news Frankie goes to Bethlehem: how The Power of Love became an unlikely Christmas anthem | pop and rock

Frankie Goes to Hollywood's single The Power of Love was never a Christmas song, Holly Johnson complained, when a version was used on the John Lewis festive ad in 2012. He wrote it

in 1983 while still on the dole, having given up his art school grant and unsure of his future in music – even though the band were on the brink of success. The song was a paean

not to another person, he explained, but to love itself – “a force from above”; death-defying, vampire-smiting. His voice still contained that silvery archness (wasn't the

“hooded claw” a reference to Wacky Races?) but the emotional heft was real. Was this really the guy from Relax?But from day one, Johnson never stood a chance extricating The

Power of Love from Christmas. It was Frankie Goes to Hollywood's third single, and third and final No 1. It had just one week at the top, at the start of December 1984, before Band

Aid's Do They Know It's Christmas? knocked it off. After the shock and awe of previous singles Relax and Two Tribes, The Power of Love's video was a straightforward nativity scene

that barely featured the band – “chocolate box”, as Johnson later lamented.Season's greetings … a scene from The Power of Love. Photograph: zttrecordsWhile producer Trevor

Horn had turned Relax and Two Tribes into special-effects-laden blockbusters, he did very little to The Power of Love in the studio – just speeded it up (you can hear the

original, slower version on Frankie's John Peel session in 1983) and added a lush string section from Anne Dudley of Art of Noise. He says that at the time – and this really

dates things – his main worry was how to get a 12-inch out of a ballad when their previous two singles had done so well in remixes. They made an extended version by including a

recorded Christmas message called Holier Than Thou in which five drunken Frankies chant a festive rhyme: “Christmas is here once again / So let's all have some fun / Don't forget

10 pints tonight / And don' t forget to come – to the lads' party of course!”Watch the video for Frankie Goes to Hollywood: The Power of LoveThe single came at the start of

Frankie's unraveling, when the forces controlling the band were pulling in different directions. Two weeks before its release, adverts from their label ZTT billed it as their

“third No 1”. This embarrassed its distributor, Island Records, which was growing weary of the concepts dreamed up by Paul Morley, ZTT's maverick marketing manager. Horn, the

band's label boss as well as producer, had the musicians in a punishing record deal – and the two “ferocious homosexuals” (their words) and three scouse “lads” that made