When you wanna come.
A love letter to the lyrics of Relax by Frankie Goes To Hollywood
Prologue
A love letter to a T-shirt slogan.
Frankie say relax.
Frankie say say.
Frankie say say, not says.
Most replicas and rip-offs of the original T-shirt don’t say say, they say says – FRANKIE SAYS RELAX. The copies can’t cope with the incongruity of say.
The dissonance of say jars your brain out of autopilot. It forces you to consciously confront its logic and therefore its meaning. Frankie is in the plural. Frankie is a they not a he.
So what does say say? Say says we. Say says us. Say says solidarity. Say says unanimity. Say says a lot.
Frankie wring (not wrings) a lot of meaning from a single word.
It is a fashionable fantasy in the advertising industry to talk about a brand ‘owning’ the conceptual territory that defines its market. This means that, in the minds of consumers, a brand is indelibly and irreplaceably associated with the most powerful motivating idea for its audience. These motivating ideas tend to be broad, generic and captured by a single word — togetherness, family, softness, strength and so on. Persil would love to ‘own’ whiteness for instance. Perhaps, back in the day, Heineken could justifiably claim to ‘own’ refreshment. But such success stories are exceptional. Ownership takes chutzpah and hubris, which most brands don’t have.
‘See how every brand in this market is selling comfort? Well, fuck them with an uncomfortable sharp stick. Comfort is ours. We are the comfort fucking masters.’
Brands lack the necessary arrogance and aggression. Brands have commitment issues. They don’t commit to ideas that cut through. And they don’t commit to a single idea over time. They play safe and fickle. Most brands lack the zeal that the ownership of an idea requires.
Frankie surfeited on zeal. They overcommitted to every idea they ever had, be it war, love, pleasure, or sex & horror.
And Frankie own (not owns) the broad, generic, single-word concept of RELAX. If you’ve heard the song, Frankie have captured your imagination, literally so, in a neuroscientific way. The memorability and repetition of the lyrics, coupled with your awareness that your relationship with the song is part of a mass, popular consciousness, make it inevitable that many of your brain’s neural network associations for the word RELAX will relate to this song and this band. There is nothing you can do about. Except maybe hypnosis.
Relax
Don’t do it
When you wanna come
Relax has aged well, better than a lot of popular music of its time. It doesn’t sound dated. But it is a time capsule nonetheless, not of musical style but of cultural permissiveness.
There is an annual ceremony in Antarctica to replace the steel post that marks the position of the geographic south pole. The ice sheet at the Pole drifts by about ten metres each year, and so a new marker is placed in the true position each New Year’s Day. There is a line of markers for previous years that trace the movement of the ice over time. Without them the direction and the scale of shift would be imperceptible.
Culture drifts like polar ice. We don’t notice it happening under our feet, and so we need markers to remind us of the extent to which things have changed over time. Relax is a cultural marker post. It is a discontinuity, a step change every bit as significant as the first scripted use of “fuck” on BBC television.
Looking back it’s hard to believe that there was once some ambiguity about the meaning of this song. How could it possibly have been about anything other than sex? Well them was more innocent times so they was. The working assumption was that pop acts would play by the rules if they wanted radio airplay. And the rules of the time would most certainly have precluded lyrics about sexual climax. Relax drove a bus through the rules and took full brazen advantage of the naivety of that working assumption.
Relax invaded the airwaves under cover of a PR smokescreen. According to the press release the song was about motivation and achieving success, a far-fetched illusion whose tissue-thin veneer of credibility was based on a small subset of lyrics.
Live those dreams
Scheme those schemes
When Frankie talked about coming, they meant in the sense of arriving, of breaking through. Of course they did.
Make making it your intention
Hats off to the Frankie and the ZTT Records team for keeping a straight face. They pulled off a scally scam of epic proportions. But the charade didn’t last long. The song is peppered with guttural utterances, ecstatic moans and lyrics like, “I’m coming, ah!” which all kind of give the game away. Once you see Relax for what it is, it’s hard to believe you could have seen it as anything else.
Legend has it that Mike Read lifted the needle mid-record when the penny finally dropped, furious either at the band, or at himself for being a hapless filth mule, an unwitting host organism for a depravity parasite.
The Relax episode features prominently in Read’s Wikipedia entry, although he tells a somewhat different story. Either way the banning of Relax proved to be a classic example of the maxim that there is no such thing as bad publicity, helping to propel it to №1 in the UK singles chart.
Most people will swear blind that the second situation in which Frankie want (not wants) you to relax is when you want to sock it to it, whatever ‘it’ and ‘it’ are.
Relax
Don’t do it
When you wanna sock it to it
But there is an alternative version, from the horse’s mouth, that fits the Relax narrative so beautifully that it is what I shall always hear when I listen to the song.
When you wanna suck it, chew it
I think we all know what ‘it’ is in that version.
I’ve tried to lip-read Holly Johnson singing this line on various Relax videos, but it works equally well with either lyric in mind. And, really, who cares if it’s just another piece of mischievous, manufactured legend? It’s perfect. As is the po-faced quote from Derek Chinnery, the controller of Radio 1 at the time (see the “alternative version” link above).
Relax is simple and devastatingly effective. There are not many lyrics to write a love letter to. Two imperatives — Relax! Don’t do it! One line of context — When you wanna come. That’s more or less it. Relax is short on lyrics, long on (verbal) emissions. It is a collection of petites morts.
Come!
Hurgh!
In an interview called One February Friday on the B side of the 12 inch version of Two Tribes, Brian Nash talks about the role of Frankie the band, behind Holly Johnson the singer.
We’re the hammer that knocks the nail in
And what a nail Relax is.
(Note the cameo appearance by Lemmy from Motorhead at the end. I don’t think he needs anyone to tell him what his motivation is for this scene.)
If you liked this, you might like this love letter to the lyrics of Rent by The Pet Shop Boys.
