FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD – "Relax"

Eight is bang on. I love the sadomasochism metaphor you used there, too, so writer points ++ on that.

“There’s barely a song” – I’d never thought of it that way but, yes, that’s a two-note chorus! Congratulations, Mr Horn. It’s the kind of song I think I hear in pubs or bars all the time, but listening to it today I realise I haven’t heard it in years. The heavenly chord into Germanic one-note bassline is one of the all-time ‘event’ intros; we’re on hallowed soil. Indeed, aside from the odd, fey keyboard squeak and glugging noise, the production still sounds so heady. Should I be surprised? Well, I heard a much more recent Trevor Horn Popular entry recently and was sad to only feel as if I’d had my ears varnished.

I always think of pornographers as being far more reposed than uptight Holly. ‘Pinched’ is right, his vocal is certainly seedy, sadistic – it could just sound hissy and unappealing but up against the melancholy chord sequence it ends up as ecstatic.

Has any other single song launched a fashion craze?

wichita, I remember the video for “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” sparking a mad rush for fluorescents in my school. But you said “song” and not “video” so uhh….

Rosie, I don’t remember the t shirts until the summer – which makes sense – when they had their second single out (I’ll keep schtum). If it was purely merchandising it would have been dull, I agree, but I think it was grass roots.

I wish I could remember the slogans on some of the cheaper bootlegged shirts, I’m sure there some crackers. All I remember is seeing a girl in Chester wearing one in the distinctive ‘Relax’ block print that read ‘OK Ya’. As in the Sloane slogan. What would a modern equivalent be – a David Cameron t shirt which somehow referenced Tinchy Stryder? God, the 80s were difficult.

And also Holly going “hit me with your laserbeam/laserbeam me”; that’s to me the most disturbing part of the song AND at the same time the sound of pop going nova or something like that. Now that i think about it, I suppose it pretty much summarizes why this is such a relevant song.

There was a t-shirt which said ‘Frankie Say Arm The Unemployed’ that I fondly remember (I’m actually in the middle of writing something about those slogan shirts for me blog at the moment, though more about the originals designed by Katherine Hamnett)

After the string of rubbish chart toppers we’ve just had I’m tempted to give this a 9 or even 10 just for being a breath of fresh air and NEW. I once had to translate the lyrics of this for a Spanish girl in a nightclub in Alicante, “Quando quieres orgasmo” was the best I could do.

8 seems fine for me as it’s not my top Frankie hit. However the combination of sleek disco pulse with sublime rock dynamic is a compelling one.
The song had an early pre-Horned debut on an edition of the Tube the previous year – and I seem to recall John Peel, introducing the band on TOTP, taking pride in announcing that he had given the band a session on his show in 1983.
Holly always sounds lusty and lascivious to me – as if he’s savouring every moment – compared with Marc Almond’s more ambivalent tones.

A 9 for sure, 10 sometimes. This went to #10 in January 85 in the U.S., after being re-released from April ’84 where it got to #67. This was the only Top 40 hit for them in the U.S.

Never really liked this – before the ban it was played quite a bit on Radio One and despite its later status thought it was a bit of an overproduced noise of a record.Unfortunate in my opinion when Trevor Horn had been/was to be responsible for such good stuff.

Fuckin Mike Read if it wasnt for that self-publicising twat (and the only reason he must have had for wanting the ban is for some weird way of getting himself publicity) we probably wouldnt be having this conversation 25 years later…as it was going nowhere fast before the ban despite being all the plays…

For me this record sums up the time when I finally knew the halcyon days of early 80s pop were over and the leaden completely unfunkiness and ugliness of the mid-80s had taken over. Still only 3 years till the entry of the house stuff in 1987/88 turned things around…

#18 depends how strict your definition of funky may be but ‘Hangin’ On A String’ was a hit a year or so after this right? Plus ‘Slave To The Rhythm’, ‘White Lines’, ‘Somebody Else’s Guy’, ‘Change Of Heart’, ‘Twilight’, …surely these are not unfunky or ugly unless you’re wholesale opposed to digitisation/synth-soul.

It’s a bit unfair to say “none of the band played on the final cut”. You obviously haven’t seen the film clip of the band playing the song BEFORE Trevor Horn got hold of it – several weeks before it hit the charts. Admittedly listening to the “bare bones” of the song seemed exactly like that – viewing a skeleton before the real meat was placed over it – but credit to them for creating the frame for Horn to work on.

#2 Watch – a week of Cyndi Lauper’s ‘Girls Just Want To Have Fun’, then two week’s of ‘Radio Ga Ga’ by Queen.

Didn’t like it then, don’t like now. I half get and don’t get it – that bwangy bass sound sums up the time as much as anything else, and I understand the tension/release business, but beyond that, eh… I had no real idea who Trevor Horn was when I first heard this, but there was something going on that I really wasn’t going to enjoy (with a couple of exceptions) over the years to come. As for Paul Morley’s hype machine, I wasn’t exposed until I was back in Britain later in the year, but I didn’t take to that either – I’m sure will discuss that a lot more over Popular installments to come. Morley on Late Review=good, Morley as pop provocateur=tedious.

At my school, it was said (in whispers) that the chorus went “relax, don’t do it, when you want to suck and chew it.” I winced even then, I think.

It’s amazing how camp signifiers would drift over everyone’s heads in those days. So many people just didn’t seem to catch on – from Queen to Village People to The Smiths. Even when Frankie made it this explicit, there were plenty who still didn’t get it. Especially kids: those of us who’d heard that there were GAYS in FGTH disagreed over which of them it might be. Hmm, the scruffy, drunk-looking Scousers obsessed with Pink Floyd, or the neat dancer in the pink vest with the clipped “Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart” moustache? Different times. We grew up slowly in them days. Pleasing to recall how little the gay thing bothered us, mind. Something tells me a similarly out(re) gay-oriented act would not find such favour with 12-year-olds today.

The whole “I heard they didn’t even play on the record” stuff is hilarious, not least for the musical illiteracy it displays. People were genuinely shocked when the news got out. Presumably these people had heard “Relax”, and assumed that was the sound of a power trio?

My favourite moment in “Relax” is when Holly shouts “come… HUH!!!” and there’s that grotesque gushing noise, like gallons of industrial semen charging down a sewer pipe (is that the “Caligulan piss” bit in the video? I haven’t seen it for ages, and I’m not going on YouTube now as I’m supposed to be working and I’d be on there for hours). But at the risk of sounding like an old dad or a bad stand-up, the lyrics remain incomprehensible to me. Relax, don’t do what? Don’t come? Is this a premature ejaculation pep talk? The only bit that connects is “hit me with your laser beams”, which is kind of cleverly naughty, I suppose.

I think I prefer the follow-up, even though this may well be the “better” record. I’m not sure why – maybe the idealistic cynicism of Frankie / ZTT works best for me when it’s outward-looking, rather than public/private, pseudo-sensual. Maybe it’s my innate dislike of the calculated sex-as-marketing approach: “Relax” would be phenomenal as an obscure gay disco track, but the fact that it’s so self-conscious, designed to shock and tease more than to thrill… that almost takes the edge off a great, great record. Mind you, I love that Eurodance stuff like E-Rotic (“Max Don’t Have Sex With Your Ex”, “Fred Come To Bed”, “Fritz Loves My Tits” etc), so perhaps I just don’t know what I’m on about.

“Relax” is indelibly linked in my memory with being on the bus home from matric, part-way through the hour-long 25-mile journey, hearing it sung by a guy from the year above us who had perfected not only the BOM bom BOMs but Holly Johnson’s orgasmic “huuAAHHH!”, for all the bus to hear.

Not that we necessarily even thought of it as orgasmic; naivete, and lack of exposure to the banned video (in Australia as here), meant that our only explicit clue was the lyric “when you wanna come” – and its preceding instruction to relax and not do it was perfect misdirection, because why wouldn’t you want to do that? Surely Frankie was telling us not to bother coming to Hollywood.

Okay, we can’t have been that naive, not at sixteen, but the tame replacement video did mask the innuendo to a surprising degree, given that the whole track is soaking in bodily fluids, practically spraying them out of the speakers with every beat. It was still obviously a hit to us, even though it only reached number five in Oz (where INXS and Pat Benatar were lording it over the charts at the time); all those 12″ versions were surely evidence of its importance. Record companies wouldn’t release more than one version of a single just to cash in, would they? Next you’ll be telling us those T-shirts weren’t a spontaneous gesture of solidarity from the fans. Frankie Say Consume.

I never bought any of the “Relax” singles, though, and didn’t even hear Pleasuredome until a few years ago. My Frankie album was a review copy of Liverpool sent to our student mag at uni a few years later. The review I wrote was mixed, at best, and tells me that I didn’t rate much of their stuff apart from “Relax” (and “Warriors of the Wasteland”).

So this might have scored a 6 from me back in the day. It’s grown in my affections, and I can definitely see how it could be worth an 8 or 9 to others, but to be honest to Tom’s rating guidelines I’ll have to call it a 7. I can happily go years without hearing or thinking of “Relax”; its abundant musical heirs have left it less essential than it once might have been. Even if I have had BOM bom BOM running through my head all weekend.

Has anyone ever covered relax?

Mediocre song, good but overrated production. A lot of noise signifying very little. So, around a 6 I think.

Smashie and Nicey did quite a good spin on the Mike Read incident, in which the Enfield character is seen in the studio saying:

“I have in my hand a piece of filth by Paul McCartney and The Frog Chorus which contains the line ‘Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum’. I don’t want to hear about your nether regions Mr McCartney and I’m not playing this shit on my radio programme.
Here’s Frankie Goes To Hollywood and Relax”

#28 one great thing about the E-Rotic singles is the way they tell a little story across the releases. So the chorus of “Fred Come To Bed” goes “Fred come to bed / Cos your Max had sex with his sexy ex”. Where Fritz and the tits fit in I’m not sure.

Will at #25 is right – it entered at 35 on Tuesday 3 January and jumped to 6 the following week, before the ban. I don’t know whether Mike Read had played it in his Wednesday morning chart rundown the week it entered, but maybe he only listened to it properly the week it went up 29 places. Normally a single with that kind of momentum would be a pretty sure contender for number one soon afterwards – maybe not a “five weeks at No 1 and one of the ten best-selling singles of all time” kind of hit, but it’s safe to say it would probably have been number one without the ban.

Mike Read talked afterwards about going into clubs where the DJ would put on “Relax” to taunt him as soon as he walked through the door – his reaction was to hit the dancefloor immediately, to signify that he thought it was a great dance record, just not the kind of thing he wanted to broadcast to kids at breakfast time. Which, to be honest, I find to be a defensible position.

This is another one which takes me back to finals year – to be precise, the euphoric lunchtime after the last exam of Finals week, when our whole gang, male and female, half-skipped down Egham Hill towards the pub singing chorus after chorus of “Relax” – we weren’t thinking about the subject matter, just the title was the operative word. A golden afternoon in a momentous year.

At that time, early June ’84, “Relax” was already heading back up the chart to meet its successor in an incredible scenario in July. Its Top 40 run in full: 35-6-2-1-1-1-1-1-2-3-6-16-21-23-21-29-29-31-26-24-21-17-16-11-5-3-2-2-3-3-3-6-7-12-20-22-29. The weeks when it was 11 through to 6 were the weeks when its bunny-embargoed successor was at number one.

Does anyone know the release date of Relax? I seem to remember it being on The Tube around Oct/Nov ’83.

Icicle Works singer Ian McNabb recently published his autobiography, Merseybeast. One of the quotes in the promo blurb was from his mum who said of it “There’s too many drugs and women get treated very badly.”

Great record. “Event” pop. As Will at #25 points out, it was already well on its way to the top (leaping from No.35 to 6) the week before it was banned, but I’m sure Frankie wouldn’t have been quite the same phenomenon without Mike Read. Still, all good.

Here’s a nice illustration of the essential paradox of being 11: having bought this disgraceful single, I rushed home and played it a dozen times in succession while making a battle scene with my Star Wars figures.

It spent 8 weeks hanging around the lower reaches of the top 100 at the end of 1983 before it broke into the top 40. There’s also the great ‘Wild Wet & Willing’ NME cover of November 1983, accompanying a Gavin Martin interview which led to Holly Johnson refusing to talk to the paper for the next ten years.

I think that I must have the first 18 months of FGTH in my head as some kind of benchmark for monumental pop, a record that hasn’t been matched in the subsequent 25 years. At their peak, Oasis may have made big-sounding records that everybody knew were coming out, but crucially they weren’t about anything and didn’t carry the sense of importance that Frankie did.

Looking back, I now realise that the sense of importance was largely a pose – do these singles really provoke any sense of sex/ war/ religion? – but if rock people are going to pose, then they might as well do it on this scale. Also the pop/dance nature of these singles makes it a lot easier to take than either the earnestness or signposted irony of U2.

So when I was 11, Relax was an important document about sexuality, but one that I couldn’t really decipher. What practices were they refering to? It must be some deep – and frankly rather scary – adult secret.

25 years later, like Taylor, I’ve learned that the lyrics of this don’t really function as coherant innuendo. I can remember talking about formulative pop experiences in a bar with a gay academic in the nineties and him admitting to me “I’ve never really worked out to what each line of that song is supposed to be referring” and being pleased to learn that I wasn’t alone in not getting it.

I’m not bothered that this doesn’t function very well as a song, because I think that I’ve always approached this first and foremost as an artwork. Certainly, more than any other record on Popular so far, I think that this is the single for which the sleeve forms an important part of the full aesthetic experience. I find it interesting how that cover has always exuded devience to me without ever once striking me as arousing or enticing – an effect magnified by the shocking S & M text on the reverse, which we schoolchildren would shock each other by pointing out.

I can’t remeber if we’ve discussed this before, but is this the first number one which works better as a 12″?

TOTPWatch: Frankie Goes To Hollywood performed Relax on Top of The Pops twice (Christmas 1984 we’ll come to in the fullness of time);

January 5 1984. Also in the studio that week (the twentieth anniversary edition) were; Status Quo, Frank Kelly and Slade. David Jensen and John Peel were the hosts.

40 -It was released in autumn 1983 but they first appeared on The Tube at the beginning of 83 performing a short snatch of Relax (sounding anything but a million seller)and another forgotten song where the camera mainly followed two girls in fetish gear, The Leather Pets who were dancing with them. Trevor Horn was reportedly much taken with their performance and later disappointed when he realised they were not in the band.

I’m inclined to agree that this may well have made the top sans Read’s unilateral ban but that it would not have been half as massive a hit/gay anthem – blah-blah-blah – as it turned out to be. As Erithian says, Read’s objection was that he did not think the track was appropriate for the school run on his breakfast show. Whilst this does sound a little prissy especially over a quarter of a century later, I’m prepared to believe that Read’s actions were mostly genuine rather than self-serving. It would have been extraordinary had a leading national DJ been offended by something like this.

But something like what, exactly? Despite all the talk of sucking and cuming, “Relax” really is a bit of a train wreck and would be instantly forgetable had the lyric referred to “jump to it” and “when you want to run” to precisely the same arrangement. For me, this was in no part the seismic event people would claim, even though the direct result was two more giant hits for Frankie, which one may not comment on until Bunny grants Royal Assent.

Rosie # 1 – Waldo tells me that he received his residential preventive training for Customs (now UK Border Agency) at a place called Wyboston, a stone’s throw from St Neots, although just over the county line in Beds. Although the centre had an excellent bar, the delegates made several trips into St Neots. There was laser-gunning (paint-balling but less messy), visits to ruby houses but mostly, of course, drinking. This was done in the aforementioned Wheatsheaf, where one night there was a karaoke. After a few babyshams, Waldo ambled up with a couple of other pitiful visiting drunks and treated the carrot-cruncher locals to a rendition of “Blue Moon” a la The Marcels. This actually went done well, well enough for a group of homeboys to give their own version of it in reply. The asmosphere was nothing other than cordial. By the time the Customs group tumbled on to their specially arranged minibus, everyone was totally wankered.