The Story Behind The Song
It is the last week of June 1984. Margaret Thatcher is in Downing Street and Ronald Reagan is campaigning to be re-elected US President. The bitter miners' strike is at its most violent, the Austin Rover 200 saloon is launched and Virgin Atlantic makes its inaugural flight. Possibly the most important event for Britain's youth, however, occurs at 1am on Saturday 23 June, two hours after the pubs had closed on the Friday night: the extended video of Two Tribes premieres on TV.
The video centres on a makeshift wrestling ring surround by people in different national costumes representing the countries of the watching world. The two fighters in hand-to-hand combat are Ronald Reagan and Konstantin Chernenko, the newly appointed leader of USSR. Lead singer Holly Johnson is a TV presenter reporting on the increasing violent fight and, as the personification of Western media, incites the audience. Fighting inevitably erupts everywhere, the scuffles spilling into the ring where the leaders of the two superpowers look on helplessly. The final shot is the planet exploding into the cold emptiness of space.
Two Tribes captured the global angst of the time. Hostile and barely able to communicate, America and Russia squared-up to each other like two Neanderthal tribes armed not with flint arrowheads but thousands of atomic warheads, the stockpiles of which grew monthly. According to the record sleeve, the two superpowers had amassed over 16,000 nuclear warheads at the time. The threat of nuclear war was like a freezing fog that never lifted. It pervaded the media and insidiously swirled at the back of everyone's mind, icily reaching into thoughts and conversations, at work and at home. The anxieties were not helped, in Europe at least, by the election of Ronald Reagan (in 1980) who was an advocate of Armageddon theology, the belief that a nuclear war would be part of God's plan.
Two Tribes was originally recorded for a BBC John Peel session in October 1982. Johnson noted: "There are two elements in the music – an American funk line and a Russian line. It's the most obvious demonstration of two tribes that we have today." Although the basic structure of the song remained unchanged, the production by Trevor Horn transformed it into something more dramatic and powerful. The music is furious, unrelenting and underwritten by a pounding bass line that propels the song along to its inevitable self-destruction in a frenzied denouement.
A plethora of mixes were released, the aim being to prolong interest in the song for as long as possible and, of course, the revenue stream. In addition to the single, the main extended mix was Annihilation, possibly one of the most original and influential 12" singles ever released. Lasting over nine minutes, it starts with an air raid siren and includes spoken parts from both Patrick Allen (as a government spokesman) and Chris Barrie (as Ronald Reagan).
The lyrics, although simple, are powerful and memorable. The first line – "When two tribes go to war" – is derived from a line of dialogue in the movie Mad Max 2 (1981): "Two mighty warrior tribes went to war and touched off a blaze which engulfed them all." The second – "A point is all you can score" – means that you can only demonstrate your strength but not win a global nuclear war. On the extended version, Ronald Reagan (impersonated by Barrie) jokes "just think, war breaks out and nobody turns up" because everybody has been killed in the nuclear exchanges. The second verse is biographical of Reagan, who identified as a born-again Christian, modelled Van Heusen shirts in the 1950s and whose debut movie role was Love Is On The Air (1937) – "On the air America".
The most curious line is "Sock it to me biscuits, now" which occurs near the end of the song. Despite being four decades old, there appears to be no explanation, despite speculation on some websites. The word "biscuit" is most likely urban slang for "pistol" which would fit the war theme and mean: "Give me all you've got pistols now." However, as "pistol" also is slang for a guy's dick, and Frankie's frontmen were gay, it takes on a different meaning. We suspect it was a coded double entendre.
It is hard to understate the impact Frankie Goes To Hollywood had on popular culture this year. They spent 68 weeks on the singles chart, had three No. 1s, two million sellers, a double album with advance sales of over a million and possibly sold more T-shirts in a calendar year than anyone in UK history. It was impossible to escape. Paul Rutherford, the group's dancer and poseur, later remarked: "We just couldn't see it coming at all. But God, we rode it. There's been nothing like it since."
And there possibly never will.
We hereby instate Two Tribes by Frankie Goes To Hollywood on The Wall as No.5 Best Single of 1984
I was blown away on first hearing the track: its energy, threatening bass and Holly Johnson's performance make it one of the singles of the 1980s.Ant B
