It's just about relaxing, isn't it?' " Frankie Went to Hollywood "Of course, they pulled back as the record climbed the charts," Read said, "and in the end their interviews were all, 'Hey. Once the scope of the potential success was in sight, however, the band retreated from its brash stance, remade the video, reassembled their features and became cuddly rebels for the press. Obviously gay sex is around and a thing which everyone is aware of, but I think Frankie were going out deliberately from the start to get banned." I mean, from the outset, the band were very open about what they were about and the simulated sex scenes on their video made it clear that 'Relax' was about gay sex. Read said he suggested the ban because of "the content. I think I did it because it felt right at the time." "You don't think about the repercussions it's going to have. "I don't regret what I did," Read told London's Jamming! magazine. There's nothing like controversy to get a band noticed - remember the Sex Pistols?Ī BBC ban may be a band's best friend, and Frankie won its boost of notoriety when London's Radio One censor Mike Read picked the single "Relax" as the Hit to Nix. Horn diddles the dials and pushes the levers, and Morley concocts the outrageous advertising-based slogans, playful propaganda and pseudo-philosophy intended to sell the band's musical McNuggets and stir up the censors. Every move the group makes is orchestrated - literally and figuratively - by Trevor Horn and Paul Morley, who have put together an audacious record label called Zang Tuum Tumb (named for one of Horn's synthesized drum sounds). In fact, gay has cachet - witness the success of the Smiths and Bronski Beat.įrankie itself seems as manufactured as a modern-day Monkees, a post-punk Village People sprung forth fully armed from the brow of junk culture. All of a sudden it seems that everyone is doing protest songs again - Culture Club and others are charting with antiwar anthems - and the word "gay," at least in the record biz, is no longer pop poison. This summer in London it seemed as if everyone and his brother was wearing T-shirts emblazoned with oversized graphics screaming cleverly confusing non sequiturs - FRANKIE SAY! - and dancing to the group's manifestoes with a disco beat.Īnother front of the most recent British invasion, Frankie rode in on a wave of pop acts flourishing in a newly tolerant (or curious) atmosphere and cannily co-opted the craze for causes. Pure image, an explosion of sound, sense and nonsense, the Frankie phenom has put some color back into the pop world's cheeks. Headed for its American concert debut at the Ontario Theatre in Washington, D.C., Tuesday, Election Night. Masterminded by journalist/provocateur Paul Morley, the smartest pop Svengali since Malcolm McLaren pointed the Sex Pistols at the world. Produced by Trevor Horn, the hottest pop record producer since the Beatles' George Martin. More fab Frankie fax: Fronted by Holly Johnson and Paul Rutherford, two openly gay lead singers. That song and the second, the antiwar "Two Tribes," grabbed the number one and two spots simultaneously on the British singles charts - which hasn't happened since the Beatles and Elvis Presley quit making hits. The single promptly became a monster hit (6 million copies sold worldwide), with the longest run of any record ever on the British charts (more than 50 weeks). Their first record, the explicitly sexy "Relax," was deemed too naughty to air by the BBC, as was the spectacularly orgiastic companion video. So who is this FRANKIE, and why is he SAY-ing all those things? There Is No Frankieįrankie Goes to Hollywood is a five-man Liverpudlian pop group that took its name from a '50s billboard announcing Frank Sinatra's first movie.
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