The Box Set and the Ledger
Frankie, ZTT, and the Accounting of Survival
One simply does not write about Frankie Goes To Hollywood's Welcome to the Pleasuredome in 2025 without confronting mortality. Doesn't happen. The music is too bright, too decadent, too confident in its own futurity to hear it now without thinking of the people who made it—and the people who did not survive to see how far into the future it traveled.
Jill Sinclair, one of ZTT Records' three founders, gets blamed for building the contractual cages that held the band together and apart. She was twenty-one when she founded SARM Studios, a prodigy of infrastructure, someone who understood the alchemy of rooms, tape, and talent long before she fully grasped the implications of music contracts designed to protect a label's massive investments. She enabled masterpieces—Grace Jones, Propaganda, Seal—by running the business side of ZTT, acquiring the Stiff Records catalogue, fighting off Warners UK's advances, and crafting deals so restrictive that when Holly Johnson challenged them in court, the judge called them “unreasonable restraint of trade.”
In 2006, an accidental shooting left her with severe brain damage, unable to communicate or move for eight years before her death from cancer in 2014 at age sixty-one. The woman who designed contracts binding artists into old age spent her final years imprisoned in her own body.
Johnson escaped his cage in 1988. He fought ZTT for two years, won his artistic freedom, walked away triumphant. And within three years—1991—he received an HIV diagnosis that was still assumed to be fatal. He expected to die. Many of his peers did. But he survived. He lived long enough to become what he never thought he’d get to be: older, wiser, HIV+ for thirty-four years, a queer elder at sixty-five.
Paul Rutherford, Johnson's comrade in Frankie, survived too—AIDS, austerity Britain, Cold War Britain, the closet Britain, the full catastrophe. He is a quieter figure in the retelling, but the survival speaks for itself. Survival is not a moral category; it’s a kind of daily miracle.
None of this was knowable in 1984, when Pleasuredome arrived in its maximalist glory: a double album of glossy decadence, militarized camp, queer sexuality, and world-ending dread, produced by Trevor Horn with the precision of a nuclear weapons lab. Anne Dudley built the atomic pile. Morley painted nose art: the slogans, the futurist-fascist typography, the ZTT propaganda-machine parody. The album was outrageous and immaculate, a commercial product and a provocation and a mirrorball held up to the apocalypse.
But in 2025, it becomes something else—a reminder of how human lives and corporate lives operate on different clocks. The latest reissue, a lavish box set, tells multiple stories at once.
The first five discs are not just archaeology—they're the documentation of a slow absorption. Early demos and radio sessions show Frankie in their Liverpool ecosystem: a post-punk club band with ideas, energy, queer defiance. Then the remixes begin. One after another, ZTT's machinery pulls them deeper: Horn's production erasing and rebuilding, Dudley's arrangements replacing the band's own instrumental identity, Lipson's engineering re-engineering flesh into Fairlight sequences.
By the time you reach the album proper, the transformation is complete. Diana emerges from ZTT's forehead, fully formed and fully armored, the birth canal carefully erased. The five-disc prelude isn't filler. It's the receipt. Proof that this magnificence required extraction.
And with that receipt you gain entry to the temple. The Pleasure Dome as built environment. ZTT’s architecture laid over Frankie’s bones. Horn’s aesthetic-industrial complex in full bloom: session musicians stepping in, sequencers replacing players, the studio replacing the band. It is coercive brilliance. Extractive amplification. A masterpiece produced through methods that would be condemned today. And yet—the result is undeniable.
The transformation was not clean. But it was thorough.
And you also realize the most astonishing fact: this entire monument was built at a time when Johnson and Rutherford had no guarantee they would survive the decade. The queer futurity coded into the album was not fantasy—it was defiance. These voices were recorded against a backdrop of Reagan, Thatcher, the Falklands hangover, rising homophobia, and a plague that would soon decimate the very culture the album celebrated.
So yes, there is a ledger here:
Jill Sinclair: built studios that enabled brilliance; crafted contracts that would have trapped artists into old age; founded an empire later sold as inventory.
Holly Johnson: endured exploitation; earned a liberation; was dealt a fatal prognosis; pulled off survival against dizzying odds; lived a long life that outlasted his captors.
Paul Rutherford: suffered an invisibility in the retelling; managed a survival in the reality.
Welcome to the Pleasuredome: kept on going, moving bodies, igniting hearts. Forty-one years and counting.
Yet the ledger doesn’t balance. How could it? Sinclair’s death does not retroactively redeem the contracts. Johnson’s survival does not erase the lost years. The legal victory helped future artists but did nothing for those who died before they could exercise their rights. The Pleasure Dome remains magnificent regardless of who lived or died.
But the ledger is not done. In 2017, three years after Sinclair’s death and nearly three decades after Johnson won his case, Universal Music Group acquired ZTT Records and Stiff Records in a single back-catalog purchase. Not out of love. Out of asset strategy. From 2017 to 2022, the ZTT archive was licensed to BMG/Union Square Music—meaning the recordings changed hands multiple times in five years, each transaction further abstracting the music from its origins.
The cage Johnson escaped was dismantled, but the inventory became an entry in the assets column.
And so in 2025, the seven-disc box set is released by Universal Music Group—a corporation that had nothing to do with the creation, the battles, the politics, the lawsuits, the survival, or the deaths. It profits because copyright law grants corporations near-perpetual ownership of cultural memory.
The human stories end. The corporate story rolls forward indefinitely.
This is the third column of the ledger: corporate IP management. A system that does not care who died young and who beat the odds. A system that does not weigh injustice or liberation. A system that keeps the music in print not because it is a queer monument, but because it is a marketable asset.
Yet the Pleasure Dome outlives everyone.
In 2025, you put on the album, and what you hear is no longer just ZTT spectacle. You hear Johnson’s voice, still alive when the album expected him not to be. You hear Rutherford’s harmonies, present in a history that nearly erased him. You hear Sinclair’s architecture, gleaming long after her body is gone. You hear Horn’s ambition, Dudley’s structural genius, Morley’s slogans fading into a kind of camp nostalgia for a futurism that never arrived.
You hear a record made by people who did not know if they would survive, remastered by people who never knew them, sold by people who were not yet born when it was made.
And the music plays. On and on and on.
A commercial product. And a provocation. And a reminder. Also a monument. As well as a ledger entry in a system that outlives its makers.
A future that keeps receding, twenty minutes at a time, perpetually waiting and never arriving.
Coda: You Can't Pee Without Getting Steven Wilson Wet*
The 2025 box set arrives remixed by Steven Wilson—who has overhauled King Crimson's catalog, Yes, Jethro Tull, XTC, Tears for Fears, and now Frankie. Wilson has become format-shift infrastructure through sheer ubiquity, the name on the contract when labels need to justify premium box sets.
But Wilson isn't just updating the mixes for Dolby Atmos. He's creating new ones: a 30-minute "Supernova" mix of the title track ("one of the best things I've ever done," he writes), instrumental versions across all formats, extended mixes positioned as homage to ZTT's original 12-inch culture. These aren't archival preservation—they're new creative work, generating new copyrightable material, exclusive to specific premium editions to force multiple purchases.
This is the fourth column: remediation as revenue stream and authorship expansion. The music doesn't just persist—it grows, branches, multiplies across formats and exclusives. Each new version creates new purchase opportunities, new rights to manage, new revenue for corporations that acquired the catalog as inventory and specialists hired to expand it.
Wilson himself operates in good faith—he's a meticulous craftsman doing work he genuinely loves. But the system he serves uses that craft to justify $180+ box sets where the "new" content is remixes of music made under contracts later deemed exploitative, now owned by Universal, now expanded by a hired specialist for audiophile collectors and completists.
An album created by replacing the band with session musicians, produced under contracts struck down in court, acquired by a corporation decades later, now remixed and extended by the go-to craftsman of the day who is sincerely proud of the opportunity to bolster that work and of the end product.
Yet—
Someone once observed that Marx's grave charges admission while Mill's does not. The seven-disc box set is Marx's grave: premium-priced access to music originally made as queer defiance, now curated by corporations, remixed by hired technicians, segmented across formats to maximize revenue extraction.
The discarded cassette in the Goodwill bins is Mill's grave. Essentially no admission fee. No Dolby Atmos. No Steven Wilson. Just the music, still circulating outside the ledger, waiting for whoever needs it. Found for 99 cents by someone who wasn't alive when it was made, played on a device Universal can't track, generating zero revenue for anyone.
Perhaps the most punk rock listening of Pleasuredome in 2025 is exactly that: the queer kid finding a cassette in the bins.
The corporate machinery rolls forward. But the bins don't care. Neither does the tape.
It just plays.
*Phrase borrowed from Chickfactor fanzine's "Pavement Boy" comic strip, circa 1990s.