"Relax" - Frankie Goes to Hollywood

On Delayed Gratification

How a dance hit about gay sex went from banned to the top of the charts.

Guy walks into a gay bar, wrestles a tiger, mounts a leather-bound daddy like a horse, and gets suggestively sprayed with champagne by every patron in the place… all for the amusement of a man dressed as a Roman emperor. And that’s just the music video. 

Meanwhile, the lyrics to “Relax” explore the heightened pleasures of not rushing an orgasm during gay sex. 

That might all be just a typical Tuesday evening for the boys of Frankie Goes to Hollywood. But their unvarnished depiction of life also ushered in a brief era during the early ‘80s for mainstream acceptance of gay culture.

Just as ultra-conservative leadership was retaking control of the U.K. and U.S. in 1979-1980 via Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, an equal and opposite uprising of queer visibility in music materialized. The ‘70s brought us a handful of out musicians like David Bowie, Lou Reed, Sylvester, and Elton John, but the turn of the decade incited a veritable explosion of queerness with acts like Soft Cell, the B52’s, Bronski Beat, the Culture Club, the Pet Shop Boys, and Erasure dominating the airwaves through the mid ‘80s. The rise of music video culture and the debut of MTV in 1981 helped amplify the queer aesthetic. And no music video was more overtly sexual in its gayness than 1983’s “Relax” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood. 

Relax, don't do it

When you want to suck, chew it

Relax, don't do it

When you want to come

But shoot it in the right direction

Making it your intention

Live those dreams

Scheme those schemes

Got to hit me (hit me)

Hit me (hit me)

Hit me with those laser beams

Typical Tuesday at an S&M bar

Frankie vocalists Holly Johnson and Paul Rutherford

Released in October 1983, the “Relax” video was directed by Bernard Rose, who was hired by Bronski Beat the next year to direct the much less sexual but equally gay music video for “Smalltown Boy.” Rose talked to Yahoo Music about how groundbreaking it was at the time that both acts were “out” in public. “There were a lot of artists [in the ‘80s] who were gay but not open about it like George Michael, Freddie Mercury, Elton John (who went back into the closet in the ‘80s) – these people we now think have always been out, but they were not out in 1984. Frankie Goes to Hollywood were really the first ones who came out and said, ‘Well, yeah, we’re gay.’” Only lead singer Holly Johnson and vocalist Paul Rutherford are actually gay. The rest of the band - Mark O'Toole (bass), Brian Nash (guitar) and Peter Gill (drums) supported the band’s provocative image. 

Before the group signed with a record label, Frankie Goes to Hollywood was invited to perform on the U.K. Channel Four show, The Tube. Dressed in leather fetish gear, the band caught the eye of producer and ZTT record label owner, Trevor Horn (formerly of Buggles, whose single, “Video Killed the Radio Star” was the first video aired on MTV in 1981). Horn was taken with their “dangerous sexuality” and thought “Relax” would make a killer first single.

Early performance before the band was signed to ZTT Records

Horn, along with co-founder of ZTT Records, Paul Morley, wanted to play up the band's subversive image. “We roughed them up, took it to the extreme. We did the opposite of what would be in a marketing rule book.” One promotional campaign for the single featured vocalist Paul Rutherford in a sailor cap and a leather vest, smiling next to the phrase “ALL THE NICE BOYS LOVE SEA MEN” — a pun on the song “Ship Ahoy! (All the Nice Girls Love a Sailor).”

Promo featuring Paul Rutherford

Horn went to work rearranging the group’s more funk-based version of “Relax” into a high energy synth pop dance track. Upon the single’s release, it quickly reached No. 3 on the U.K. charts before a sudden ban by the BBC and MTV, which deemed the lyrics and video too obscene. Turns out that broadcasters were disgusted by the band’s unapologetic queerness. 

But the uproar only increased the song’s popularity as record stores sold out of copies of the single. While the public clamored for the track, lead singer Holly Johnson did a television interview with an executive from BBC’s Radio 1 who explained to the singer that he thought the lyrics “could offend the majority of our listening audience.” Johnson replies, “Only someone with a mind of a sewer could find them obscene.” During the controversy, the band refused to admit publicly that the song’s lyrics were sexual.

The BBC ban was eventually lifted in 1984 as “Relax” continued to climb the charts. The band also shot a decidedly less gay version of the music video to be played on MTV. The song remained in the U.K. Top 40 for 37 consecutive weeks, 35 of which overlapped with the BBC’s ban. It was awarded “Best British Single” of 1984 at the Brit Awards, and Frankie Goes to Hollywood won “Best British Newcomer.” 

By the time the entire album, Welcome to the Pleasuredome, arrived in 1985, it was poised to become one of the most commercially successful records of the 1980s. In the album’s liner notes, Frankie bassist Mark O’Toole finally dropped the pretense that the lyrics to “Relax” weren’t about sex. “Everything I say is complete lies. Like, when people ask you what ‘Relax’ was about, when it first came out we used to pretend it was about motivation, and really it was about shagging.”

The band’s admission about their racy lyrics came too late for the mainstream public to care. “Relax” was an earworm, and people were too busy dancing to consider the nature of the lyrics. It became such a ubiquitous part of the ‘80s that seemingly everyone was wearing a “FRANKIE SAY RELAX” T-shirt in public. 

In a 1997 episode of Friends, Ross takes back his old Frankie t-shirt from Rachel after their break up.

Welcome to the Pleasuredome produced three No.1 singles in the U.K. Unfortunately for Frankie Goes to Hollywood, their second album was less successful and infighting among the band led to their breakup. 

The success of Frankie Goes to Hollywood came and went, so to speak. Their first single, however, remains among the first examples of unabashedly out and proud musicians celebrating queer sex. A song about literal delayed gratification is also true more broadly. Its effects on pop culture are only more recently obvious decades later. Frankie crawled in 1983 so that artists today like Lil Nas X, Troye Sivan, and Janelle Monae could run free.

Original gay version:

MTV sanitized version (after hanging up their fetish gear)

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