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…)