Welcome to the Pleasuredome

Think of the flush that must have crept over Mike Read’s face the moment he realized that when Frankie sang “come,” they meant cum. Pupils and capillaries dilated, he must have scanned the lyrics printed on the sleeve of “Relax” and read the word “suck” as if for the first time in his life. By the time the BBC 1 Radio DJ declared the song “obscene” on air, “Relax” had already become a mainstay on his station—contemporary estimates say it played 70 to 100 times in six weeks—extolling the pleasures of gay sex to some thousands of unsuspecting listeners. Eleven days into 1984, “Relax” fluttered to No. 6 on the UK charts. Yanked from airplay, it soared to the top by the end of the month.

The tale of Read’s sudden panic quickly grew. Before long, he hadn’t just declined to play the single on his hit countdown show; he had dragged the needle off the disc halfway through its runtime and banned it on the spot. Depending on who’s telling the story, he also either flung the record against the wall or snapped it over his knee. For his part, Read claims he wasn’t all that bothered; he simply ran out of airtime. But he will concede that he noticed some “vile words” and a “simulated phallus” printed on the cover, and he did indeed pronounce the whole thing obscene.

While he didn’t have the authority to ban “Relax” from broadcast himself, Read’s declaration made its way up the chain, scandalizing BBC executives as it went. Apparently, it had never occurred to them that “come” meant anything other than showing up. “The group seemed to confirm [the lyrics] as referring to fellatio and ejaculation, which are not exactly subjects which I think are appropriate for broadcasting on the radio,” said Derek Chinnery, BBC 1 Controller, two weeks after Read’s proclamation. “We could have said there is a dual meaning to this song, that it was a kind of nonsense lyric about relaxing. But when the performers themselves confirmed that it was referring to these sexual aberrations then it didn’t seem to me appropriate that we should play it at all.” That day, the BBC learned a key lesson: If you don’t know what a song is about, it’s probably about sex. And if you’re certain a song is about nothing, it’s definitely about sex.

“Relax,” the crown jewel in Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s debut album, Welcome to the Pleasuredome, went largely unnoticed for the first three months after its release in the fall of 1983. An irresistible performance on the Top of the Pops’ 20th-anniversary show catapulted the single into public consciousness: Lead singer Holly Johnson vamped along to its pre-recorded studio glitz dressed in leather and flagging piss, while his co-vocalist Paul Rutherford—the handsome clone to Johnson’s charismatic scamp—danced as if he had just stumbled into the eighth discotheque of the night. The BBC fracas cemented the song’s illicit appeal. Everything that was supposed to nip a music career in the bud—politics, overproduction, overt homosexuality, censorship—only poured fuel on Frankie’s fire.

The band spent months frothing up clubs in their native Liverpool, cultivating a leather-and-chains look they swore owed more to Mad Max’s road warriors than any particular fetish scene. “We really had to hit hard to get off the streets … to create a reaction, especially in Liverpool because there’s so many bands,” Johnson told NME. “To stand out we had to give it loads, loads of sex because that was the easiest and quickest shocker to get attention.” They revved into gear in February 1983, when they snagged a slot on the music TV program The Tube. Wearing mesh crop tops, they banged out an embryonic rendition of “Relax,” then a bare-bones funk ditty that interpolated the Lady in the Radiator song from Eraserhead.

Among their viewers was producer Trevor Horn, the studio wizard behind era-defining hits like the Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star” and Yes’ “Owner of a Lonely Heart.” He had just launched a new label called Zang Tuum Tumb with his wife Jill Sinclair, former NME writer Paul Morley, and fellow producer Gary Langan. A few weeks later, Horn heard a more developed version of “Relax” on David “Kid” Jensen’s Radio 1 show. Impressed, he started calling around to sign Frankie. They had the spark; he had the finesse that could coax it into an inferno.

ZTT’s parent company, Island Records, had previously passed up a chance to add Frankie to their roster, claiming, ambiguously, “They don’t have the right image.” Horn and Morley, meanwhile, saw a path to the promised land paved in leather. On both sides of the Atlantic, listeners hungered for an electronic sound that overpowered the senses. In the first few years of the decade, New York acts like Grandmaster Flash, Melle Mel, and Afrika Bambaataa dreamed up electro tracks that heralded cyborg futures, while in San Francisco, Sylvester and Patrick Cowley pitched disco into a new, accelerated lane. Aesthetically glamorous, sexually ambiguous bands like Culture Club, Soft Cell, and Eurythmics were taking the new audiovisual arena of MTV by storm, ushering in what would be dubbed the second British Invasion. But where Boy George and Marc Almond tended to dodge direct questions about their personal sexualities, Frankie’s two vocalists left the closet far behind. (The rest of the band—Brian Nash, Peter Gill, and Mark O’Toole, collectively known as “the lads”—were straight.)

”[Horn] thought the gay thing was the most dangerous thing about us, but he loved that,” said Rutherford. Morley agreed it was ZTT’s job to inflame Frankie’s most scandalous appeal: “What a record company should do is exaggerate the raw material of its artists; most companies remove or reduce it.”

For months, Frankie and Horn worked “Relax” from a libidinal sketch into an erotic phantasmagoria. Horn had at his disposal a Fairlight CMI, the nascent digital audio workstation newly favored by Stevie Wonder, Herbie Hancock, and Peter Gabriel. “He was one of about three people in England who owned and knew how to use a Fairlight computer synthesizer,” said Rutherford. The machine enabled precise visual sequencing; you could etch melodies and rhythmic patterns directly on the screen with a light pen. It was also the first commercially available digital sampler that could record sounds directly into the machine and play them back at any pitch on the keyboard.

Working with a slew of session musicians, Horn teased layers and layers of outré sound out of the Fairlight—a deliciously sleazy three-note bass strut, candied digital horns, a constellation of syncopated percussion—all building toward a crescendo he called “the orgasm effect.” “I imagined it was dawn, Holly had climbed to the top of a mosque, held his arms in the air and called all of these hordes forward to have sex with him,” he said. “I put a huge orgasm in the middle, the biggest orgasm anybody had ever been had by anybody.”

It worked. “Relax” satisfied listeners starving for sound that walloped them more than it washed over them. It also sent the competition scrambling. Early synth advocate Gary Numan said the single “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.”

While Horn and the band toiled away on Frankie’s sound, Morley began crafting an equally infectious media campaign. Riffing on Katharine Hamnett’s “Choose Life” design (a reference to Buddhism, not abortion), he penned a sequence of enigmatic slogans and printed them on blank white T-shirts in big, black letters: Frankie say relax. Frankie say war! Hide yourself. Frankie say arm the unemployed. Morley himself liked to wear a T-shirt that said, “Propaganda will give you the truth.” In interviews, he was equally prone to sloganeering: “I condemned [manipulation] when it was done badly. Great manipulation I adore.” By the summer of ’84, the shirts were everywhere—a fad, sure, but also a prescient bit of agitprop. Ubiquitous directives with no clear authority behind them might make you wonder about your susceptibility to authority’s tools in general.

Frankie’s second single, the anti-war rumble “Two Tribes,” debuted at No. 1 in June 1984. With Frankiemania at a fever pitch, the natural next step was to let the band play across an album’s length—and with their prefab grandiosity, it only made sense that their debut LP would sprawl across two discs, an opulent oasis in the midst of Thatcherite austerity. Despite their cultural hold, Frankie still had a lot to prove. Naysayers claimed they were too polished, too glossy; all style, no substance; industry puppets lending their pretty faces to Horn’s studio indulgence.

“We get a lot of interviews where people say, ‘We hear that you can’t play your instruments and that you were totally created by Trevor Horn,’” complained Johnson. “It’s so tedious for us, and it makes us resent the record company, which is not a healthy situation. ZTT didn’t go out of their way to deny the rumors, because it’s to their advantage for people to believe that they are wondrous Svengalis.”

Welcome to the Pleasuredome would only further polarize their reception. Released at the end of October 1984, it boasted tauter versions of “Relax” and “Two Tribes” than the luxuriant 12" mixes that had been ringing out in clubs all summer. Its title track, meanwhile, swelled to a tumescent 14 minutes, rooted in a shuddering bass groove: a glimmering showcase of Horn’s studio prowess and a hearty welcome indeed.

A clutch of cover songs deepened the band’s complex love affair with the United States. They had never visited the country, but its cultural stranglehold fascinated them; they named themselves after an advertisement for Frank Sinatra’s first film role, while Johnson took his given name from Warhol superstar Holly Woodlawn. Frankie raced through Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run” at 157 BPM, faithfully took on Dionne Warwick’s “Do You Know the Way to San Jose,” and sprawled across a hi-NRG version of Edwin Starr’s “War,” where they tasked a Ronald Reagan impressionist with reading both a Hitler quote about beauty and a meditation on revolutionary love by Marxist thinker David Cooper. (Cooper also wrote the mock-posh dissection of what an orgasm really is on the footnote track “Tag.”) Rather than a direct protest against imperial brutality, Frankie’s “War” seemed to blare a warning about the evolving nature of power in an era where cable television advertised both the threat of nuclear armageddon and a spread of convenient options for escaping its attendant stress. A seasoned actor sat in the White House and the news became just another product for the masses to consume.

While some were quick to label Pleasuredome an instant masterpiece, for certain critics, the glaze over Frankie’s political and literary convictions cracked on impact. Creem pronounced it a “put-on and a con, a flim-flam scam of a sham, a hip hype calculated solely to separate as much money as possible from as many people as possible as fast as possible before all the young rubes wake up and realize they’ve been fleeced.” Record called it “stagey and sophomoric,” reiterating the suspicion that Frankie were no more than “puppets for ZTT masterminds.” They had a right to be skeptical; half the sounds on the album poured out of a machine that had only been on the market for five years, and Horn was one of only a few producers who knew how to deploy it to its full potential. If you took the measure of a band by how long they spent wrangling their own gear, Frankie fell short—no more than a handful of pinballs bouncing around ZTT’s brilliant machine.

It’s true that there are oceans between that first scrappy Tube performance and the sumptuous opera that unfurled inside Pleasuredome. But Johnson’s electricity—his knowing poise, the twinkle in his eye, the ripples in his voice—surges through Pleasuredome’s entire lifespan, from demo to marquee. He’s as much in love with the camera on the Tube spot as he is in the first Bacchanalian video for “Relax,” which, among other delights, shows him soaking up a golden shower in a subterranean fetish club. (Naturally, the clip was also banned from the BBC and never cleared to air on MTV.) Listen to the way he trills his Rs on the word “erect” in “Welcome to the Pleasuredome,” or the vibrato he relishes for measures on end on “Black Night White Light,” and any thought of his emptiness shrivels up. Only a music press that discounted the power of performance itself—that shunted voice, presence, and attitude off to the side in favor of technical dexterity—would dare call him a puppet.

The same media preoccupied with who played which instruments in the studio also harbored a phobia of pleasure itself, especially in combination with politics. But against a dreary backdrop of privatization, plague, deprivation, and shame, what choice did Frankie have but to dazzle? Their politics were in their citations of revolutionary figures and also gleamed across “Krisco Kisses,” a paean to fisting: “You fit me like a glove, my love/You fit me like a glove!”

Pleasuredome rang out into the years that followed, emblematizing the ’80s and loosening the way for bands like Erasure, who would carry a similar torch into the rave years. The album turned out to be the apex of Frankie’s short-lived career. They followed it in 1986 with Liverpool, which flopped, and disbanded in the wake of intra-band aesthetic conflict and legal scuffles with ZTT—a by-the-books demise. But for a season, Frankie Goes to Hollywood pierced through the clouds on the back of the most thunderous orgasm anyone had ever heard.

It didn’t take long for the sex and the thrill of the music to evaporate from collective memory. By the fall of ’84, parody T-shirts poked fun at the sheer ubiquity of Morley’s originals: Who give a Sh!t what Frankie say?, they read. By 1997, a Frankie Say Relax shirt prompted uproarious canned laughter all by itself on an episode of Friends—a symbol of a bygone media obsession. Four years later, Zoolander laundered “Relax” into a gag of its own. Once a scandal and a threat, the song deflated into the non-referential gibberish the BBC had first assumed it to be. Frankie’s eroticism, formerly a tidal force, trickled away into sterile nostalgia.

But this story isn’t only about sex. Pleasuredome culminates in Frankie’s left-turn third single, an undanceable ballad the label marketed as a Christmas song, complete with a Nativity pageant video. On “The Power of Love,” the band swan-dives into total, unblemished sincerity: no cheek, no wink. From the depths, Johnson sings of real, obliterating love, the kind of love that atomizes and rearranges reality, the kind of love that has nothing to do with property, propriety, or ownership, and everything to do with surrender. He calls it “death-defying.” What a gift that “The Power of Love” came about more than a full decade before the dawn of Auto-Tune. You can hear Johnson striving for these notes; landing flat, hearing his failure, and correcting; hoisting himself up microtone by microtone to each sublime plateau.

Frankie arrived in a splash of scandal, pressurizing dancefloors with euphoric club mixes. With “The Power of Love,” they also insisted that sexual and spiritual ecstasies need not be mutually exclusive. Far from it—they feed each other. Slipping a fist into your beloved could be a more fervent act of love than slipping on a ring before God. Instances of mind-wiping abandon crystallize into the highest devotion: love unbound by time or space. Pleasure, from music or sex or both, didn’t trivialize true feeling. It bored a hole into the heart of it.

Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan.