Frankie Goes To Hollywood… a blockbuster 80s act that doesn’t really need any introduction as their background, story and various controversies (1) can be found far and wide to the distant corners of the internet, and in the depths of music publications over the years so I’ll save the back story on this one. They got their start in the tight-knit Liverpool scene that was based around the club Eric’s in the late 70s and early 80s — a scene that also brought forth bands like Echo And The Bunnymen (2), Dead Or Alive, The Teardrop Explodes and many more.
Overall, this entry is less about the song itself and more about the progression of this song in various stages — from its early funk/punk roots as a young new band from Liverpool, to the slickly produced behemoth that the track would become when it finally took over the airwaves in the heat of Frankie-mania only a few years later — so whether either myself or you, the reader, actually like this track isn’t the point of the exercise here. If anything this is just one recent example I’ve come across in how one song can have multiple versions, and in the case of Frankie Goes To Hollwood, is a result of the band being plucked out of underground obscurity and into the music industry hit-making machine.
And here I’m going to only look at a few versions of the song that I know about as apparently numerous versions exist as it morphed into the popular version most listeners know of today. Some of these I’m not aware of and probably couldn’t find them. This does not include the numerous, extensive remixes that came out with the various 12″ singles of the track, including “Relax (New York Mix)” and “Relax (Greek Disco Mix)”. Frankie were an early forerunner of the “remix” — now ubiquitous in the current world of dance and electronic music over the past few decades.
How did I come to writing about “Relax” in this one? My partner came across an early ZTT demo of the track (more on this below), expressing her surprise and liking of the track. I then dug up an even earlier version to show her — the original that got the band signed (see video at the bottom).
This “original” version saw the band playing on the UK music programme The Tube back in early 1983, and the track at that point was called “Relax (In Heaven Everything Is Fine)”. It’s a live performance video with the band in what is likely some Liverpool nightclub along with a couple of local dancers — everyone involved wearing negligible, provocative clothing. This version starts with drummer Peter Gill playing a metronomic beat and then singer Holly Johnson turning around with a vocal ad-lib before the band kicks into a bit of skeletal funk that’s a familiar version of the main riff of the song. There’s then a pause in the track and it picks up tempo and into a different key, sounding like something Gang Of Four or Bush Tetras would kick out. The song again then slows back to the original tempo and it’s starting, main riff and key and then finally ending with the band singing the main vocal (“Relax… don’t do it…”) in a vocal-only a cappella style before presenter Jools Holland — seemingly rather bored and unimpressed — bursts in to get some comments from the band.
Apparently after this eye-raising TV performance, the band were immediately contacted by popular UK producer Trevor Horn, who might be best known for his short-lived band The Buggles and their one-off hit “Video Killed The Radio Star”, and perhaps lesser known for his short stint as a vocalist in the UK progressive rock band Yes for their 1980 album Drama, which features artwork by the band’s usual artwork collaborator, the “progressive rock visual artist on everyone’s Rolodex“, Roger Dean. Horn does a decent job filling in the shoes for the band’s usual vocalist Jon Anderson on this album, but I won’t get off topic here.
When the band started working with Trevor Horn the task of producing a block-buster hit out of “Relax” to be released on Horn’s major label subsidiary ZTT was apparently a long, laborious process. An early produced version found Horn pulling in some extra musicians from Ian Dury and The Blockheads to re-record what he thought could have been better playing on the track. The result is the ZTT demo version (video at bottom) which gets closer to the sound of the final, popular version of the track but still retaining a lot of the typical band instrumentation of bass guitar, guitar and drums. This version found online on YouTube is accompanied by an early promo video using a lot of scanning lasers one would usually find at a high end nightclub. Confusingly, this same promo video is available online with the music that would be the final version of the track — and in fact, I think it’s the alternate video to the band’s official promo video for the final version of the track. Yes, a bit confusing.
Which then brings us to the final version, which sees the bass line — originally played on a bass guitar — replaced by one sampled E-note from a Fairlight sampler and the majority of the guitar work replaced by synthesizer/sampler programming very much from Trevor Horn‘s input. This is for the most part the version most people know about. Strangely enough it’s interesting watching live or TV performance footage of the band playing this version — all playing (read: miming) the song as if they were a band when those instruments clearly don’t exist in the mix. The band’s memory of playing the song for these performances perhaps comes from memory of the earlier versions of the song when the band was actually playing all of the parts.
And with this final, official version of the song at least three two promotional videos exist, including the “laser” version mentioned earlier, the more well known controversial video of the band frequenting an S&M club filmed in London by English director Bernard Ross (whose 1988 film Paperhouse was written about on this website here in Film Klub), and then another MTV version that was used as a segment in the popular 1984 erotic film Body Double, directed by Brian De Palma (Phantom Of The Paradise, Blow Out, Dressed To Kill, etc) and starring the popular actress Melanie Griffith.
As mentioned at the beginning of this piece, the band is well documented — including it’s breakout hit “Relax”. Here’s one of many features: a piece from UK’s Channel 5 about the track that aired a few years ago.
It’s not uncommon for a musical artist to have multiple versions of one track circulating around. In many cases there’ll be a version recorded for a demo or self-titled debut independent release, only to have said group then signed to a major label and a far more polished version of that original track ending up on their major label debut. On a more independent level, a group might release another version of an earlier track on a later release, with the style and instrumentation “updated” for that track to better align with how the band sounds at that point in their timeline.
I myself have done numerous versions of tracks, the most notable being the track “Cinema Eyes”, which had the official and extended version on the CD release of Fiction Prediction (2013), then an alternate version called “Cinema Eyes (Soft Riot’s Small Doses Version)” for an exclusive publication of the same name and then finally a “Cinema Eyes (Version IV)” which eventually came out on 2021 release Second Lives. There’s even a demo version that was up online at some point, so in essence there’s five versions in total, which is covered on this piece I published a while back.
And then we band such as Fugazi — a very influencial band to me, especially in my earlier years — who after they went on their extended, still-ongoing hiatus in 2002, took it upon themselves by way of their label home Dischord Records (co-run by singer/guitarist Ian Mackaye) would in the coming years offer their Fugazi Live Series to fans, a gargantuan archive of live recordings from hundreds of their shows across the world for $5 USD each (or on a “sliding scale”). Fugazi, being in their element at best in a live performance setting (I’ve seen them live twice so I can attest to that), sees their compositions change — sometimes drastically — at every show, especially as the band are known to often play without a set list, often taking impulsive visual cues from other band members to establish what song they were playing next in their set, and on top of that, often extending or changing up the various band member’s parts of the song. With their songs being extensively “road-tested” live, I can only assume that when going into their usual Inner Ear Studios to record an album, there’s likely a strategy discussed in how each song would work best in a studio session as compared to what works for any given track purely in a live setting.
A few years ears after offering Fugazi Live Series to fans, many early demo versions of classic tracks of their early releases from the late 1980s would appear on the Dischord-released First Demo album, a proper official release put out 2014 offering a further dimension to songs already quite familiar to fans of the band.
- One such controversy which happened long after the band broke up was the fact that a completely different group from America started booking tours around the USA claiming to be Frankie Goes To Hollywood, with the singer of this imposter band claiming to be the brother of singer Holly Johnson. This was around 1999 or 2000 and I remember reading a local music mag in Vancouver that previewed a show this band was playing in the city around that time, and I remember thinking that the whole fiasco was pretty hilarious.
- Over the past couple of years I’ve read two of the memoirs written by Will Sergeant from Echo And The Bunnymen entitled Bunnyman and Echoes — both covering the 1970s Liverpool scene, growing up in the city during that time and the early days of the band. I even saw a book Q&A for Echoes here in Glasgow. Sergeant a gent and very approachable. I got him to sign my copy of Themes For Grind — an early instrumental solo endeavour of his.