Yet the conditions under which Frankie’s records were made couldn’t have been further from punk’s spirit. Far from “doing it yourself,” the band ended up excluded from the recording process by their producer. “Relax” displayed Horn’s maniacal perfectionism and his willingness to disregard the musicians he was supposedly working with and for. He quickly came to see Frankie as an obstacle to his vision. In the studio, overawed and intimidated by Horn’s reputation, the band was too nervous to make suggestions. In his autobiography, A Bone in My Flute, Johnson admitted, “Whatever he said we went along with. On one occasion, Trevor said to me that he had considered sacking the musicians from the band, leaving just Paul and me to front the act.” After an abortive attempt to get the Lads to play to his satisfaction, Horn hired the Blockheads, the accomplished funkateers who’d once backed Ian Dury, but the results weren’t modern sounding enough. Eventually, a high-tech version of “Relax” was constructed with the rhythm programming assistance of Art of Noise’s Jeczalik and keyboard work from session player Andy Richards. Apart from Johnson, the band twiddled their thumbs in Liverpool while the definitive version of “Relax” was made at Horn’s West London studio. “I was just…Look, ‘Relax’ had to be a hit,” says Horn with a mixture of self-justification and guilt. In the end, the sole sonic contributions from the band, besides Johnson’s vocals, were samples of the group jumping in a swimming pool. Yet Horn later admitted, “I could never have done these records in isolation. There was no actual playing by the band, but the whole feeling came from the band.”
“Relax” sounded colossal, as well it should have after Horn had lavished £70,000 in studio time on it. But Horn claims that its monumental quality owed less to his production tricks than the key it was played in and the instrumentation used. “‘Relax’ is perfect because it’s in E,” he says. “The most satisfying note on the bass guitar is bottom E and that’s what’s running through the whole song.” Technology did play its part, though. A new device enabled Horn to lock the Fairlight-sampled bass pulse in superhumanly tight synchrony with the four-on-the-floor Linn drum machine. The pumping bass and pounding kick drum fuse in a love action of thrust and grind. In his memoir, Johnson describes how “Relax” merged “rock edge” with the Hi-NRG disco that ruled gay clubs in the early eighties. DJ/producer Ian Levine, the pioneer of this sound, defined Hi-NRG as “melodic, straightforward dance music that’s not too funky.” The nonfunkiness was crucial. Slamming rather than swinging, Hi-NRG’s white European feel was accentuated by butt-bumping bass twangs at the end of each bar.
“Relax” tapped into Hi-NRG’s remorseless metronomic precision and orgiastic vibe. “As we were making ‘Relax,’ I became more and more convinced it was all about sex,” recalls Horn. “It was like a shagging beat. Also the more I met the guys, I thought it was about sex. They were obsessed with it. By the end we were thinking of giant orgasms.” Horn filled the record with “imaginary mayhem,” synth whooshes, gasps and exhalations. The whole song is suffused with a preorgasmic glow. Two-thirds of the way through, “Relax” ignores its own advice—“Relax, don’t do it/When you want to come”—and erupts with a crass but hilariously liquid simulated ejaculation. The spasming drumroll at the end of the single feels like an amyl rush. The protracted and abstract “Sex Mix” was even more blatant with its rubbery squelches, bathhouse splashes, boystown gang chants, slurping sounds, and Holly leerily slurring stray words such as “awesome” and “feel.” Ironically, the song’s original concept was “If you wanna get on top of a situation, you’ve gotta work hard to do it,” Johnson told the East Village Eye. “The sexual innuendo was put upon it later.”
Despite all the “sex,” “Relax” was sexy only in the exhibitionist sense of the Amsterdam leather bars Johnson visited, where the sex acts had an element of “theatre and performance” he enjoyed. “Relax” was driven by something far stronger than sensuality: the idea of sex as weapon, shock tactic, threat. “Relax” didn’t offer flesh or delight, it reveled in the word, in saying the unsayable. The specific word in question was “come.” If “Relax” was “about” anything, it appeared to be delaying orgasm, or oral sex, or both. Strangely, the moral guardians at the BBC nearly failed to notice the song’s suggestiveness. Radio One supported “Relax” heavily in the weeks following its October 1983 release. It slowly inched its way up the charts until the group was invited to appear on Top of the Pops in January 1984, whereupon “Relax” vaulted up to number six. Absurdly, it was only after having made it a hit that Radio One decreed the single unfit for broadcast after a DJ noticed its obscene overtones and refused to play it on his show. Within two weeks of the ban, “Relax” reached number one, where it stayed for five weeks, its long reign at the top only bolstered when Top of the Pops and BBC Television also banned it.
The only surprising thing about the ban was how long it took to, ah, come. Morley had courted scandal from the start. ZTT’s ad campaign for “Relax” began with two quarter-page ads in the music press. The first featured a mustachioed and grinning Rutherford in a sailor hat, shades, and leather tunic. The second presented Johnson as a sinister, unsmiling sex dwarf, with a shaven head and rubber gloves. “ALL THE NICE BOYS LOVE SEA MEN,” declared the first ad, “Soap it up…rub it up…Frankie Goes to Hollywood are coming…making Duran Duran lick the shit off their shoes…Nineteen inches that must be taken always.” The second ad promised “theories of bliss, a history of Liverpool from 1963 to 1983, a guide to Amsterdam bars,” and a vision that would “grip especially those who are at home in the giant cities and in the web of their numberless interconnecting relationships.” The single’s artwork laid it on thicker still. A photo on the back cover showed a hand tugging cruelly on the ring piercing a male nipple. Elsewhere there was a cute little logo of four wriggly-tailed spermatozoa. Divided into “chapters,” the sleeve notes kicked off with the invitation, “Let’s go down the hall to the disciplining room” and included a scene in which the “monster” Frankie orders his sexual vassal Peta to “get down there and lick that shit off my shoes!” Says Morley, “I rang up Holly and said, ‘Look I’m going to put an abbreviated pornographic novel on the back of the twelve-inch, is that okay?’ And Holly went, ‘Yeah, all right.’”
Along with the avant-porn pantheon (de Sade, Genet, Bataille, Burroughs), Morley doubtless got some inspiration from Taxi Zum Klo (Taxi to the Toilet), Frank Ripploh’s recent movie about German gay life, which featured unprecedentedly graphic scenes of cottaging and water sports. D.A.F., the leather-clad Düsseldorf duo, were also Morley favorites. In NME he’d praised their Alles Ist Gut as “slimy, steamy sex music,” a hard electrodisco evocation of “the rubbing, juices, pounding, striving, belching, stickiness…the smells, the rhythms, the passions, the secretions, the darkness, the tears of S.E.X.,” and framed the review with quotes from D. H. Lawrence and radical antipsychiatrist David Cooper. The whole Frankie escapade gave off a powerful whiff of sixties-style sex radicalism (Herbert Marcuse, Norman O. Brown et al.). One could see Frankie as a last spurt of that style of libertinism that saw the libido as inherently revolutionary, before a revitalized Thanatos (in the form of AIDS) imposed limits on Eros.
Simply through demanding “satisfaction” (orgasm), all sixties pop music had a powerful insurrectionary charge. But during the permissive seventies, heterosex gradually lost its edge. The only frissons came from the glam star’s flirtations with decadence and gender-bending. Pop’s forays into homosexuality had been tentative and teasing so far. Frankie were a full-on glimpse of a world where anything was permitted in the quest for kicks and cocks. While you didn’t actually see fisting or S&M, the video for “Relax” was orgiastic. Directed by Bernard Rose, it depicts Holly Johnson as a naïf in the big city who stumbles into a gay pleasure dome. There, a Nero-like fatso presides over scenes of Roman-style decadence. With Rutherford as his guide, Holly’s innocence gets debauched and he’s last seen in the sticky midst of a frotting gang grope.
INTO BATTLE WITH THE
ART OF NOISE had minimal impact in Britain, but in America “Beat Box” became a popular track with breakdancers. Because most Americans knew nothing of ZTT’s reputation, the Art of Noise were often assumed to be a black group (indeed their music would eventually become one of the most popular sources for sampling, alongside Kraftwerk, James Brown, and Parliament-Funkadelic). Inspired by this B-boy reception, which proved that their cut-up aesthetic could cut it on the dance floor, the Art of Noise reworked the track as the single “Beat Box (Diversions One)” b/w “Beat Box (Diversions Two).” The remakes featured a rambling rock ’n’ roll bassline and dashing tremolo guitar licks redolent of Duane Eddy, as if to place the Art of Noise in that noble if marginal tradition of instrumental pop hit makers such as the Ventures.
With that tune, the Art of Noise now joined the pantheon. First, they reached number one on the Billboard dance chart (even as “Relax” reigned over the U.K. pop chart). Then “Beat Box” spawned yet another dance floor smash with the closely related single “Close (To the Edit).” “It’s not called ‘Close (To the Edit)’ for nothing, because you could more or less stitch any bit of ‘Close’ into ‘Beat Box’ and it would still sound like one piece,” laughs Anne Dudley. “I can’t actually remember where ‘Beat Box’ ended and ‘Close’ began because at one point they were one track.” The single reached number eight on the U.K. pop chart, helped by a brilliantly surreal video directed by Zbigniew Rybczynski, which also garnered steady play on MTV in the United States. The video’s most striking image—a prepubescent punkette dismembering a piano with a chain saw—made for a witty visual emblem for the Art of Noise’s updated version of musique concrète’s slice-and-dice methods.
Foregrounding what Dudley calls the music’s “disjointed wondrousness,” the title also twists Yes’s Close to the Edge to make an encrypted nod to the thunderous Alan White drum break underpinning both “Beat Box” and “Close.” You can also hear “Close” as an homage to Kraftwerk and their Autobahn-era notion of the car as a musical instrument. The track begins with an engine starting, and a motor revving is developed into a melodic motif.
The success of the Art of Noise was another triumph for a seemingly unstoppable ZTT, but Trevor Horn wasn’t exactly feeling relaxed. In fact, he was so nervous about Frankie being just a one-hit wonder that he spent three months fine-tuning the follow-up to “Relax,” “Two Tribes,” building and discarding versions of the single. Horn inflated Frankie’s energetic but emaciated funk-metal ditty into an epic surge somewhere between Chic and Rush. Over an adrenalin-pumping bass pummel, swashbuckling guitars flash like the scimitars of jihad cavalry charging an infidel city. Featuring approximately nine lines of lyric, “Two Tribes” is even more jinglelike than “Relax.” As antiwar polemic goes, the chorus, “When two tribes go to war/A point is all that you can score,” is pretty trite, but Horn’s supercharged production makes “Two Tribes” sound almost as momentous as its theme of nuclear doomsday.
It’s the ancillary paraphernalia orchestrated by Morley that really made “Two Tribes” an event. In 1984, the cold war was in its final phase, before Gorbachev and glasnost. Soviet commander in chief Chernenko was a politburo hard-liner, while Reagan seemed scarily sincere when he described the Soviet Union as the Evil Empire. For the twelve-inch “Annihilation Mix” of “Two Tribes,” impressionist Christopher Barrie impersonated the U.S. president uttering absurdities such as “Just think: War breaks out and nobody turns up.” ZTT also hired actor Patrick Allen, the reassuring paternal voice of Protect and Survive (a record made by the British government to be played on the radio just before a nuclear attack), to repeat some of his chilling advice, such as “If your grandmother or any other member of the family should die whilst in the shelter, put them outside, but remember to tag them first for identification purposes.”
Morley caked the record sleeves for “Two Tribes”—which, like “Relax,” came in numerous mixes—in cold war facts and figures, including a sleeve note about alcoholism in the Soviet army, a table contrasting the superpowers’ nuclear arsenals, and a chart displaying the number of deaths (in tens of millions) caused by the diverse aftereffects of a five-thousand-megaton war (ranging from toxic gases and nuclear winter to epidemics, famines, and psychiatric disorders). The video featured Frankie as a TV news crew on the sidelines of a no-holds-barred wrestling match between Reagan and Chernenko look-alikes, complete with knees in the groin and ear biting. The pièce de resistance, though, was Morley’s T-shirt campaign, openly modeled on Katharine Hamnett’s agitprop T-shirts that boasted slogans such as WORLD NUCLEAR BAN NOW and CHOOSE LIFE. Morley’s FRANKIE SAY…series swept the nation with variations such as FRANKIE SAY BOMB IS A FOUR LETTER WORD and FRANKIE SAY ARM THE UNEMPLOYED, inevitably inspiring answer T-shirts such as WHO GIVES A FUCK WHAT FRANKIE SAY.
Combining savage satire and sheer informative clout, “Two Tribes” ought to have been the ultimate protest record. Yet that intent was undercut by the whole feel of the record, which seems to exult in the prospect of apocalypse. “It’s not political,” Holly Johnson said. “It sounds glorious, I think.” The key to “Two Tribes” is the bursting euphoria with which Johnson sings the kiss-off line, “Are we living in a land where sex and horror are the new gods?” It’s Eros versus Thanatos again, the apocalyptic notion that anything goes in the decadent Last Days, that living like there’s no tomorrow is the logical response to a world in which nuclear annihilation constantly hangs over our heads. Like Prince’s “1999” with its “we could all die any day” call to party, “Two Tribes” sounds like celebration, which is why it’s nowhere near as effectively antiwar as UB40’s chilling “The Earth Dies Screaming” or Kate Bush’s “Breathing,” which actually took the listener inside the airless claustrophobia of the family fallout shelter as recommended by Protect and Survive.
“Two Tribes” entered the U.K. charts at number one on June 4 of 1984 and, stoked by innumerable remixes, stayed there for nine weeks. Amazingly, “Relax” surged back up the charts and for one week nestled at number two beneath “Two Tribes.” With the fourth (“Relax”) and eleventh (“Two Tribes”) best-selling U.K. singles of all time (back then, at least) under their belt, Frankie were now the biggest British pop group of the eighties, and a total vindication of ZTT’s media manipulation strategy. “In a stupid sense, the fantasy I had as an NME journalist about New Pop, it came true with me,” says Morley. “So there was a glorious narrative purity to it.”
When “The Power of Love” became their third number one in a row in December 1984, the conceptual arc of the Frankie singles was complete. Following sex and war, the big theme this time was religion, or redemption, or love as salvation. Something like that, anyway. “The Power of Love” also represented a kind of staged sellout, as if “narrative purity” demanded that Frankie relapse into mere showbiz, like all rebels eventually do. Holly crooned cabaret-style about “A force from above/Cleaning my soul,” a string section soared, Anne Dudley piled on the grand piano. All in all, it was a bit tacky. A blatant bid for the Christmas number one, “The Power of Love” was ousted from the top spot after just one week by Band Aid’s all-star African famine charity record “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”
Why not end it there as a conceptual coup, three number one hits that each addressed one of the grandest themes imaginable? “My plan, which was the height of naïveté and yet the height of sophistication, was to do ‘Power of Love,’ then sell Frankie for five million to someone like CBS,” says Morley. But by this point Frankiemania had developed its own fatal logic. There had to be an album, and it had to be a double. Welcome to the Pleasuredome cost just under £400,000 and took Trevor Horn’s cinemascope production to new peaks of opulence. “The world is my oyster,” gloats Johnson on the side-long title track, just before mangling Coleridge with the cry “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a pleasuredome EEEEEE-RECT.” Essentially “Relax” at a more regal tempo, “Welcome to the Pleasuredome” evokes a vague quest for glory, a wild life of thrill seeking
and rapacious desire. After side two (the singles) and side three (mostly cover versions), Pleasuredome begins to flag seriously as it gets to the Frankie compositions. “Krisco Kisses” took its name from Crisco, the cooking fat widely used as a long-lasting sexual lubricant in pre-AIDS days, but the tune sounds as hamfisted as Iron Maiden trampling their way through the stage backdrops of The Lexicon of Love. By “Black Night White Light” and “The Only Star in Heaven,” Johnson’s limited lyrical range is revealed with lines such as “Live life like a diamond ring” and “The pleasure seekers are dying to meet ya/They need young blood.” Worse, you can hear Horn’s enthusiasm for the project audibly draining away.
Pleasuredome’s packaging was sumptuous, of course, and strewn with great jokes, from the inner sleeve’s ad for ZTT merchandise (Rutherford and Propaganda vocalist Claudia Brucken modeling The Jean Genet boxer shorts, The Sophisticated Virginia Woolf vest, The Andre Gide socks, and The Edith Sitwell bag for life’s little luxuries) to the back cover’s Picasso-style canvas depicting an orgy of satyrlike beasts (follow some of the long winding tongues and they end up at some other animal’s puckered anus). But as a banquet stuffed with aphrodisiac fare, Frankie’s double album is ultimately a turnoff. Rampant hedonism never sounded so tedious. Advance orders for Pleasuredome were staggering, in excess of one million in the U.K. alone, but as word spread, the copies didn’t exactly fly out of the stores.
Rip It Up and Start Again Page 54