On this date in 1984 Frankie Goes to Hollywood started a five-week run at no. 1 on the UK singles chart with “Relax!” Two weeks earlier, on 11 January, DJ Mike Read was playing “Relax” on his BBC Radio 1 Breakfast Show when he noticed the front cover design by Anne Yvonne Gilbert. Read apparently became outraged by the “overtly sexual” nature of both the record sleeve and the printed lyrics, which prompted him to remove the disc from the turntable live on air, branding it “obscene”âits lyrics centred on the oft-repeated “Relax, don’t do it/When you wanna suck it, chew it/Relax, don’t do it/When you want to come.”
Two days laterâalmost three months after the single’s initial release, and just eight days after the group’s Top of the Pop appearanceâthe BBC banned the record from all its TV and radio outlets.
ZTT Records signed Frankie Goes to Hollywood after producer-turned-ZTT co-founder Trevor Horn saw the band play on the television show, The Tube. Once the band was signed, ZTT co-founder Paul Morley mapped out the marketing campaign fashioned as a “strategic assault on pop”. Morley opted to tackle the biggest possible themes in the band’s singles (“sex, war, religion”), of which “Relax” would be the first, and emphasised the shock impact of Frankie members Holly Johnson’s and Paul Rutherford’s open homosexuality in the packaging and music videos.
ZTT initiated the ad campaign for “Relax” with two quarter-page ads in the British music press. The 1st ad featured images of Rutherford in a sailor cap & a leather vest, and Johnson with a shaved head and rubber gloves. The images were accompanied by the phrase “ALL THE NICE BOYS LOVE SEA MEN”, a pun on the music hall song “Ship Ahoy! (All the Nice Girls Love a Sailor)”. It declared “Frankie Goes to Hollywood are coming ⦠making Duran Duran lick the shit off their shoes ⦠Nineteen inches that must be taken always.” The 2nd ad promised “theories of bliss, a history of Liverpool from 1963 to 1983, a guide to Amsterdam bars”.
Below, the first one is the official video and the second is from a TV show in 1984âfeaturing Lemmy (Motorhead).
⢠Read also SEX PISTOLS VS EMI.
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Featured image via laut.de.
