Frankie Goes To Hollywood ‘Inside The Pleasuredome’

  • RELEASED: 29 Oct 2014
  • FORMAT: Deluxe box set / LP / 3×10″ / DVD / Cassette / Book
  • LABEL: ZTT / Union Square Music
  • CAT No.: SALVOFLBX001
  • DESIGN: Openmind / Philip Marshall
  • WRITING: Paul Morley / Ian Peel
  • PHOTOGRAPHY: John Stoddart / Peter Ashworth / AJ Barratt / Anton Corbijn
  • ILLUSTRATION: Lo Cole / Anne Yvonne Gilbert
  • SPOTTERS DELIGHT: Funded by fans via Pledge Music, 2000 sets were produced with over half of those going to pledgers before the remainder were offered via conventional channels.
  • EXTRA ZEN: BUY

The opportunity seemed too good to be true – getting to co-design a deluxe box set of a pivotal album from my youth and a chance to use unseen interviews and visual material I’d been collecting for the best part of a decade. The request arrived early in January of 2014 from Union Square who would be producing the set with material licensed from ZTT and releasing it via Pledge Music, a kind of Kickstarter for new releases.

A workload of Ian Peel’s musical and written curation would be supplemented by design and graphic input from myself and Philip Marshall in the form of a box that would house a remastered replica of the original LP, three 10″ discs, a DVD, a cassette, three prints, a book and more. Without any confirmed track list I sat down to sketch out some ideas for this based on existing designs from the 1984 time period and started creating themes based on wordplay and recurring visual motifs. This was all pure play and speculation on my part and I had a ball with it, pretending I was both the XL design team of old and Paul Morley writing his cryptic sleeve notes.

‘Inside’ became the optimum word here as Ian had been crafting an angle for the set to reveal the expanse that it would cover. An early thought was that it would be called the “Pleasurebox’ but this was quickly discarded when Ian came up with ‘Inside The Pleasuredome’. From here on we had a concept to hang a lot of our ideas on, the die cut holes in the sleeves revealed the contents inside, the book: the inner thoughts of those who created the imagery.