October 1983, Liverpool → London: British label ZTT Records, founded by producer Trevor Horn, releases the debut single “Relax” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood. First three months - 30,000 copies sold, acceptable for a debut single from a British new wave act, but unremarkable. Everything changed in January 1984, when BBC Radio 1 banned the track from airplay. By March - #1 UK, where it stayed for 5 weeks. By the end of 1984 - 2 million copies in the UK alone, the year's record.
The ban as marketing
On 11 January 1984, BBC Radio 1 DJ Mike Read pulled the needle off the record mid-broadcast, announcing into the microphone: “This song is disgusting”. The “Relax” lyrics contained explicit sexual allusions. Five days later the BBC officially banned the track - on Radio 1, on Top of the Pops, on Radio 2. The same day, single sales grew tenfold.
“Mike Read did for ZTT what we couldn't have done even with a million pounds of marketing. After the ban, every pub, every school, every radio show in the world was talking about us”, Trevor Horn told Sounds in 1985.
The ban lasted until 21 May 1984 - 19 weeks. During this time the track spent 48 weeks in the UK Singles Chart, 5 of them at number one. It broke the record of Soft Cell's “Tainted Love” (43 weeks charted). End-of-year sales were 2 million copies, per Official Charts Company data.
How the sound was made
When Frankie Goes to Hollywood signed with ZTT in 1983, they played hard glam-rock with guitars. Trevor Horn threw out the entire guitar track and rebuilt the record from scratch. Recording took place at Sarm West Studios (Horn's own studio on Basing Street, London) over eight weeks. Of the group's original material, only Holly Johnson's vocal survived in the final version.
Horn's instrumentation on “Relax”:
- Fairlight CMI Series II - all dramatic orchestral bedding, samples of brass and strings
- Synclavier - the signature “stabs” (syncopated hits) in the chorus
- Yamaha DX7 - electric piano and leads
- LinnDrum - main drum-machine backbone
- Roland TR-808 - percussion layer on top
Nobody from Frankie Goes to Hollywood except Johnson was physically present at the final sessions - Horn and engineers Andy Richards and Steve Lipson assembled the track themselves from samples and programmed parts. The band toured playing material they couldn't technically reproduce live.
The numbers
- UK: #1, 5 weeks; 2 million copies (all of 1984)
- Germany: #5 (13 weeks in top 40)
- France: #12
- Netherlands: #6
- Switzerland: #2 (held from #1 only by Nena's “99 Luftballons”)
- Australia: #5, 3× platinum
- US: #10 Billboard Hot 100 (March 1984), #7 Dance Club Play
- New Zealand: #1, 6 weeks
Total global sales by end of 1985 - around 6 million copies. In the Official Charts Company's 2019 ranking of “British singles of all time”, “Relax” sits at #6, ahead of The Beatles' “Hey Jude” and Queen's “Bohemian Rhapsody”.
Why Horn and ZTT worked this way
Trevor Horn in 1983 was already a well-known producer - Buggles (“Video Killed the Radio Star”, 1979), Yes (album 90125, 1983), ABC (The Lexicon of Love, 1982) had all passed through his hands. He founded ZTT Records specifically to avoid the standard studio model of “artist + producer” and instead control sound, packaging and marketing in full.
On “Relax” Horn applied for the first time what would later be called “sampler-driven pop” - a track built entirely from samples, where live instruments are barely audible. Eighteen months later this concept underpinned ZTT's work with Propaganda (“Dr. Mabuse”, 1984), Grace Jones (“Slave to the Rhythm”, 1985) and Art of Noise. A breakdown of the Fairlight CMI lives in a separate piece.
Cultural aftershock
“Relax” was one of the first mainstream gay hits to reach the top of mainstream charts. Holly Johnson and bassist Mark O'Toole were openly gay - for 1984 Britain this was radical. The BBC's ban was formally justified by sexual explicitness without direct reference to homosexuality, but everyone understood the subtext.
In the 1990s and 2000s the track was a staple of Pride events worldwide. In 2017, BBC Radio 1 placed it on a special programme marking the 50th anniversary of decriminalisation of homosexuality in the UK - a public apology for the 1984 ban. In 2022 the track opened the Qatar World Cup playlist (which triggered a separate political scandal).
What the conclusion is
“Relax” is a rare case where a state broadcaster's ban didn't kill a hit - it created one. ZTT made enough on this record to buy an office in Notting Hill and fund the label for three months. Horn used the revenue to produce “Voyage Voyage” by Desireless and other European hits of 1984-1986 - indirectly, “Relax” bankrolled a whole wave of eurodance. Frankie Goes to Hollywood broke up in 1987 after two albums - they didn't survive the success of their own debut. For more on the birth of italo-disco, see the dedicated piece.