For months, Frankie and Horn worked “Relax” from a libidinous sketch into an amorous phantasmagoria. Horn had at his disposal a Fairlight CMI, the nascent digital audio workstation recently favored by Stevie Wonder, Herbie Hancock and Peter Gabriel. “He was one of about three people in England who owned and knew how to use a Fairlight computer synthesizer,” Rutherford said. The machine allowed accurate visual sequencing. you could draw melodies and rhythmic patterns directly on the screen with a light pen. It was also the first commercially available digital sampler that could record sounds directly into the machine and play them back in any key on the keyboard.
Working with a series of session musicians, Horn teased layers and layers of extraneous sound out of the Fairlight—a delicious three-note bass, sugary digital horns, a constellation of syncopated percussion—all building toward a crescendo he called an “orgasmic effect.” “I imagined that dawn, Holly had climbed to the top of a mosque, held his hands in the air and invited all these hordes to have sex with him,” he said. “I had a huge orgasm in the middle, the biggest orgasm anyone had ever seen.” .
It worked. “Relax” satisfied listeners starved for a sound that enveloped them more than washed them away. It also sent the competition scrambling. Early synth advocate Gary Numan said the single “plunged me into a pit of despair. The production was so good, the sounds so classy, that it seemed to elevate the whole recording job – we were all left reeling, trying to catch up.”
While Horn and the band labored over Frankie's sound, Morley began to create an equally infectious media campaign. Riffing on Katharine Hamnett's “Choose Life” design (a reference to Buddhism, not abortion), she wrote a series of cryptic slogans and printed them on plain white T-shirts in big, black letters: Frankie say relax. Frankie Says War! Hide yourself. Frankie says to arm the unemployed. Morley himself liked to wear a T-shirt that read: “Propaganda will give you the truth.” In interviews, he was equally prone to slogans: “I condemned [manipulation] when it got bad. Great manipulation that I love.” By the summer of '84, the shirts were everywhere — a fad, sure, but also a little prophetic agitprop. The ubiquitous instructions with no clear principle behind them might make you question your sensitivity to tools of authority in general.
Frankie's second single, the anti-war rumble “Two Tribes”, debuted at No.1 in June 1984. With Frankiemania at a fever pitch, the natural next step was to let the band play an entire album —and in its prefab splendor, it made sense that their debut LP would be spread over two discs, a lavish oasis in the midst of Thatcherite austerity. Despite their cultural power, Frankie still had a lot to prove. The naysayers claimed they were too polished, too shiny. all style, no substance. industry puppets lend their beautiful faces to Horn's studio enjoyment.
