“Relax” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood

"Relax" was the first single by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, released by ZTT in 1983, and it's the record that turned a new band into a national scandal. Holly Johnson wrote the words and shares the music credit with Peter Gill and Mark O'Toole; Trevor Horn produced it, bringing in other musicians alongside the band, and he built a pulsing, pumping Hi-NRG monster out of synths, a thudding beat and pure nerve.

It was a slow fuse. The song crawled into the UK Top 75 in November 1983, reached the Top 40 in early January 1984 and hit No. 1 on the chart dated 28 January, knocking Paul McCartney's "Pipes of Peace" off the top. The BBC banned it from the airwaves over lyrics it considered openly sexual, but the ban couldn't stop it: it stayed in the Top 40 for 37 weeks in a row. When "Two Tribes" came along that summer, "Relax" climbed back up behind it, and for a spell Frankie held the top two spots at once, a feat only the Beatles and John Lennon had managed before. A string of 12-inch versions and the "Frankie Say Relax" T-shirt fad kept feeding the frenzy.

It remains the biggest-selling debut single in UK history, with a reported two million sold there. It won Best British Single of 1984 at the Brit Awards, and in America a 1985 reissue, closer to the British mix, finally reached No. 10 on the Hot 100.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.