Fact #156343
When:
Short story:
The debut album by Frankie Goes To Hollywood, entitled Welcome To The Pleasuredome, enters the UK chart at No1.
Full article:
FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD - WELCOME TO THE PLEASUREDOME
by Johnny Black
(This feature first appeared in Hi Fi News, February 2010)
It started in jail.
In the spring of 1982, Mark O'Toole, bassist of fast-emerging Liverpool band Frankie Goes To Hollywood, was jamming on a new bass line in The Cells, a disused police station which had become a popular rehearsal space.
Simultaneously, the band's vocalist, Holly Johnson, was bowling along the central reservation of nearby Princess Avenue, fast approaching The Cells, with a saucy little rhyme going round his head that began, "Relax, don't do it…"
Moments later, Holly was singing his rhyme along with Mark's bassline and Relax was born. The song would prove to be the cornerstone on which the Frankies' astounding run of success – three consecutive No1 hits with their first three singles - would be built. It was also the first track recorded for what would become their multi-platinum debut album, Welcome To The Pleasuredome.
Although the Frankies' were creating waves around Liverpool, they were having trouble breaking out of the city. The man who would change all that was Trevor Horn.
Already famed for his work with The Buggles, ABC and Yes, Horn first became aware of The Frankies when he saw them perform Relax on influential tv show The Tube early in 1983. "This video came on with all these women chained up to a wall and a whole load of other kinky stuff going on," he remembers. "Chris Squire (Horn's band mate in Yes) said, 'This band looks really interesting. Why don't you sign them up for your new label?'" Horn and his wife, the entrepreneur Jill Sinclair, had indeed just started a label, which they had named ZTT. (Just so it won't keep you awake tonight, be advised that ZTT is an abbreviation of Zang Tumb Tumb, the title of a sound-poem by Italian Futurist poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti).
Although intrigued by that Tube performance, Horn felt that there were "some obvious faults to the track." By a happy coincidence, however, Horn was tuned in again on March 15, when the band played a slightly amended version of the song on Radio 1's Kid Jensen Show. This time, Horn was bowled over. "Hearing Relax on Jensen, I realized how fantastic the song was," he says.
Unaware that the band, having already been turned down by several labels, was on the brink of splitting up, Horn signed them to ZTT on what Johnson would subsequently describe as, "a very unfair £250 recording advance between the five of us."
Asked what he saw in the track, Horn says, "It was a great combination of rock and Donna Summer dance music, with this Liverpool four-on-the-floor shagging beat that remained the root of the song right through. It was like a radio jingle or a chant, except that Holly sang it like a wild animal. His voice was amazing."
Nevertheless, he still had reservations. "When I met them, even though I immediately liked them and they had all these great ideas, I had doubts about their playing ability."
Horn's dilemma now became how to transform Relax from a million pounds worth of potential into a million pounds in the bank. "I was pretty ruthless in those days," he admits, "so I decided to bring in some better musicians, Ian Dury's backing band, The Blockheads. The idea was to give the Frankies an example of another way to approach the song."
The Blockheads' bass player, Norman Watt-Roy, came up with a descending three-note bass part that Horn loved, and decided to include. Then, ZTT engineer Steve Lipson delivered a guitar part which, says Horn, "somehow caught the spirit of what The Frankies' guitarist, Nasher, had been doing and transformed it."
The other ace up Horn's sleeve was the fact that he was one of only three people in the UK who owned a Fairlight computer synthesiser. At that time, the Fairlight was the state of the art in the cutting edge technique of audio sampling. "I remember playing Holly and Paul a sample on my Fairlight," remembers Horn, "where I'd synced the bass together with a Linn drum beat, and I could see they were very interested in that."
Many bands would have been outraged at the level of direct control Horn was taking of their signature song but The Frankies were huge fans of New York dance music and well understood the potential of the Fairlight in that context. "Trevor did kind of take control," acknowledges the Frankies' second vocalist and dancer Paul Rutherford, "but that's because he knows exactly where he wants to go. He stretches the material every which way, puts in everything but the kitchen sink. That's just the way he works."
Once the backing track was nailed, Holly Johnson stepped up to the mic. "By the time he actually sang the vocal at 4.00am, he was so totally hyped up, he was crazy, like a Doberman with a rabbit in its teeth," remembers Horn.
At the end of the take, Horn felt the vocal was slightly out of tune, but Johnson put him straight. "It was not out of tune," he says. "I was doing little slurs with my voice, using microtones. It was quite deliberate. That 'Ow!' which I do, is my Marc Bolan affectation, with a bit of James Brown thrown in."
Released on October 24, 1983, Relax languished in the lower reaches of the chart for almost six weeks before the band secured a Top Of the Pops appearance at the start of the new year. The following day Relax shifted 54,000 copies, at which point Radio 1 Breakfast Show deejay Mike Read suddenly realized that the lyric was virtually an audio guide to the finer techniques of oral intercourse. Deeply offended, he removed it from his turntable halfway through and declared it obscene. Days later the BBC banned it and before the end of the month Relax was at No1, on its way to an estimated 13m sales worldwide.
ZTT now needed an album to capitalise on the label's runaway first hit but, fortunately, the band had no shortage of songs. "As well as Relax," explains Paul Rutherford, "we'd already written Two Tribes, Welcome To The Pleasuredome, The Only Star In Heaven and Krisco Kisses. War was something we decided to do while we were in the studio, but we were already doing most of it live."
With the album firmly in mind, the first priority was to complete a follow-up to Relax, and the obvious candidate was Two Tribes. "The backbone of the track was a Linn 2 bass drum with a sample of a slapped bass guitar E string going across it," remembers Horn. "Bottom E is very sympathetic to a bass drum and it sounded huge on the radio."
Augmenting the Frankies this time around was arranger Anne Dudley who would subsequently find chart success herself as a member of Art Of Noise. "I orchestrated the opening of Two Tribes. Fairly straightforward," she says. "Trevor said, ‘How many players would you like?’ I said, 'About twenty'. He said, ‘Right, we’ll have forty or fifty or sixty. We want to spend lots of money here.’ So there were clarinets and flutes and French horns and timps."
With work moving ahead on the album, Two Tribes followed Relax into the UK's No1 single slot, aided and abetted by a string of carefully timed re-mixes, a barrage of pithy slogan-bearing t-shirts and an eye-popping Godley And Crème-directed video.
The album's centre-piece, however, was its astonishing title track, with a lyric based on the Coleridge poem Kubla Khan. "It started out as three and a half minutes," says Horn, "but we kept extending it until it was over sixteen minutes long."
Featuring Yes's Steve Howe on guitar, it became an audio epic which Rutherford accurately sums up as, "a Pink Floyd kind of thing but with a modern dance feel to it."
The album also included their third No1, the big ballad The Power Of Love, plus a muscular cover of Springsteen's Born To Run, not to mention Holly Johnson's Sinatra-like re-take of Dionne Warwick's Do You Know the Way To San Jose, demonstrating that the band was capable of much more than disco-rock dance floor fillers.
Welcome To The Pleasuredome, a double album, was released on October 28, 1984, entered the chart at No1. It quickly went triple-platinum and eventually racked up an extraordinary 66 weeks on the chart, so that by the end of 1984 Frankie Goes To Hollywood was the most successful act in all of Europe.
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by Johnny Black
(This feature first appeared in Hi Fi News, February 2010)
It started in jail.
In the spring of 1982, Mark O'Toole, bassist of fast-emerging Liverpool band Frankie Goes To Hollywood, was jamming on a new bass line in The Cells, a disused police station which had become a popular rehearsal space.
Simultaneously, the band's vocalist, Holly Johnson, was bowling along the central reservation of nearby Princess Avenue, fast approaching The Cells, with a saucy little rhyme going round his head that began, "Relax, don't do it…"
Moments later, Holly was singing his rhyme along with Mark's bassline and Relax was born. The song would prove to be the cornerstone on which the Frankies' astounding run of success – three consecutive No1 hits with their first three singles - would be built. It was also the first track recorded for what would become their multi-platinum debut album, Welcome To The Pleasuredome.
Although the Frankies' were creating waves around Liverpool, they were having trouble breaking out of the city. The man who would change all that was Trevor Horn.
Already famed for his work with The Buggles, ABC and Yes, Horn first became aware of The Frankies when he saw them perform Relax on influential tv show The Tube early in 1983. "This video came on with all these women chained up to a wall and a whole load of other kinky stuff going on," he remembers. "Chris Squire (Horn's band mate in Yes) said, 'This band looks really interesting. Why don't you sign them up for your new label?'" Horn and his wife, the entrepreneur Jill Sinclair, had indeed just started a label, which they had named ZTT. (Just so it won't keep you awake tonight, be advised that ZTT is an abbreviation of Zang Tumb Tumb, the title of a sound-poem by Italian Futurist poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti).
Although intrigued by that Tube performance, Horn felt that there were "some obvious faults to the track." By a happy coincidence, however, Horn was tuned in again on March 15, when the band played a slightly amended version of the song on Radio 1's Kid Jensen Show. This time, Horn was bowled over. "Hearing Relax on Jensen, I realized how fantastic the song was," he says.
Unaware that the band, having already been turned down by several labels, was on the brink of splitting up, Horn signed them to ZTT on what Johnson would subsequently describe as, "a very unfair £250 recording advance between the five of us."
Asked what he saw in the track, Horn says, "It was a great combination of rock and Donna Summer dance music, with this Liverpool four-on-the-floor shagging beat that remained the root of the song right through. It was like a radio jingle or a chant, except that Holly sang it like a wild animal. His voice was amazing."
Nevertheless, he still had reservations. "When I met them, even though I immediately liked them and they had all these great ideas, I had doubts about their playing ability."
Horn's dilemma now became how to transform Relax from a million pounds worth of potential into a million pounds in the bank. "I was pretty ruthless in those days," he admits, "so I decided to bring in some better musicians, Ian Dury's backing band, The Blockheads. The idea was to give the Frankies an example of another way to approach the song."
The Blockheads' bass player, Norman Watt-Roy, came up with a descending three-note bass part that Horn loved, and decided to include. Then, ZTT engineer Steve Lipson delivered a guitar part which, says Horn, "somehow caught the spirit of what The Frankies' guitarist, Nasher, had been doing and transformed it."
The other ace up Horn's sleeve was the fact that he was one of only three people in the UK who owned a Fairlight computer synthesiser. At that time, the Fairlight was the state of the art in the cutting edge technique of audio sampling. "I remember playing Holly and Paul a sample on my Fairlight," remembers Horn, "where I'd synced the bass together with a Linn drum beat, and I could see they were very interested in that."
Many bands would have been outraged at the level of direct control Horn was taking of their signature song but The Frankies were huge fans of New York dance music and well understood the potential of the Fairlight in that context. "Trevor did kind of take control," acknowledges the Frankies' second vocalist and dancer Paul Rutherford, "but that's because he knows exactly where he wants to go. He stretches the material every which way, puts in everything but the kitchen sink. That's just the way he works."
Once the backing track was nailed, Holly Johnson stepped up to the mic. "By the time he actually sang the vocal at 4.00am, he was so totally hyped up, he was crazy, like a Doberman with a rabbit in its teeth," remembers Horn.
At the end of the take, Horn felt the vocal was slightly out of tune, but Johnson put him straight. "It was not out of tune," he says. "I was doing little slurs with my voice, using microtones. It was quite deliberate. That 'Ow!' which I do, is my Marc Bolan affectation, with a bit of James Brown thrown in."
Released on October 24, 1983, Relax languished in the lower reaches of the chart for almost six weeks before the band secured a Top Of the Pops appearance at the start of the new year. The following day Relax shifted 54,000 copies, at which point Radio 1 Breakfast Show deejay Mike Read suddenly realized that the lyric was virtually an audio guide to the finer techniques of oral intercourse. Deeply offended, he removed it from his turntable halfway through and declared it obscene. Days later the BBC banned it and before the end of the month Relax was at No1, on its way to an estimated 13m sales worldwide.
ZTT now needed an album to capitalise on the label's runaway first hit but, fortunately, the band had no shortage of songs. "As well as Relax," explains Paul Rutherford, "we'd already written Two Tribes, Welcome To The Pleasuredome, The Only Star In Heaven and Krisco Kisses. War was something we decided to do while we were in the studio, but we were already doing most of it live."
With the album firmly in mind, the first priority was to complete a follow-up to Relax, and the obvious candidate was Two Tribes. "The backbone of the track was a Linn 2 bass drum with a sample of a slapped bass guitar E string going across it," remembers Horn. "Bottom E is very sympathetic to a bass drum and it sounded huge on the radio."
Augmenting the Frankies this time around was arranger Anne Dudley who would subsequently find chart success herself as a member of Art Of Noise. "I orchestrated the opening of Two Tribes. Fairly straightforward," she says. "Trevor said, ‘How many players would you like?’ I said, 'About twenty'. He said, ‘Right, we’ll have forty or fifty or sixty. We want to spend lots of money here.’ So there were clarinets and flutes and French horns and timps."
With work moving ahead on the album, Two Tribes followed Relax into the UK's No1 single slot, aided and abetted by a string of carefully timed re-mixes, a barrage of pithy slogan-bearing t-shirts and an eye-popping Godley And Crème-directed video.
The album's centre-piece, however, was its astonishing title track, with a lyric based on the Coleridge poem Kubla Khan. "It started out as three and a half minutes," says Horn, "but we kept extending it until it was over sixteen minutes long."
Featuring Yes's Steve Howe on guitar, it became an audio epic which Rutherford accurately sums up as, "a Pink Floyd kind of thing but with a modern dance feel to it."
The album also included their third No1, the big ballad The Power Of Love, plus a muscular cover of Springsteen's Born To Run, not to mention Holly Johnson's Sinatra-like re-take of Dionne Warwick's Do You Know the Way To San Jose, demonstrating that the band was capable of much more than disco-rock dance floor fillers.
Welcome To The Pleasuredome, a double album, was released on October 28, 1984, entered the chart at No1. It quickly went triple-platinum and eventually racked up an extraordinary 66 weeks on the chart, so that by the end of 1984 Frankie Goes To Hollywood was the most successful act in all of Europe.