HAVE YOU SEEN THIS LINK?

THE IDEA ARCHIVE HAS HIT THREE HUNDRED STRAIGHT

UP SUPERBOOKS THIS

WEEK. WHEN WILL IT NEVER END? IT WON'T. BOOKS

FROM THE PAST MOVE FAST. CHECK YOUR MIRRORS.

THAT'S 1984 COMING UP

BEHIND YOU! SUDDENLY

THERE CAME A BANG! 

Nineteen eighty four to the floor. Frankie Goes To Hollywood were EVERYWHERE but right now this book is NOWHERE to be found. FGTH turned the world upside down and we turned it upside down again just to find this copy. This is ZANGLETT no.1 - the only one - the book of the meteoric multi-orgasmic rise to fame and ultimate climax of Frankie Goes to Hollywood. 
 

The contents page and colophon is a masterwork of design, art direction and copywriting. Tom Watkins' XL designed a lot of it (before he managed Pet Shop Boys, Bros, East 17 et al). Paul 'favourite Beatle? Yoko Ono' Morley will have written the words. Paul Morley wrote worlds in the eighties. He wrote the lyrics for Moments in Love, he wrote the shirts: FRANKIE SAY WAR! HIDE YOURSELF
 

Obvs Frankie and friends bought at least five of these shirts themselves BUT they really did SELL A LOT. One HMV store manager is quoted saying that if the shirt was a single, it would have been at No.3 in the charts! (The first two positions were Two Tribes and Relax).
 

The green leaf covered artwork from the back of the Welcome To The Pleasure Dome album. There is a truly fantastic archival website of ZTT artwork with the back store of all their most exuberant and errant creation stories told - CLICK HERE (but do come back some time this week).

Holly Johnson on the telly. The banned band that Top Of The Pops and Radio 1 wouldn't play. 
 

Depending somewhat on your age in 1983, it is quite possible that you had FGTH pages from Smash Hits all over your bedroom wall and had no idea they were gay (or what gay was). On the visual evidence of this Holly and Paul picture, you might now find that a little hard to believe - but it's true. Freddy Mercury too!
 

The book comes with a most impressive and impressively large poster. 

Relax sold two million copies in the UK alone (population 60M). This book is a lot harder to find. It was catalogued by ZTT as AS6 - the sixth actual released product by the label. We have it on a permanent search and have found three in five years. But it is found again now. And you can buy it on the button below.