The Frankie Powers of Love - #OneSongOnePlaylist

Here’s another entry in the sporadic, slightly unhinged #OneSongOnePlaylist series.

This time, I’ve rounded up as many versions of Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s The Power of Love as I could find.

Yes, before you start, I mean the Frankie one; the 1984 single by Holly Johnson, Peter Gill, Mark O’Toole and Brian Nash, from off of Welcome to the Pleasuredome - quite a formative album for my music tastes; I was 12 when it came out and just beginning to form my own opinions.

This one’s personal; MrsVark and I had it as a slow song at our wedding. So, unlike some of the other playlists, this wasn’t just me amusing myself by stacking up a ridiculous pile of near-identical tracks and listening to them all. This one actually mattered.

That said, putting it together was a PITA.

Usually, these playlists just mean searching for a song title and sifting through the results. This time, searching for "The Power of Love " was a pointed lesson: there is no world body that coordinates song titles like what equity does with actors’ names, or that weird thing about clown faces. There is a metric shit-ton of songs called the Power of Love, and two are not just well-known but cultural juggernauts, each with its own ecosystem of covers and remixes. So it was more work than usual.

The rules: no Huey Lewis and the News (that’s maybe another #OneSongOnePlaylist), and absolutely no Jennifer Rush.

FGTH’s song is a cultural touchstone for many. It sits in a cultural spot. It came out in November 1984, became their third UK number 1, and yet somehow ended up in the Christmas song pile for a lot of people—even though the lyrics never mention Christmas. That’s mostly thanks to the Nativity themed video, shot outside Jerusalem, and all the Christian imagery on the cover. A bit like an early East 17 "Stay Another Day".

Which is fair. If you put out a big emotional song right before Christmas, dress it in religious imagery, and give it a Nativity video, you can’t be surprised when it gets dragged out with the tinsel and Quality Street.

But what makes the song work is that it isn’t actually about Christmas. Holly Johnson later called it something much bigger and more spiritual, saying there was a biblical side to its passion and that “love is the only thing that matters in the end”. That probably explains why so many artists from wildly different genres have had a go at it. It can be grand, tender, over the top, stripped back, devout, secular, or just gloriously fucking melodramatic, depending on who’s singing.

And plenty of people have had a go.

Naturally, the playlist has multiple FGTH versions, because once you start counting alternate mixes, extended cuts, later reworks, and oddities like Strings Only, the band basically become their own sub-genre. Beyond that, there are versions by Gabrielle Aplin , Dalton Harris , Oomph! , Nouvelle Vague , Il Divo (singing in chuffing Latin as is their schtick), Ulver , Anneke van Giersbergen , and a bunch of others who seem to have wandered in from pop, rock, trance, Christmas music, ambient, and whatever else Qobuz had on hand. There are even two reggae/dub versions, which are significantly better than I expected.

Aplin’s version is probably the best-known cover in recent years, helped along by the 2012 John Lewis Christmas advert, becoming a UK number 1 in its own right. Which rather proves the point: this song has enough emotional weight and enough room in it to survive radically different arrangements and still land.

That’s why this playlist is one of the better #OneSongOnePlaylist experiments. Some songs fall apart if you repeat them too much. Some just prove that most people should have left them alone. But The Power of Love holds up. Even the weaker versions are at least interesting. And when they work, they do it for different reasons—some go for bombast, some strip it back, some go full Christmas, some sound like they’ve wandered in by mistake and decided to stay.

So yes, this was harder to put together than most. Much harder. It meant more filtering, more checking, and a lot more muttering “no, not that bloody one” at the search results than I’d like from what is already a pretty niche, self-inflicted hobby. But it was worth it.

Partly because it’s a genuinely fascinating song with a weird afterlife. Partly because there are enough different takes to make the experiment worthwhile. And partly because, for me, it’s tied to one of the happiest days of my life.

If you feel like subjecting yourself to a surprisingly moving, sometimes odd, and very Frankie-specific journey through The Power of Love, the playlist is below.

Just remember: no Huey Lewis , and absolutely no Jennifer Rush.

Qobuz playlist: https://open.qobuz.com/playlist/62195364

Spotify playlist, if you insist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3qW9BHXHDAydXCmeTEEY7Z?si=46THHdjdROOVwtm-zkWtnw

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