FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD – “Relax”
In the beginning was the ban. Oh, there’d been a Frankie before, and a “Relax” before, but the ban was the B of BANG!, that Paul Morley-driven hyperconcept which when completed would lead to….. well, something. (A computer game, as it turned out.)
The ban, of course, was consensual. Relax, in its flesh-and-leather sleeve, ached for punishment – as public and official as possible. Mike Read duly doled some out. The record became an instant legend and soon had the sales to match the publicity. Classic McLaren playbook, as many a veteran must have pointed out. And the really clever thing was, when you played it it was hardly obscene at all: its filth was all in the aura and the rumour.
Or almost. “Relax” had Holly Johnson, after all. Holly wasn’t a sexy performer – he sang like he looked, mocking and pinched. But he had a seediness to him that was perfect for the material. He turns the hi-NRG workout of “Relax” into pornography by the simple trick of sounding like a pornographer: there’s a grubbiness to every grunt, gasp and sneer. Every time he gasps “when you wanna come” he’s part master of ceremonies, part voyeur, part swept-away joyous victim.
He’s also the only thing in Frankie you can grab onto. Years later there was a minor scandal as it transpired none of the band played on the track – but surely nobody was shocked? There’s not a band on this record – there’s barely a song, just a collection of gorgeous Fairlight fragments posing and wheeling to the unending catwalk beat. And thanks to Trevor Horn it all sounds immense. Or almost all: a couple of the keyboard runs are a bit BBC wildlife show, and the sampled splash effect that accompanies a cataract of Caligulan piss in the insta-banned video just sounds on record like something’s broken. He could – and would – push and polish the machinery further.
But that wasn’t the point of “Relax”: the point was to provoke and delight and suggest, and make people dance. And “Relax” was an absolute, enormous success on those terms. The queer and BDSM imagery Morley and the band built “Relax” around dropped a little into the background – leathers switched for tight, slogan-dense T-Shirts – and Frankie became a bona fide event. The Sex Pistols restaged as burlesque? Sure, but oh how it worked.
8
I don’t think it *was* aimed at a gay audience in an anthemic way though — it’s more like an “in-yr-face battlecry”, aimed at the innocent non-gay world at large, intended to rub ppl the wrong way, so its uneasiness and its brute ugliness are job-well-done rather than flaws: “We’re here, we’re leathermen, get used to it laYm0rz”
I guess I just feel vaguely alienated by it then!
I never thought of it as an explicitly “gay” song. I mean, straight people come too and it doesn’t mention any, um, particular way of doing it.
I’m interested in how Frankie managed to achieve such popularity with that particular brand of gayness, the S&M and Rutherford’s look and so on. Surely it can’t have passed over people’s heads? I can see Boy George being a phenomenon partly as the continuation of the popular tradition of cattiness, drag and charming old ladies. But not ‘Relax!’, which seems of a particular time image-wise (though it’s never seemed dated sonically in the slightest, which is amazing given the elements it contains). That said, I know nothing of Frankie qua public personae and would imagine that Holly could be quite cutting, but if he was it’s not in the record.
I think the ‘New York Mix’ has become my preferred version of this, it’s great.
Its undoubtedly thanks to Trevor Horn, like Tom says, that Relax sounds immense, but I’d also like to think of it as being a version of Scouse Epic; a younger brother to Cope, Wylie and McCullough – that Liverpool postpunk tradition of making everything BIG, loud and theatrical; piling on the textures; leaving subtlety to the southerners, and laconic understatement to the Mancs. (Holly J a veteran of that scene,as a Big in Japan member)
In this context, worth mentioning the cultural profile of Liverpool in the early 80s, not matched since – Boys from the Blackstuff, Brookside as C4′s flagship soap in ‘edgy’ contrast to Coronation St, Letter to Brezhnev, Liverpool dominating football the way Man Utd started to the following decade… and politically (for leftists still reeling from the 83 election, at least), Liverpool council – whatever you thought of Militant – seemed to be the leading edge of a younger, radicalised local politics, challenging Thatcherism the way no one else was (at least until the miner’s strike started later this year). Liverpool mattered… some of this was the old story of a working class collective identity, battered by the recession but still resilient, still there (the ‘story of the blues’ from Wah! Heats improbable No.3 from the previous year). But another strand to it was a sense of northern glamour/hedonism/flash that probably had to do with Liverpool being a port, which FGTH and Relax would tie in with. But the two strands seemed like flipsides to the coin at the time. (I don’t know whether this explains what I’m getting at any better, but I was at university at this time with someone from the Cantril Farm estate in Liverpool who was not particularly radical or politically active, but she wouldn’t hear a word against Derek Hatton – the much-slagged ‘face’ of the local council – for 2 main reasons, a) because they got on with building loads of council houses instead of just talking about it, and b) because he refused to apologise for wearing sharp suits and looking flash. No-nonsense but glam,see.)
er, I think originally the point of all that was… when t-shirts came out saying frankie says arm the unemployed, yes it was perhaps a silly cash-in, but there was another context as well
The performance on The Tube, which is knocking around The YouTube, is an eye-opener; it all sounds rather pedestrian and dated, and Holly Johnson’s look is in-your-face leather rather than the grey suit of the banned video. One particular camera-shot up his red leather shorts is very Brüno.
I had to double-check to make sure my memory wasn’t playing tricks on me, so now feel compelled to mention: the original T-shirts said FRANKIE SAY, not SAYS (Frankie referring to the collective band rather than the individual), leading to hours of playground cognitive dissonance.
Ha, thanks, I was certain that was right too – so much so that I got the cognitive dissonance from the ‘FRANKIE SAYS’ one I saw at #21. The shirts seem to have had a pretty big impact in the US, going by how they keep turning up on various TV shows as a signpost of 80sdom.
Less of a song more of a chant set to Fairlight samples – but what samples ! Big & brash with a funked up bassline and meaty synth brass stabs it was hard to ignore. Johnson’s smutty sneer was obv too much for Mike Read and his outrage catapulted it into the stratosphere. Doesn’t sound anywhere near as powerful now as it did then probably due to the over reliance on technology and the fact that the king was in the alltogether.
Light Entertainment Watch: Mostly music shows, but a few Wogan appearances, too;
THE (NOEL EDMONDS) LATE LATE BREAKFAST SHOW: with Mike Smith (Reporter), Frankie Goes To Hollywood (1984)
1 ON THE ROAD: with Frankie Goes To Hollywood, The Thompson Twins, Nik Kershaw (1984)
THE MONTREUX ROCK FESTIVAL: with Bronski Beat, Bryan Ferry, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Kool And The Gang, The Pointer Sisters, Chris Rea, REO Speedwagon, Sting, Tears For Fears (1985)
THE MONTREUX ROCK FESTIVAL: with Sting, Bryan Ferry, Agnetha, Bronski Beat, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Huey Lewis and the News, Men At Work, Billy Ocean, The Pointer Sisters, REO Speedwagon (1985)
THE MONTREUX ROCK FESTIVAL: with Eighth Wonder, Elvis Costello, Paul Hardcastle, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Art Of Noise, Belouis Some, Bronski Beat, E.L.O., Marilyn Martin, Ready For The World (1986)
THE MONTREUX ROCK FESTIVAL: with Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Art Of Noise, Belouis Some, Bronski Beat, Eighth Wonder, E.L.O., Paul Hardcastle, Marilyn Martin, Ready For The World, Bonnie Tyler (1986)
NAKED CITY: with Caitlin Moran, Johnny Vaughan, Jamiroquai, Moby, Ice T, Shakin’ Stevens, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Paul O’Grady, Paul Morley, Therapy ? (1993)
THE TUBE: with Jools Holland, Leslie Ash, Mark Midwurdz, Paul McCartney, Echo and the Bunnymen, Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders, Inspirational Choir, Killing Joke, Frankie Goes To Hollywood (1983)
THE TUBE: with Jools Holland, Paula Yates, Immaculate Fools, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, The Alarm (1985)
THE TUBE: with Jools Holland, Paula Yates, Spandau Ballet, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Wendy May, Nick Kamen, Felix Howard, Jermaine Stewart, Gwen Guthrie, Gregg Parker (1986)
WOGAN: with Miriam Stoppard, Charles Dance, Marti Caine, Frankie Goes To Hollywood (1984)
WOGAN: with Princess Anne, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Mark Tully (1985)
WOGAN: with Steven Berkoff, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Tom T. Hall, Duncan Norvelle, Christopher Timothy (1986)
“I put on my clothes again, behind the screen. My hands are shaking. Why am I frightened? I’ve crossed no boundaries, I’ve given no trust, taken no risk, all is safe. It’s the choice that terrifies me. A way out, a salvation.”
(Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale, Chapter Eleven)
1. Necessity
In all ways, it had to come. 18 months after New Pop had peaked, and there was scant evidence of any triumph. The Top 40 had retreated into what John Peel contemptuously dubbed “a Radio 2 chart” full of soothing platitudes, safe novelties and the decaying colours and ribbons which was all New Pop seemed to mean to a lot of people (Peel again, on TOTP, December 1983: “Isn’t it great that Billy Joel has two singles in the top ten?” he snarled to camera through teeth never more earthily gritted). Against this, there was the indie tugboat of resistance – New Order, the Cocteaus, the Fall and of course the Smiths – but still there was the urge for a more pronounced reaction.
2. Newness
It was only too fitting that the eleventh hour cavalry charge of New Pop – or its last explicit stand – should be led by its principal sonic architect and chief critical cheerleader. Morley had locked horns with Horn in the NME back in 1980, at the time of “Video Killed The Radio Star”; he was none too impressed and deemed Buggles “the dustbinmen of pop.” But two years later Dollar and ABC had come to pass, and suddenly the two men, again in the NME, found themselves to be on the same side. With New Pop in freefall, as fully and carelessly as George Michael’s spilled drink into the swimming pool in the video for “Club Tropicana,” it was natural that the two should go into battle.
3. Mercy
Unless you were there and sympathetic at the time, it is difficult to convey how devastatingly important that first Art Of Noise EP was. As the autumn of 1983 approached it genuinely did feel that pop music was finished; all that remained were ageing MoR matinee idols from a spent previous era (Bowie, Rod, Billy Joel, Lionel Richie), lapsed prog-rockers pretending to be New Popists (Jones, Kershaw) and the dying embers of the few real New Popists still slugging it out. A letter in the NME of the period complained that the Top 40 was “physically painful to listen to” with only three good records (two of which were by New Order). I am aware that if you looked long and hard enough there was plenty of great music, pop or otherwise, to be found in 1983 but retrospect can be a luxury.
So Into Battle appeared as a modest laser beam of deliverance. Although the genesis was Horn’s team
faffing aboutexperimenting with samples and outtakes from the Duck Rock sessions, those Zulu voices can be heard as far back as the summer of 1982, buried within the glittering mausoleum of Dollar’s “Videotheque.” And yet the found sounds, somewhere in a teasing triangle between Morton Subotnick, Raymond Scott and Joe Meek (do you Hear A New World in “Beat Box”?), were stretchy and playful as pop hadn’t been for some time; the moves were unpredictable, the tactics (both musically and philosophically) were alluring, and in “Moments In Love” something considerably more.4. Advent
At the “climax” of the latter we can hear 16 rpm moans from a vaguely hoarse voice. That was the slowed-down voice of Holly Johnson…and Frankie Goes To Hollywood were ZTT’s next move. When the first ZTT promotional ads appeared in the music press it was impossible not to be instantly thrilled, not to want to go and buy all these promising new horizons of music and art (even though Propaganda and Anne Pigalle were as yet unrecorded). Frankie Goes To Hollywood were a curious choice for a launch, though, I felt at the time; I had heard them in session on Janice Long’s Radio 1 show without paying much attention – sticky-backed Scouse punk-funk not quite startling enough to emerge out of studium, though it was a reasonably logical, if not outrageously illogical (which was really what was needed), development from Johnson’s previous band Big In Japan (which also harboured two further number one artists of future importance) – and couldn’t quite see what, if anything, Horn could get out of them. As unpromising a project as taking on a fast-fading MoR teenpop duo in 1981…
5. Quiet Dawn
“Relax” was released on Hallowe’en 1983; I bought it on the Wednesday, in both 7” and 12” editions (already I was collecting, already I wanted not to miss a second of this second Futurism of Zang Tuum Tumb). I noted immediately that the 12” had almost nothing to do with the song as it stood on the 7”; instead it manipulated and modified the underlying rhythm through a fascinating if marathon thirty-one minutes of stealth funk which could have emerged straight from Cabaret Voltaire’s 2 x 45 – no doubt that was the intention. Value for money. The root 7” sounded good too, colourful and surprising, big without being smugly suffocating – but even then I knew that whatever real power the record possessed was unlikely to reveal itself unless or until it became a big hit. Out in the fields of Left it would become lost.
6. Slow Burn Necessitating Accelerator
For the first couple of months of its existence, “Relax” heeded its own advice and took its time selling; it was getting plenty of radio play and selling solidly and consistently but was feeling its way up the chart by only one or two places per week. Despite the numerous plaudits Into Battle was likewise proving a stubborn seller, and there was a very real worry that not only would “Relax” be swallowed up in the Christmas market but that the entire ZTT project might capsize as a result.
Some favours were called in, and the band appeared on Channel 4’s The Tube just before Christmas in full flourish, complete with girls, bondage and a total absence of ambiguity about what “when you wanna come” and “when you wanna suck it to it” might mean. Compared to the stolidity of Paul Young or the Thompson Twins it was remarkably strong stuff for a teatime audience, but it generated enough interest in the group and the single – in combination with the traditionally low level of post-Christmas record sales – to propel “Relax” to number 35 in the first chart of 1984; into the Top 40 and therefore eligible for the racks of Woolworths and TOTP.
7. Cant Come
And then there was the slow realisation and the less-than-slow reactionism. In those days the Top 40 was issued on Tuesday lunchtime, and Radio 1, keen to exploit the chart’s centrality to the station’s existence, ran it thrice; live on the Tuesday lunchtime show, then again on Tuesday teatime (Peter Powell casting a more critical eye on the list) and lastly on Mike Read’s breakfast show on Wednesday morning. Despite having played it regularly and enthusiastically for the best part of two months, while counting down the Top 40 on the morning of Wednesday 4 January, Read suddenly experienced a Damascean revelation, realised what “Relax” was actually about (as though the single cover alone couldn’t have given it away), spluttered some disgusted outrage and refused to play it. Initially Read went it alone in this regard, but over the next few days Radio 1 opted to ban it from the station altogether. However, their TOTP performance had already been recorded, and it went out on that Thursday’s programme – there were no girls or bondage, but the impact remained murderously explosive and revelatory. Whipped up (so to speak) by the inevitable press brouhaha, “Relax” was suddenly on a roll; in the following week’s chart it had leapt to number six (I note incidentally that Channel 4 were at the time running the first properly networked rerun of The Prisoner on British television). The next week it was at number two behind “Pipes Of Peace,” and there was a repeat of the “God Save The Queen” frisson – would The Powers That Were conspire to keep it off the top? But that was not to be; on the day before my twentieth birthday “Relax” became an unqualified number one, reportedly outselling the rest of that week’s Top 20 combined. The silence on the various Top 40 shows and on TOTP was deafening and profound.
8. Radio One Cant…Or Could They?
By the beginning of 1984 Radio 1 were in an embarrassing position; explicitly set up in 1967 to cater for the teenage fans of the then newly-outlawed pirate radio, they had now settled into a junior cardigan version of Radio 2, and their controller of the time, Derek Chinnery, was keen to push Radio 1 to an even more upmarket – and more middle-aged, and certainly richer – audience. In an interview conducted with the Slow Dazzle fanzine in 1984, Peel complained bitterly about having his four weekly evening shows cut to three, and quoted Chinnery as saying that Peel’s show was fit only for hoodlums and undesirables. It’s a wonder that he stayed with Radio 1, but he did; meanwhile, as the new wave of pirate radio began to explode in London, highlighting the soul, rap and electro music which mainstream radio was still strenuously avoiding – the young Tim Westwood being among the broadcasters in question – the BBC’s hat continued to look progressively older and shabbier. In that same interview, Peel also cited Chinnery’s desire to cater for “young professionals in the car on their way home from the theatre or to the restaurant who want to listen to something familiar like…Kenny Rogers.” Thus, to a degree, the preponderance of dreary, nullifying MoR in the charts of the period. It seemed that everything was being neutralised.
9. Come Cant
Of course the BBC were also hoist by their own hypocritical petard with the “Relax” debacle. Nearly all of their daytime DJs indulged in ooh-ing and aah-ing and cor-ing at Page Three models and nudity and comeliness in general; the noxious Steve Wright in particular revelled in “makes you feel like…making love” sub-Barry Whiteisms when spinning the latest Lionel Richie or Al Jarreau hot, hip platter for the valium-stricken housewives who were his core audience. And, as with The Sun, having frothed at the collective mouth, they then proceeded to mock open mouths of outrage when presented with the real thing. Their embarrassment and stupidity were made all the more profound by the fact that commercial radio gleefully continued to play “Relax” – and that was reflected in their relative ratings.
10. Real Thing
Because “Relax” was unavoidably and inevitably the Real Thing; an explicit and gleeful celebration of gay sex. At last, after the decades of coded messages in “Secret Love” or “Have I The Right?” or “You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away,” after an era of New Pop where even Boy George and Marc Almond were obliged to be all coy and ambiguous about their sexuality, here it was, out in the open, unashamed and loud, with its hardcore on-the-beat beat, its pauses and liquid explosions placed for deliberate maximum impact. It took the emerging hi-NRG boom (taking the recent innovations of Bobby “O” and others into account) and made it pop, and nearly every important hi-NRG record to emerge in the Britain of 1984 had to acknowledge either “Relax” and/or “Blue Monday” (even as the dancefloors of such places as Fire Island in Edinburgh were already that summer mutating the hi-NRG template in tandem with this strange new electronic music that was beginning to emerge from Chicago).
11. Glad
Tom Robinson had made the Top 20 in 1978 with “Glad To Be Gay” but a typically timid EMI hid it away as part of an EP and another track, the straightforward rocker “Don’t Take No For An Answer,” was promoted to and played on radio as the assumed lead track. But, as I said, after “Relax” there could be no more hiding. By the summer of 1984 leading hi-NRG divas such as Hazell Dean and Evelyn Thomas had crossed over to become chart regulars – and more vitally, the likes of Bronski Beat (politically) and Divine (hardcore-ly) were now getting major hits and opening things up in a way that would have been unthinkable even six months previously.
12. Mess Aesthetics
From its opening Olympian call to arms (in both senses) via its relentlessly doubling drumming to its crucial final pause before the two explosions – the first the loudest Horn had ever sounded, and then the second to soundtrack the actual coming with its quadrupling drumbeat (Holly’s murmur, Rutherford’s “HEY!” and then BANG!!), closed by Holly’s satisfied, triumphant, echoing purr of “COME!” “Relax” sounded and still sounds magnificent and magisterial, especially when you couldn’t hear it on the chart rundown; excluded perhaps less on account of scandal than for fear of shaming its rightly-humbled contemporaries, including “Doctor, Doctor,” “Radio Ga-Ga,” “Wouldn’t It Be Good?,” “That’s Livin’ Alright (Theme From Auf Wiedersehn Pet),” “What Is Love?” (Jones famously rhyming “anyway” with “anyway”), “Break My Stride” and too many others – its only worthy competition was “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” in its way of cheerful garish even more subversive than “Relax” (it should be noted that both Cyndi Lauper and Madonna made their UK chart debuts in the same week of January 1984). It is clear that Horn pulled out that extra ounce of forthright power with a purposive view to making “Relax” the unanswerable answer to the New Pop crisis. This was the record everybody had to beat…including, eventually, Horn and Frankie themselves…and, as Morley later commented in one of his innumerable Frankie ad campaigns, they made the rest of pop appear small and petty (“Makes Big Country look like a back garden in St Helens”).
13. The Killing, Or Rebirthing, Of Pop
And yet, if “Relax” was the saviour of pop, it also dealt the notion of the pop single its fatal blow. Rarely satisfied with final mixes, and taking a direct lead from Brian Wilson in this respect, Horn endlessly tinkered with the mix of “Relax” so that the version which appears on Now That’s What I Call Music Vol 2 is different from that which eventually appeared on Welcome To The Pleasuredome is different from the version which appears on the cassette single is different from the endless remixes which now seeped out from Sarm West Studios. Above even the controversy – and how exactly did ZTT manage to set up and publish a “BANNED” advert in the music press less than a week after Read’s ban, in those pre-computer days? – it was the remixes which helped “Relax” towards its record-breaking unbroken 37-week run on the Top 40 (in the Top 75 it managed the full 52 weeks of its year, and even then, just like “Blue Monday,” it, as it would be, came back for more); every time it seemed on the verge of slipping out of the chart, BANG! would come a new mix, and it would guiltily, or proudly, slope its way upwards again. This eventually meant that no one has really been able to agree on the “definitive” version of “Relax” and thus the abandonment of the concept of the self-contained, three-minute “definitive” single was set in motion. This had of course been on the cards since “Good Vibrations” and “Strawberry Fields,” but the advent of the 12-inch single in the ‘70s had accelerated evolution, and thus did begin to supersede the need for the “single” as people had known it. Some were quick to dismiss the quick-change “Relax” remixes as cynical cashing-in, but in the long term it heralded the slow passing of something hitherto considered vital to pop; now everything was in floatation, amenable to amendments and, ultimately, whatever shape its individual listeners wanted it to assume. Thus, perhaps, did New Pop go on to win at least part of the war. How other parts of it were fought – and to what effect – well, I’ll get onto that (ooer) presently.
I was on a photo shoot with a photographer (English bloke living in NYC) recently and we got talking about music and he told me he used to be in Anne Pigalle’s band back in the 80s. If I’d remembered she was on ZTT I’d have pumped him for some gossip on Horn and Morley.
Excellent post MC.
Marcello #85 – great stuff as always, but both Will and I upthread remembered it as being the following week, which would have been 11 January, when Mike Read took the needle off the record – i.e. the week it went from 35 to 6. It’s an important point (insofar as any of this is important!) in the question of whether it was heading for number one anyway. I’m pretty sure the furore blew up while I was at RHC, and term wouldn’t have started as early as the 4th. Can you verify the date you quote in section 7?
In a way when Read banned the record wouldn’t have made a huge difference, because if it was indeed 4 Jan, it was only the day before the transmission of their (already recorded*) TOTP performance, and I imagine it was that performance that propelled the record from 35-6.
At this point, TOTP performances – particularly debut performances from striking acts (Musical Youth, Culture Club, etc) – still retained the ability to dramatically impact a record’s sales.
For most of the watching public on 5 Jan, this would have been their first exposure to FGTH
* Actually, I always thought TOTP performances were recorded on the day before tx, i.e. the Wednesday (so Frankie would have been arriving to record their debut TOTP about an hour after Read pulled the plug on the record, if that was the timeline)
You thought right, TOTP was recorded on the Wednesday.
#87 – as I recall it was definitely the first chart after the hols and “Relax” was the highest new entry within the 40 at 35 and that’s when he spluttered; I was in the bathroom showering and listening to him on my old-school transistor and I too spluttered. The TOTP performance went ahead because a blanket ban hadn’t yet been imposed (and also probably because it was too late to change the programme’s schedule/get in a substitute act) but by the time it leapt to #6 the following week no one on the station was playing it. Admittedly we are now talking over a quarter of a century ago but the memory has stuck with me.
NME Watch: 5 November 1983. Out of touch old-timer Charles Shaar Murray is unconvinced – Move over, grandad!;
“I played the B-side of this first by mistake, and found a dubbed-up interview with the band in which they explain how they decided to work with each other and then recount their recording history. “It’s not that exciting a story, really”, says one of them. I agreed with him heartily and played the A-side anyway. Basically a chant over the rhythmic vibration of the very latest digital kitchen sinks, ‘Relax’ is the subject of an ad campaign which requests that one requires 19 inches to comprehend the music fully. Having only been issued with seven, I eventually made do with about three. Presumably the band who converse so fascinatingly on the B-side are present somewhere in all of the general Hornery of the A-side. As ever, I await further enlightenment.”
CSM awarded a joint single of the week to ‘Lifeboat Party’ by Kid Creole & The Coconuts and Eurythmics’ ‘Right By Your Side’. Also reviewed;
Ian Dury – Really Glad You Came
The Style Council – A Solid Bond In Your Heart
The Rolling Stones – Undercover Of The Night
JoBoxers – She’s Got Sex
Bob Dylan – Union Breakdown
The Assembly – Never Never
The Cure – The Love Cats
Genesis – That’s All
Yello – Lost Again
Captain Sensible – I’m A Spider
Death Cult – God’s Zoo
Absolute crap. Aggressive bass-heavy monotone thumping, overblown sound effects, pub rock turned camp, the triumph of marketing, t-shirts, slogans, computer games, and the musical forebears of Milli Vanilli. No more than a more bigged-up Sigue Sigue Sputnik. My goodness the grimness of shiny facile materialism of the mid-80s was fully upon us. And how horrid it was.
Warranted hero of good things past Trevor Horn turned to zero.
ZTT did much better (Snobbery and Decay!); hell, Holly Johnson did better solo, just about (Heaven’s Here, Heaven’s Here)
1984 was when pop turned bad again. Frankie says…buy all the dross, and the public shamefully submits, as they often do before well-marketed dross.
This week the second (and arguably the better of the brace) single from ABC’s criminally underrated “Beauty Stab”, “SOS” enjoyed its one week in the top 40, at number 39.
And later in the year, much later, something far more genuinely experimental with electronics and technology, and far more enjoyable and….well just musical, really, their “(How to be A) Millionaire”….stiffed, if you will excuse the expression in the context of this crude and grotesque piece of japery – had Frankie never heard of the expression “too much information”, with two weeks at a lowly number 49.
I fear that I can only give this song another one out of ten, the same that I gave to the very very different number it replaced at the top. Not a good start to the year. But I suppose it was bleak year in many ways, in the real world as well as the world of the charts.
#42 – The essential paradox of being 11. Perfectly put!
#46 – So the future Father Jack was on the same show as Frankie? Seems somehow fitting. DRINK! FECK! RELAX! HUH!
#85 – Hard not to fanboyw?!nk over that post, but still: HUH!
Interesting to read through these comments. Much of what I’d want to say about Relax has already been said by others (8/10 feels about right to me). One point that hasn’t been fully addresed, however, was just how truly God-like Trevor Horn was already seeming at this point (esp. if you were in a band or knew people in bands). Yes’s Horn-hyper-produced Owner of a Lonely Heart was a surprise #1 for a couple of weeks in the US in Jan 1984. Even though Yes were has-beens compared to Frankie, their scoring a #1 with a record with a full selection of Art of Noise bonkers bits in it, and with a completely mad, Bertolucci-esque video by the late Peter Christopherson from Throbbing Gristle and Coil (gotta believe that the art of noise and ztt brains trusts must have had some input into getting Christpherson that job!) is almost as amazing as breaking Frankie. Yes’s follow-up single ‘Leave it’ in March 1984 (again with a nifty high concept vid. that no one has ever forgotten) was also a kind of production landmark – the track for which the phrase ‘Fairlighted up the wazoo’ might have been coigned! Both of these records seemed to me at the time to set the table for Prince’s various very weird-sounding but also instantly classic records later in the year. Anyhow, I mention all this in part just to get across that, even without Frankie, at this point Horn was the hottest producer on the planet. Then Relax went nuclear with a good-old-fashioned banning and tabloid dust-up… well, you could only wonder what might come next… Taking either Relax or Owner of a Lonely Heart as its kick-off, then, 1984 was a year of intense, massive-sounding hits that in some respects haven’t been equaled or surpassed since for their general weirdness and impact. Both Frankie’s three #1′s and Prince’s three big Purple Rain hits (2 #1′s and a #2 in the US) feel like truly incredible pop events to me now – as far out as the charts go.
92, Chelovek na lune – I think you are pretty much spot on there, with regards to Frankie, 1984 and the excellent “Beauty Stab”.
I find the whole Frankie sound really unpleasant and ugly somehow.
Agree fervently about Beauty Stab – one of the sanest and deepest commentaries on eighties Britain, especially its second side (the backing vocals on “S.O.S.,” by the way, were provided by FGTH) – and How To Be A Zillionaire which pre-empted in both style and content the group responsible for a possible Phantom Popular entry from later in 1990 (significantly the latter did much better in the States than here).
“From Land’s End to John o’ Groats…” That final track from Beauty Stab is a ripper and should have become a standard… Maybe the return of tough times and tories will see it re-discovered.
As I noted way above, this song’s uneasiness, ugliness and TMI are all job-well-done rather than flaws of execution — it isn’t intending to get everyone to love it
Reading upthread about the most sampled drum break ever @60…I’d have to counter with The Winstons’ “Amen Brother”, more commonly known as the “Amen Break”. There’s an interesting piece on it here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SaFTm2bcac
Ironically, his explanation of the origins of the Amen is recorded on a dubplate.
Isn’t the most sampled break ever “Funky Drummer” by James Brown? A quick google around leaves me none the wiser (except that it’s either the Amen Break, Funky Drummer or The Honeydrippers dependent on which web page you read) – so this is a genuine question, if anyone has an answer.
So, the claim is that that the kick/bass drum in Relax is the kick drum from When the Levee Breaks? That may be so, but I can’t hear it, certainly not in anything like the way I can when WtLB’s drums are sampled in Beastie Boys’ Sabotage and elsewhere in hip-hop. Frankie’s kick is powerful but also very dry/not at all echoey, right? whereas WtLB’s kick is *the* ultimate recorded-in-a-big-room echoey pulse. Horn and his techs may have used a sliver of a WtLB’s bass drum beat, i.e., just it’s attack really, attack to spice up the drum machine sound they had is my guess. At any rate, under no circumstances would I consider Relax’s kick the sample of a drum break (the Beasties and others sample the whole WtLB break the way everyone does funky drummer, ashley’s roach-clip, et al.).
Going back to this after remembering that Nasty Rox Inc’s “Ca$h” album makes full use of WtLB’s break, most notably on “Wubba Wubbaa II”. Ironic then, that NRI were signed to ZTT probably at the twilight of the label’s illumination of the pop landscape. And who were they, this Nasty Rox Inc? Step forward CJ Bolland and Dave Dorrell. I’m willing to wager that Horn/Lipson/Dudley contributed to the sound and feel of that album behind the mixing desk as well.