Frankie Goes To Hollywood: Welcome to the Pleasuredome Album Review

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.