As this weekend has turned out to be an unexpectedly and unpleasantly stressful one, I decided to make use of this b-side Sunday to take a deep breath and relax a little...
Frankie Goes To Hollywood - Relax (Instrumental) (the b-side of 1983's "Relax" 12" single)
...though perhaps not in the manner Frankie suggests.
Depending on what story one chooses to believe, wouldn't the instrumental version of "Relax" actually be a Blockheads, Art of Noise, or Trevor Horn track? (Actually, considering the amount of production spit and polish Horn lavished on the recording, the latter essentially applies regardless of the version in question.)
The single wasn't so much a pop record as a meticulous marketing stratagem calculated to maximize publicity, and therefore sales, through the MacLarenesque technique of epater-ing the bourgeoisie. While the psuedo-decadent sexual window-dressing seems transparently pretentious and absurd in hindsight...
...it did pay off very handsomely for a short while, at least.
Sunday, May 18, 2008
desire to be repeated as often as desired
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2 comments:
Link is busted, yo.
As for FGTH being wholly a studio creation: I dunno. Once I might have agreed, but a couple of years ago on the FGTH episode of VH1's Bands Reunited, they showed an old performance clip of the group before they fell in with Horn, doing an early version of "Relax"—and the bones of it were there...
For some reason, Blogger chose to post an unfinished draft. The final version is up now.
What I've heard and read is that Horn had a lot riding financially on FGTH being a massive success. He didn't want to leave anthing to chance, and did some major studio tweaking before releasing the final product. But that's par for the course in pop music, anyhow.
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