This week you get another extended post so we can finish up the letter F nice and clean. Without further ado, I give you the final batch of artists whose names begin with the sixth letter of the alphabet and who reached the ass end of the Billboard Hot 100 in the ’80s.

Fortune
“Stacy” — 1985, #80 (download)

Fortune is an AOR band formed in Los Angeles in 1977. They released their debut self-titled record in ‘78, had a track called “Airwaves” on the Last American Virgin soundtrack in ‘82, then finally got around to their second album (also self-titled) in ‘85. “Stacy” comes from the second album, which includes a whole mess of generic light-rock tunes.

David Foster
“The Best of Me” — 1986, #80 (download)
“Winter Games” — 1988, #85 (download)

There’s just no way I have it in me to discuss the shittiness of Foster’s duet with Olivia Newton-John, “The Best of Me,” or Foster in general, when Terje Fjelde lives and breathes the guy — read Into the Ear of Madness while listening to these tracks.

4 by Four
“Want You for My Girlfriend” — 1987, #79 (download)

My first thought was 4 by Four simply wanted to be the next New Edition: good-looking kids with slick pop-filled R&B hooks. But I listen to this song and hear a lot of Prince in it as well. Zero in on the 2:20 mark and I swear you’ll hear the first bar of Prince’s “Controversy.”

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Frankie Say One-Hit Wonder?: While “Relax” is pretty much all the Liverpudlians are known for on this side of the pond, I’d add “Two Tribes” in there at the very least and “The Power of Love” if you live anywhere outside the U.S. So why should you like a group that had basically one good year in the mid-’80s, then dissipated? The evidence, please:

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Every once in a while, I’ll stumble across a CD I’ve had for years that I just didn’t care for, only to give it another shot and discover it’s really not all that bad. That’s the case with this week’s selection, Frankie Goes to Hollywood lead singer Holly Johnson’s first solo album, Blast.

Being a huge FGTH fan (the whys of which you’ll learn more about tomorrow), I was eagerly awaiting Johnson’s first solo release, which came after a two-year court battle between Johnson and his former label, ZTT, to wrest himself free from Frankie’s old, supposedly draconian contract. Imagine my horror when instead of a sex-fueled, sleazy proto-disco romp in the Frankie vein, I heard the album’s first single, “Love Train,” a straight-ahead dance-pop froth with about as much danger as an Erasure song (the closest it came to the raunch of Frankie was the almost-innuendo of the repeated “stoke it up”). This was not my Frankie. It featured a Brian May guitar solo, for heaven’s sake! (more…)