Fact #171007

Holly Johnson (vocalist) : Our manager at the time was Bob Johnson, who had managed Aztec Camera, The Ruts, Billy McKenzie and others. He got us £600 from Arista to make a demo, so we did both Relax and Two Tribes. We also made a very amateur, makeshift video in the Hope and Anchor in London, with girls chained up in skimpy leather outfits, very like our stage act at the time. We sent it to various record labels, but they all found it too outrageous.

Fortuitously, a new tv show, The Tube, liked the look of it, and they came to The State in Liverpool, and re-shot our video in a rather more professional fashion, then showed it on the programme.

Jools Holland (presenter, The Tube) : It was my birthday, and I got horribly drunk. I remember being the first person to say, 'Well, they're not going to get anywhere then.'

Trevor Horn (producer) : This video came on with all these women chained up to a wall and a whole load of other kinky stuff going on. 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?' Jill (Sinclair) and I had just started ZTT but we hadn't signed anyone. I thought they were pretty good even though there were some obvious faults to the track ...

Holly Johnson : That first version which Trevor heard had a very convoluted middle eight which changed the rhythm and the harmony. We simplified it later.

Trevor Horn : I didn't think too much more about them until I heard them again on David Jensen's radio show, doing a BBC session for Relax.

Holly Johnson : By then, we'd been together for ages, and all my mates in Liverpool seemed to be getting famous, and we were going nowhere. We were on a downward trail of death and destruction. If Frankie hadn't taken off, I and the other members of the band could easily have been dragged into the sewer. We were teetering on the edge. I was going to go to art school.

Trevor Horn : Hearing it on Jensen, I realised just how fantastic the song was, and I couldn't believe that Jensen didn't realise what the track was about. I knew that the song could be a hit so I said to Jill we had to sign them, regardless of the cost.

Holly Johnson (vocalist) : He got in touch with us through our management and asked us if we wanted to be on his record label, ZTT. We were totally blown away by this because he was the most technologically advanced record producer in the UK at that time.

Trevor Horn : We had no idea that they were on the verge of splitting up, or that all these other labels had turned them down because they didn't know what to do with them.

Holly Johnson : The only other label in the running was Beggar's Banquet. They offered us a deal that would have given us £40 a week each for the next year, but they didn't have a producer like Trevor Horn.

Paul Morley (co-founder, ZTT Records) : If, in the 60s, Phil Spector created a ‘wall of sound', by the middle of the 80s Horn had already established his sound, a whole room of sound, the walls, floors, ceilings, doors, windows, decorated with absolute flourish. As an architect of sound, Horn is unashamedly an exhibitionist, an utter show off... He has proved time and time again that pop is an art form, and that he is the supreme pop artist.
(Source : the official programme for Produced By Trevor Horn, a concert for The Prince's Trust, November 2004.)

Holly Johnson : So we signed to ZTT, with a very unfair £250 recording advance between the five of us, and then we had to wait about four months in the summer of 1983 for Trevor to become available to produce it.

Trevor Horn : So what they came to me with was the second version of Relax, the simplified one they'd done on David Jensen, but it was still 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.

What I liked about the song was its structure. It was like a radio jingle or a chant, except that Holly sang it like a wild animal. His voice was amazing. When I met them, even though I immediately liked them and they had all these great ideas, I had doubts about their playing ability.

Peter 'Ped' Gill (drummer) : When we first signed to ZTT, we were eighteen, and Trevor thought, 'They mustn't be able to play very well,' like, but he hadn't even heard us. It was only natural that a man of his calibre was gonna think like that.

Trevor Horn : Geoffrey [Downes, Horn's partner in The Buggles] had a Fairlight but he'd gone off to form Asia. So when he went I bought a Fairlight. That, actually, I must admit, freaked my wife out because it was £18,000 and that was a fortune back then! There was only four of them in the country and I had one of them. But what was even more important was I knew what it was capable of, because I understood what it did. Most other people didn't understand at the time - sampling was like a mystical world... But when the Fairlight arrived there was no real way of locking it to my little rig. It was very primitive. I realised almost straight away that it was a full-time occupation for somebody, but luckily there was a guy called JJ Jeczalik [co-founder of Art Of Noise, now occasionally recording as Art Of Silence] who worked with Geoff Downes. He was bored and looking for work, so I did a deal with him and I gave him the Fairlight and he worked on it night and day.
(Source : interview by Ian Peel, Sound On Sound, March 2005)

Trevor Horn : The very first piece of recording we did towards the final version of Relax was at the Virgin Manor Studios. I recorded them jumping into the swimming pool. I just thought it might be useful, and we did eventually use it in the Sex Mix.

At that same session, I played Holly and Paul a sample on my Fairlight - the only kind of computer-sampler that existed then - where I'd synced the bass together with a Linn drum beat, and I could see they were very interested in that.

Holly Johnson : I knew all about electronic dance music and sampling machines. It was what I danced to in the clubs but we couldn't afford that sort of equipment. This was when Trevor discovered that the band really couldn't play along with the machine sequences he'd devised. As musicians we were great live, but very young and raw, so Trevor wanted professional musicians who could play to a metronomic beat.

Trevor Horn : I was pretty ruthless in those days so, because of my doubts about their playing abilities, I decided to bring in some better musicians, Ian Dury's backing band, The Blockheads, over one weekend. The idea was to give the Frankies an example of another way to approach the song. That was when the Blockheads' bass player, Norman Watt-Roy, came up with a lovely descending three-note bass part that I loved, and decided to include.

We spent two and a half weeks on that, the third, version of Relax but there were communication problems between me and the Frankies, partly because it was going to be the first record on my label and I knew it could be a hit, but it had to be done absolutely right.

Trevor Horn : Then, one Wednesday, I was in the corridor and I heard someone playing a guitar part in the studio which was exactly what I had wanted. I thought it was the Frankies' guitarist Nasher, and I rushed into the studio, but actually the Frankies were all up in Liverpool. The guitarist turned out to be our engineer, Steve Lipson, who I didn't even know could play guitar, but he had somehow caught the spirit of what Nasher had been doing and transformed it.

Steve Lipson : That song (N.B. Lipson recalls the song in question as being Ferry Cross The Mersey) didn't have a guitar part yet, so I plugged in my guitar and began playing something for the middle eight. All of a sudden, Trevor ran into the control room and asked whose sound he was hearing. I said, 'Oh, it's me.' He said, 'You never told me you could play the guitar,' and I said, 'Sure, I did, but you didn't appear interested.' Now he was. And this brings us back to Relax, which at that time bore no comparison to the finished record, even though the song itself was similar. Trevor had obviously gleaned its essence from the band, but he'd also incorporated some ideas from the Blockheads, along with a few sounds that were in the Fairlight.
(Source : Interview with Richard Buskin, Sound On Sound, April 2008)

Trevor Horn : We started rehearsing it with Andy Richards playing eights on the keyboard and J.J.Jeczalic operating the Fairlight. We did that for about four hours with me singing, just to give them a guide vocal, then performed it more or less live to 24 track analogue. We ended up using the first take.

About 11.00pm, Holly and Paul arrived at reception and I went to down to meet them at the door. I told them the track had changed again. How much, asked Holly. A lot, I said. A lot? Almost completely. Oh God, said Holly, not again.

Holly Johnson : We'd already spent three months in SARM West. Trevor was so nervous about his label's first release, he'd scrapped two complete versions. It cost £30,000 while I was travelling back to Liverpool every week to sign on.

Trevor Horn : Holly literally ran down to studio one but, when they heard it, him and Paul immediately started to dance, and so did the rest of us, just dancing around the control room. When it stopped, Holly said, 'That's fantastic.' I felt we'd snatched it from the jaws of disaster.

We started doing some final adjustments, which took a couple of hours. 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. After he was done, I said I thought one bit was out of tune, and Holly asked me to play it back, so I did. He said, 'That's not out of tune.'

Holly Johnson : It was not out of tune. I was doing little slurs with my voice, using microtones. It was quite deliberate.

Trevor Horn : I listened again, and I had to agree with him. It sounded great. I was totally blown away by his performance.

Holly Johnson : That 'Ow!' which I do, is my Marc Bolan affectation, with a bit of James Brown thrown in. Bolan used to do a lot of that in his vocals.

Trevor Horn : The orgasm effect is a sound Andy Richards had worked up on the keyboards some while before, and we decided to use it. I imagined it was dawn and Holly climbed to the top of a mosque and held his arms in the air and called all of these hordes forward to have sex with him, and that was really the vision. I wanted to put a huge orgasm in the middle, the biggest orgasm that had ever been had by anybody.

So that fourth version, done in one night, was the one. I got home at eight in the morning and said to my wife Jill, 'I think we've got it.' All we did after that was to overdub a couple of little keyboard lines and, of course, the mixing.

Holly Johnson : There were a couple of other little things. One night I went out on the roof of the studio, which is in Notting Hill, and he played a few notes on Trevor's old saxophone. The cook at the studio was a kind of rasta guy, and a bunch of his friends gathered round to listen. Trevor recorded me playing an E, and you can hear it right at the start of the track, like a foghorn in the night.

Trevor Horn : It was all this technology that was just exploding at that time, and Relax was probably the pinnacle of all that stuff. It was a combination of Page R and the Conductor (two electronic recording applications) and locking it to a Linn drum machine. So the basic track was eights running in a Fairlight ('eh eh eh eh eh eh eh eh'), fours on a bass ('ee ee ee ee') and a set of Linn drum machine patterns locked to Page R played on top of each other. It was an amazing feel.
(Source : Interview by Ian Peel in Sound On Sound, March 2005)

Holly Johnson : It was released in November, and took the longest ever time from release of a record to reaching No1 in the UK.

Trevor Horn : It took four months to start to become a hit. It got some really bad press reviews and after a while I started to lose faith in it, but Jill never lost faith and insisted we keep working it.

Holly Johnson : One week it dropped back down from 73 to 74 and didn't look like it was going to happen at all. Then we got another performance on The Tube, and that pushed it back up to 35 which got us on Top Of The Pops. At that point I went to ZTT and said 'I can't sign on the dole any more cos if we go on Top Of the Pops we'll get nabbed by Social Security.' So they put us on £40 a week ...

Brian 'Nasher' Nash (guitar) : The first time we did Top Of The Pops, I had to book some holiday from work to go up to London. That was a bit of a blast, like, doing Top Of The Pops one day and the next you're back at work with all your mates going, 'Alright there ... you were on Top Of The Pops last night weren't yer?'

Trevor Horn : The morning after Top Of The Pops, we sold 54,000 records, and a week later we were banned. (censorship)

Gary Farrow (radio plugger) : I got all the deejays vibed up and, quite honestly, risked professional suicide, even though I told them the implications of the song. Certain jocks got behind it, namely Steve Wright, Jensen, Richard Skinner and Mike Read before he took it off halfway through the song.

Mike Read : After I took it out of my programme (on 11.1.84) many people came up to me and said they were really pleased I had done so.

Derek Chinnery (controller, Radio One) : We could have said there is a dual meaning to this song, that it is a nonsense song about relaxing. But when the performers themselves confirmed that it referred to fellatio and ejaculation, then it didn't seem to me appropriate that we should play it at all.

Trevor Horn : The line 'When you want to come,' is definitely in the song, but the ironic thing is that if you listen to the record, Holly very clearly sings 'sock it to it' but Paul Morley had printed on the cover 'When you want to suck it, do it.' That's positively not on the record, but that was why the BBC decided to ban it.

Holly Johnson : What I sang was ‘When you wanna suck it, chew it.’ And I should know. I wrote it. The ban was really disappointing though. Not being able to hear it on the radio took some of the pleasure away from being Number 1.

Mike Read : I think the Frankies were going all-out to get banned from the start.

Trevor Horn : I wasn't the least bit surprised when the record was banned. I was surprised that it wasn't banned the first minute they heard it, because for me it was so overtly ... I thought about nothing but sex when I made the record. That was exactly what it was supposed to be about.

Paul Morley : It was in the back of our minds (that the song might be banned) all the way along, obviously. Well, it was in mine and Trevor's. But when it was banned, we were shocked, from the point of view that we'd got away with it for so long. It didn't upset me, 'cos my taste lies in line with things like that - that would get banned or wouldn't get airplay.

Holly Johnson : Some people are arseholes, and he (Morley) was the biggest I ever met.

Brian 'Nasher' Nash : The best thing was when it went up from No35 to No6. When it went to No1, it wasn't any big deal really. It was weird though. One minute we were all in Liverpool in crappy jobs or on the dole, and the next we were being flown all around the world and going to clubs with people throwing drinks at us. We just went mad.

Paul Morley : Frankie came to us with great ideas and exuberance, and we made it bigger and communicated it to more people than anyone else could have done. That's all.

Gary Numan : When I heard this, it plunged me into a pit of despair. The production was so good, the sounds so classy, that it seemed to move the entire recording business up a gear - we were all left floundering, trying to catch up.

Trevor Horn : One of the reasons we did all the remixes was that the initial 12-inch version of 'Relax' contained something called 'The Sex Mix', which was sixteen minutes long and didn't even contain a song. It was really Holly Johnson just jamming, as well as a bunch of samples of the group jumping in the swimming pool and me sort of making disgusting noises by dropping stuff into buckets of water! We got so many complaints about it -particularly from gay clubs, who found it offensive - that we cut it in half and reduced it down to eight minutes, by taking out some of the slightly more offensive parts (thus making the New York Mix). Then we got another load of complaints, because the single version wasn't on the 12-inch.
(Source : From ABC To ZTT, Sound On Sound, August 1994)

Holly Johnson : ZTT have always been cagey about how many copies of Relax we sold, but one estimate was 13 million, worldwide. I think we were the first group to have our first two singles and our debut album all go platinum, and I’ve no idea how many t-shirts were sold. They were being bootlegged so much. What it didn’t immediately achieve was a decent credit rating for me. I went to my bank - the Natwest, Knightsbridge - and I put our gold disc down and said, 'Here’s my collateral. Now, will you give me a £500 overdraft? And he said, 'Let me show this to somebody,' ... and he came back and he wouldn't let me have it.