaction,’ the singer for the cult band American Music Club told Ben Walsh of The Independent. ‘The record company wasn’t happy and they wanted to put out that I was bi, not gay. It was the Eighties and a completely different world. In the rock ’n’ roll world, even in San Francisco, it was not really acceptable to come out. Twenty years on, it’s completely changed, thank goodness.30
Mista Majah P, 2011
CHAPTER 17
Hope and Homophobia
‘How people navigate life and communities is different from person to person and place to place. There’s a still a lot of anti-gay sentiment, but despite the homophobia one is able to survive’
Dane Lewis, Executive Director of J-FLAG1
I nevitably there would be a backlash, and the 1990s saw a huge re-emergence of homophobia in many musical genres. Hip hop was rife with anti-gay imagery, used by everyone from Public Enemy, Eazy-E and Brand Nubian – who threatened to ‘fuck up a faggot’ on their 1993 hit ‘Punks Jump Up to Get Beat Down’ – through to acts we now associate with a more liberal attitude towards the LGBT community such as the Beastie Boys – ironic when founding member and original drummer Kate Schellenbach was an out lesbian who was in a relationship with The Breeders’ Josephine Wiggs. Michael Franti’s band the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy were one of the few acts that fought back, releasing the track ‘Language of Violence’ on their sole album, Hypocrisy Is The Greatest Luxury, a tale of queer-bashing and the potential recriminations. Brand Nubian’s Sadat X has since mellowed somewhat, saying, ‘as you grow and see the world your views on life change. I say live and let live’.2 Notorious for the homophobic, violent and misogynistic lyrics on many of his early recordings, Eminem was the enfant terrible of hip hop … until he performed a duet with Elton John at the 2001 Grammys: ‘I love him,’ Elton told Rolling Stone magazine in 2010. ‘When David and I had our civil partnership, he sent us a present. In a case, on velvet cushions, were two diamond cock rings. So there’s a homophobe for you.’
David Bowie Made Me Gay Page 29
