FEATURE:
Groovelines
Frankie Goes to Hollywood - Relax
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THERE are a couple of articles…
that I want to bring in to illustrate and explain the recording and success of Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s monster hit, Relax. As it is Pride Month, I wanted to spend some time with this L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ classic. Before coming onto some interesting articles, Wikipedia provides some backdrop and biography about one of the greatest songs of the 1980s:
“The hit version, produced by Trevor Horn and featuring the band along with other musicians, entered the UK Top 75 singles chart in November 1983 but did not crack the Top 40 until early January 1984. Three weeks later it reached number one, in the chart dated 28 January 1984, replacing Paul McCartney's "Pipes of Peace". One of the decade's most controversial and most commercially successful records, "Relax" eventually sold a reported two million copies in the UK alone, easily ranking among the ten biggest-selling singles ever. It remained in the UK Top 40 for 37 consecutive weeks, 35 of which overlapped with a radio airplay ban by the BBC (owing to lyrics perceived as overtly sexual). In June 1984, bolstered by the instant massive success of the band's follow-up single "Two Tribes", the single re-entered the Top Ten for a further nine weeks including two spent at number two (behind "Two Tribes"). At that time Frankie Goes to Hollywood were the only act apart from the Beatles and John Lennon to concurrently occupy the top two positions on the chart. Several 12-inch single versions fed the "Relax" phenomenon. The single re-entered the UK Top 75 in February 1985, and, more successfully, in October 1993, when it spent three weeks in the Top Ten”.
When thinking about these anthems and songs that defined a time, I feel Relax is especially influential and important. It is definitely one of the greatest U.K. number-one singles. When The Guardian ranked the finest U.K. number-ones, they placed Relax at thirteen. This is what they said:
“In 1983, Margaret Thatcher swept to general election victory on a moralistic platform of “Victorian values”. The Victorians are well-remembered for their culture of sexual repression, and – as a direct result – their obsession with sex and erotica. So perhaps Thatcher should have seen it coming: mere months later, the country’s No 1 single was the most gloriously filthy in chart-topping history.
Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Relax, the ultimate banger about banging, made little impact on its first release on ZTT Records in late 1983. But after a performance on Top of the Pops in January 1984, it shot to the top of the charts and stayed there for five weeks, beginning a year of total chart dominance for the Liverpool group. It remains the sixth bestselling single in British history, beaten only by Band Aid, Candle in the Wind, Bohemian Rhapsody and some novelty songs. Its immense success proves that, besides charity, nothing brings the UK together quite like extreme horniness”.
With not only its flagrant innuendo, but its wide-open synths, and swooning, psychedelic disco structure, the song was a complete wildcard – and the band performing it even more so. Frontmen Holly Johnson and Paul Rutherford were both openly gay, still a rarity in pop at the time, and courted controversy with the use of fetish wear in their performances and videos. Famously, it was censorship from the BBC that propelled the song to its peak: when it was at No 6 in the charts, BBC Radio 1’s breakfast DJ Mike Read yanked it off air after taking a cursory glance at the lewd lyrics and cover art. He declared he’d never play it again. The BBC backed him by banning it across all its shows – including TOTP. For five weeks, Frankie were announced as No 1 – and then the show played out on a different track.
The song’s runaway success was testament to the fact that censorship and repression don’t work. It was a powerful message at the dawn of the Thatcher era: this was towards the beginning of the HIV/Aids epidemic that would devastate the LGBT community and lead to a dangerous increase in homophobia, and just three years before Thatcher would introduce the regressive Section 28 amendment. It was an era of hate, in which homosexuality was pushed even further to the fringes of society than it had been before. And yet, Frankie Goes to Hollywood prevailed”.
Prior to wrapping up, there is a very deep and intriguing article from Sound on Sound that explored Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s hit. I am not bringing it all in (as it is very long) - though there are a couple of portions that I wanted to source:
“It was in 1983, while producing at a small studio named the Producer's Workshop on London's Fulham Road, that Steve Lipson received a call asking him to spend a couple of days engineering for Trevor Horn. This would be at Sarm West, where an SSL E-Series console was supplemented by a couple of Studer A80 tape machines.
"I knew who he was," Lipson remarks, "but I just didn't want to do it. By then I wanted to be a record producer, and so engineering, for me, seemed like a black hole. At the same time, I also wanted to achieve success on my own terms, not through anybody else, and I was therefore anti the whole idea. Still, the job was for just two days, so I took it even though I had no interest in being there. I basically adopted a couldn't-care-less attitude, but what transpired was that Trevor is the kind of producer who loves the people around him to get on with their jobs. That meant I was inadvertently doing exactly what he wanted me to do — it was weird. And after two days, without either of us saying a thing, we just kept going."
Having already tried to record 'Relax' with Frankie and the Blockheads, as well as with Frankie alone, Horn was now attempting to give the song some fresh impetus, and to that end he'd recruited the engineering talents of Lipson, along with keyboard player Andy Richards and Fairlight programmer JJ Jeczalik. Initially, three weeks were spent on trying to re-fashion the track, while also working on 'Ferry 'Cross the Mersey' and editing The Art Of Noise. Yet it wasn't until he took a dinner break during a 'Ferry' session that Horn came to appreciate Lipson's musical abilities.
"That song didn't have a guitar part yet," Lipson recalls, "so I plugged in my guitar and began playing something for the middle eight. All of a sudden, Trevor ran into the control room and asked whose sound he was hearing. I said, 'Oh, it's me.' He said, 'You never told me you could play the guitar,' and I said, 'Sure, I did, but you didn't appear interested.' Now he was. And this brings us back to 'Relax', which at that time bore no comparison to the finished record, even though the song itself was similar. Trevor had obviously gleaned its essence from the band, but he'd also incorporated some ideas from the Blockheads, along with a few sounds that were in the Fairlight."
These included bass hooks recorded by the Blockheads' Norman Watt-Roy, and a bass pulse sampled on a Fairlight CMI at Battery Studios a couple of years earlier by session musician Mark Cunningham. But Trevor Horn still had an ace up his sleeve.
Upon its initial US release, 'Relax' only peaked at number 67 in the spring of 1984. Yet in the UK, where Frankiemania was in full cry, it remained on the charts for 42 consecutive weeks, including a revival in the summer of that year when it climbed back to number two while the band's follow-up single occupied the top spot for nine weeks, having entered the chart at number one. Not that the aforementioned follow-up had been very easy to find.
"Sarm was a busy and expensive studio, so rather than mess around there trying to come up with a new song, Trevor asked me if I knew a cheaper place where we could go with the band," Lipson recalls. "I told him about the Producer's Workshop in Fulham, and so we all decamped for there. Even though he'd already figured out what the next single should be, it was a real long shot. The song was 'Two Tribes', and I remember when we first heard it we all looked at him like he was mad, but he said, 'It's all about the bass line.' He completely got it. He was firing on all cylinders, whereas the rest of us were completely in the dark.
"For one thing, there wasn't much to the song, and for another, the demo wasn't any good. However, out of all the material it was the only track that he could envision being the follow-up single — it wasn't a positive choice, but one made out of necessity. The thing about the bass part on the finished record is that it drops an octave, whereas the original bass part didn't do that. It sounded like kids were playing the song, and they were. What Trevor loved about it was the beat, and so after we went down to the Producer's Workshop and the band members did their thing, they then left and again it was down to the four of us — Trevor, Andy, JJ and me — all feeling depressed as anything because it just sounded terrible. We therefore set up and played it ourselves, and interestingly the only part that ended up being retained from the Producer's Workshop was my guitar.
"I played a sort of harmony, and that, together with dropping the bass down on those notes and sequencing it, as well as Andy then coming in with the chord movement — a minor chord to a fourth and back to the minor — were the key elements. Once these were all in place, we then moved back to Sarm to work on the track, and while we were in Studio Two, figuring out how to make the bass sound good, Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley were mixing an album in Studio One, and they then went away to record another album, came back to mix it, and we were still working on the bass. We were looking for sounds, trying to get the articulation right”.
I was born the year before Relax was released. I have listened to the song a lot through the years. It has this timeless quality but, at the same time, it seems to be rooted at a particular time and place. For this Pride Month-inspired Groovelines, it was great reconnecting…
WITH the amazing Relax.