We spent the next four or five hours working up this quite complex arrangement of the tune. “There were four or five of us in the control room, nobody from Frankie, unfortunately, and Locked in SARM Studios with guitarist Steve Lipson, keyboardist Andy Richards and banks of samplers and sequencers, Trevor’s fourth and final version of Relax came to fruition in one, inspiration-filled night. It was a case of ‘let’s have one more go.’”įrankie Goes To Hollywood: Welcome To The Pleasuredome Relax video Then I realised we’d been wasting our time and started from scratch. I tried with the band, I tried with Ian Dury’s band The Blockheads I tried getting them to play it. “But I just didn’t know how to make the record out of it, and we tried. “I thought Holly’s voice on the track was really good,” Horn said. After repeated attempts to get it right, it was the fourth version that everyone was finally happy with. With the foundation of a great song in raw form, it was left to Horn to transform Relax into the chart-friendly monster it became. It was like a jingle – obviously about sex.” So the band couldn’t play – the bass player and the drummer were good, the singer was brilliant, and the track was great, but it was an unusual track. “When we signed the band they never told me that the guitar player that they had couldn’t play – the guy that had played on the demos had left to go into plumbing. “It sounded terrible when they played it – they couldn’t play it in time,” Horn said in 2014. Though he was producing an album for Foreigner at the time, he took a break from it to produce Relax. Realising the potential of Relax, Horn knew it was the obvious choice for the first single – it just needed some work. “Our lawyer told us that the contract was crap, but it was the only crap on the table and, despite the poor deal, we would get to work with Trevor Horn.” “We were left with the choice of going back to Liverpool and regrouping for another assault, or taking the contract that was on the table. “Although the 80’s were seen as liberated times there were still a lot of people who had no time for homosexuals, let alone ones running around in leather knickers and thigh pads. “Our manager had been to see a lot of labels and, although some were interested, I don’t think they fancied wrestling with a band with two openly gay singers. “We signed to them because they were the only label that was interested in the band,” Brian Nash told Penny Black Music in 2012. Frankie were secured as the label’s first signing.įrankie Goes To Hollywood: Welcome To The Pleasuredome Two Tribes video Having formed in 1980 at Liverpool’s Bridewell Centre – a former police station used as rehearsal spaces by the city’s countless fledgling bands – Frankie Goes To Hollywood (named after a newspaper headline depicting Frank Sinatra’s migration to La La Land) went through a number of line-up changes comprising figures from Liverpool’s punk scene before settling on Holly Johnson, Peter ‘Ped’ Gill, Mark O’Toole and Brian ‘Nasher’ Nash with Paul Rutherford completing the group.Īfter establishing a solid live reputation and playing at venues such as The Warehouse in Leeds and Liverpool’s mecca for untapped local talent, Eric’s, they landed a John Peel session where they played the majority of the tracks that made up their live set and the demo tape they’d been shopping round labels to little interest.Ī controversial performance of Relax on The Tube in February 1983 (for which they wore S&M fetish gear and were accompanied by two PVC-clad females who dubbed themselves The Leatherpettes) proved a major turning point, landing them features in NME, a second John Peel session and most significantly, brought them to the attention of producer Trevor Horn, who had just founded the ZTT label with his wife Jill Sinclair and journalist Paul Morley. Mark Lindores looks back at Frankie Goes To Hollywood: Welcome To The Pleasuredome, a double album that sold a quarter of a million copies in its first week… Frankie Goes To Hollywood: Welcome To The Pleasuredome album coverĮ xploding onto the music scene in late 1983 amid a wave of controversy not seen since the filth and the fury of the Sex Pistols fuelled them to infamy six years earlier, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, a masterclass in marketing with an arsenal of killer tunes, dominated the musical landscape during a year-long reign before imploding in as grandiose a style as they had arrived – but not before they delivered a trilogy of the decade’s defining hits.
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