Dan from Camelot Music and I sat in a fiberglass booth, dipping french fries into our vanilla shakes and eating plastic hamburgers. “Frankie Say Nasty,” Dan said, and wadded up his burger. A cop walked past us on his way out the door.
“Hey, why do you dress like that?” he asked me.
“Because I want to,” I said.
“That’s not an answer.”
“Why do you dress like that?” I asked him.
“It’s my uniform.”
“No it isn’t. It’s who you are. You’re a cop.”
“So that’s who you are?”
“Yeah. Is that against the law?”
He shook his head. “That’s not who you are.”
“How would you know? You just walked past my table.”
“Because I was just like you. How old are you — 19? 20?”
“Seventeen.”
“Trying to find yourself,” he said, and then he smiled.
“I know who I am.”
“Trying to find yourself,” he repeated.
“I’m not the one hiding behind a badge and a gun,” I said.
“Okay. You come see me in 10-15 years. We’ll see who was searching,” the cop said, and he walked out the door.
Dan and I went back to dipping french fries into our milkshakes. A cashier ran out and wiped down the policeman’s now empty table. “Are y’all in a band?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Dan said. “Frankie Goes To Hollywood. Have you heard of us?”
Why It Matters 
First, sorry but dipping fries in your shake is gross 🙂 I wonder what that talk you might have had 10 or 15 years later would have been like….
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It is kind of gross, yes. I wonder what you’d think of the Southern habit of pouring your peanuts into your Coke…
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Well that was a pretty random encounter, and very deep too… and I’m referring to the cop and you, not the fries in the shake 😛
Here in the UK, Frankie first rose to notoriety when a BBC Radio 1 DJ refused to play Relax on the grounds that the lyrics were offensive and so was the artwork. Of course, everyone went out to buy it to see what all the fuss was about even though other stations kept playing it anyway.
But I’ve always liked ’em.. a very different style of music to much else, even if they’re mainly a bunch of sessionists…they made good noise. We even had their ‘Power of Love’ cover played at our wedding. 🙂
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We got FGTH several months after you, and I think that was due to a similar event. Now I’m going to have to go do some homework…
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