24
Jul 09
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
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.
Struck me that I haven’t posted a link to my TPL post on Now II, which can be found here. Observant readers will note that I have minimally remixed my above comments on “Relax” and incorporated them into the piece. I am likely to do the same with their other two number ones but tbh this is a standard TPL practice of mine insofar as (a) if the writing’s good enough, it can stand recycling and (b) putting it in a different (but parallel) frame gives the writing a new context and also reminds people that it was written, thereby saving it from becoming forgotten. I suppose the challenge to me really is whether I feel the same about a piece of music several years after writing about it, and if not I can change the writing about quite radically. This applies to some number ones but by no means to all of them.
Mike Reid, perhaps the definition of a Situationist prank.. ;)
“FREE SECONDS TO RUNARAHHHND!!!”
Mike Read, on the other hand, …
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Hra8IP07Zg
Mike Reid when he was bit more urban and gritty
READ!
oh never mind…
#106 – Obligatory companion-piece – https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=ELKb-lcW4e0#t=71
Critic watch:
1,001 Songs You Must Hear Before You Die, and 10,001 You Must Download (2010) 1-1001
Bruce Pollock (USA) – The 7,500 Most Important Songs of 1944-2000 (2005)
Michaelangelo Matos (USA) – Top 100 Singles of the 1980s (2001) 101
NBC-10 (USA) – The 30 Best Songs of the 80s (2006)
OUT (USA) – The 25 Gayest Songs of the 1980s (2011)
Pause & Play (USA) – Songs Inducted into a Time Capsule, One Track at Each Week
Pitchfork (USA) – The Pitchfork 500 (2008)
VH-1 (USA) – Nominations for the 100 Greatest 80s Songs (2006)
Woxy.com (USA) – Modern Rock 500 Songs of All Time (combined rank 1989-2009) 126
BBC (UK) – Pop on Trial, Top 50 Songs from the 1980s (2008)
HarperCollins GEM (UK) – Single of the Year 1949-99 (1999)
Mojo (UK) – The 100 Greatest Singles of All Time (1997) 86
New Musical Express (UK) – NME Rock Years, Single of the Year 1963-99 (2000)
New Musical Express (UK) – The Top 150 Singles of All Time (1987) 123
Q (UK) – 100 Songs That Changed the World (2003) 24
Q (UK) – 50 Years of Great British Music, 10 Tracks per Decade (2008)
Q (UK) – The 1001 Best Songs Ever (2003) 204
Q (UK) – The 1010 Songs You Must Own (2004)
Q (UK) – The 80 Best Records of the 80s (2006) 11
Sounds (UK) – The 100 Best Singles of All Time (1986) 13
The Guardian (UK) – 1000 Songs Everyone Must Hear (2009)
Uncut (UK) – 100 Rock and Movie Icons (2005) 79
Uncut (UK) – The 100 Greatest Singles from the Post-Punk Era (2001) 14
Vox (UK) – 100 Records That Shook the World (1991)
Gilles Verlant and Thomas Caussé (France) – 3000 Rock Classics (2009)
Les Inrockuptibles (France) – 1000 Indispensable Songs (2006)
Toby Creswell (Australia) – 1001 Songs (2005)
Giannis Petridis (Greece) – 2004 of the Best Songs of the Century (2003)
Kerrang! (UK) – Singles of the Year 5
New Musical Express (UK) – Singles of the Year 37
Schlager (Sweden) – Singles of the Year 9
Spex (Germany) – Singles of the Year 1
The success or even the existence of this record has to have been situated on the most tenuous of connections. Horn sees them and the song on The Tube but it’s the Kid Jensen session version that sparks his interest (remember that session? No, neither does anybody but Trevor).
The Mike Read interest in the sleeve artwork is another moment of turning point that a knock on the door from the tea lady could have made a non-happening. There was certainly nothing on the record that had alerted anybody, even when singing along happily.
Most of all, only a bizarre camaraderie between Horn and Morley could make for a high-profile in-yer-face popkid assault upon homophobia (which hadn’t even got a name yet)!
Frankie were some kind of miracle alright. In the annals of ‘manufactured bands’ their milestones are blink and they missed it.