Month: November 2022

1984 is considered the pinnacle of pop music (Light, 2014), and while gender fluidity was somewhat common in the music industry (Clews, 2017) – and even briefly accepted by the public ­– in general, being out of the closet in mainstream society – or as a public figure – was not accepted. I am going to look at ‘Relax’ by Frankie Goes to Hollywood (FGTH), the story of how it became a hit, and how it helped to usher in a willingness by public figures and musicians to come out of the closet. The willingness of these public performers has had a significant positive impact on the general public’s attitude to homosexuality even at the time the AIDS epidemic was just beginning. While society at large was processing the horror of AIDS, Holly Johnson and Paul Rutherford were openly gay in contrast to many others (except Bronski Beat and their track Smalltown Boy) within the music industry at the time.

You cannot talk about ‘Relax’ without also talking about it being banned by the BBC. Here I will look at the positive impact of the ban and how, as Oscar Wilde once said, “There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” This certainly held true for FGTH as the BBC ban “is doubly ironic that having been partially responsible for the huge success of ‘Relax’ through the imposition of the band the BBC subsequently had to relent and play the record because its very success confirmed a kind of ‘classic’ status to it.” (Warner, 2003).

Also central to this is the story is Trevor Horn, the producer on Relax, and the co-owner of ZTT records. It was his vision and production that created a track that was reported to have sold over two million copies in the UK alone. Paul Morley, co-owner of ZTT, who handled the marketing and promotion of the single, was also key to its success. He was one of the first in the industry to combine marketing with merchandising in a way that ‘Frankie Say Relax’ t-shirts are still used as a shortcut in film and TV to elicit the 80s.

Finally, I will also go into the production the track. This part will be focused on 1984 as a time that included digital technologies, including the Fairlight CMI, but was still a largely analogue process. 

How it was produced

After signing the band Horn set them up at “Manor Studios at Shipton-on-Cherwell in Oxfordshire. The Manor, as it’s most commonly known, was a residential studio, the third of its kind in the UK.” (Horn, 2022, p.171). It was here that Horn realised that the guitarist Brian Nash (a.k.a. Nasher) was not the guitarist on the original demo and had only been playing for a few months, “the problem was that at that particular moment in time, he couldn’t play.” (ibid., p. 171). The only part of this original recording session at the Manor that made it on to the final track was the sound of the band jumping into the pool which was put into the Fairlight CMI. 

The backbone of ‘Relax’ is handled by the bass/drum on every quarter note that does not deviate from the same pitch for the entire track. The drums were taken care of by the Linn drum machine, “I had five drum patterns in the Linn and my favourite was pattern number 41. I soon found that by switching between pattern 40 (that was a straight four on the floor) to 41 in the verse started to give us a terrific gear shift.” (Horn, 2022, p.175). 

The creative process for writing this track is best summed up by JJ Jeczalik:

“We were kind of getting nowhere really. It just didn’t feel right. I remember saying: ‘Let’s just put an eight-bar loop together’… We just started goofing around, literally goofing around, and cranked the volume up. We were really enjoying ourselves and started to realise that we actually had something… Trevor came back and said, ‘What’s on earth’s going on?’ or something. We went ‘It’s just a loop’. ‘No. No. No. It’s brilliant’.”

(Lacedelli, 2022)

The main instrument that you can hear on the track is the Fairlight CMI and the Linn drum machine. Programming of the Fairlight was done by JJ Jeczalik, keyboards were Andy Richards, and guitars were by Steve Lipson.

The Fairlight was an expensive machine that retailed at around $25,000 USD at the time. But was limited, “The original Fairlight could sample in 8-bit, 16 kHz, 8 voice polyphony and had a basic sequencer functionality.” (Nord, 2014). 

The take that was used in the final version was after four hours practicing with JJ Jeczalik on the Fairlight, Andy Richards on keyboards, and Horn singing as a vocal guide directly to a 24-track analogue (Black, 1999). The mix was completed at Sarm West, “This would be at Sarm West, where an SSL E-Series console was supplemented by a couple of Studer A80 tape machines.” (Buskin, 2008).

Final thoughts 

For me this track still stands up as an example of incredible production (while maybe not from a song writing point of view) that while timeless, sits larger than life in my memory of growing up in the 80s. However, without the team of people behind them including Trevor Horn, Steve Lipson, JJ Jeczalik, and Dave Robinson, ‘Relax’ may not have been the hit that it became.

FGTH were one of the first bands to have a large marketing and merchandising campaign attached to them. ‘Frankie Say Relax’ shirts are now considered a shortcut in film to show that something is set in the 80s. 

Music has the power to change attitudes and I am thankful for the decisions that have empowered these early LGBT artists to come out at the time. This helped to normalise homosexuality and change both society and popular music.  

---

Bibliography

Black, J. (1999) The making of Relax | Articles | Zang Tuum Tumb and all that. Q Magazine. Available at: https://www.zttaat.com/article.php?title=110 (Accessed: October 23, 2022). 

Buskin, R. (2008), Frankie Goes to Hollywood ‘Relax’ | Classic Tracks. Sound on Sound. Available at: https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/frankie-goes-hollywood-relax-classic-tracks (Accessed: October 23, 2022). 

Clews, C. (2017). Gay in the 80s: From Fighting for Our Rights to Fighting for Our Lives. United Kingdom: Matador.

Cunningham, M. (1996) Good Vibrations – a History of Record Production, Chessington: Castle Communications.

Gilbert, B. (2021) How we made: Relax by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, The Guardian. Guardian News and Media. Available at: https://amp.theguardian.com/music/2021/aug/02/how-we-made-relax-by-frankie-goes-to-hollywood-sex-mix-gay-clubs (Accessed: October 23, 2022). 

Horn, T. (2022) “’Relax’/’Two Tribes’, Frankie Goes to Hollywood (1983/1984),” in Adventures in modern recording. London, UK: BONNIER BOOKS LTD, pp. 166–205. 

Johnson, H. (1995) A bone in my flute. London: Arrow. 

Lacedelli, S. (2021) The Fairlight CMI: The secret composer of the music you love, National Science and Media Museum blog. Available at: https://blog.scienceandmediamuseum.org.uk/fairlight-cmi-playlist/ (Accessed: October 23, 2022). 

Light, A. (2014) Why 1984 was Pop Music’s Best Year ever, Billboard. Available at: https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/1984-best-year-of-pop-music-ever-essay-6296392/ (Accessed: November 21, 2022). 

London Recordings (2018) Bronski Beat – Smalltown Boy (official video), YouTube. Available at: https://youtu.be/88sARuFu-tc (Accessed: October 23, 2022). 

Nord (2014) Fairlight history, Nord Keyboards. Nord. Available at: https://www.nordkeyboards.com/sound-libraries/nord-sample-library-archive/fairlight-history (Accessed: October 23, 2022). 

Storm, R. (2021) The story of ‘relax’ by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, YouTube. Hits of the 80s, Channel 5. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgksUyHeqlU (Accessed: October 23, 2022). 

Warner, T. (2003) “’Relax’ by Frankie Goes to Hollywood,” in Pop music – Technology and Creativity. London, UK: Ashgate, pp. 75–90. zttrecords (2007) Frankie goes to hollywood – relax (ZTAS 1), YouTube. YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wN2tHv8gPm8 (Accessed: October 23, 2022). 

William Emmanuel Bevan – also known as Burial – is a South London music producer who was born in 1979. A reclusive producer who received critical praise for ‘Untrue’ in 2007 after its release in November of the same year. 

It was best said by Dan Hancox in The Guardian as to how reclusive Burial was, “Burial doesn’t do DJ gigs, live performances, or radio shows, and only a few photos exist of him, taken by the photographer Georgina Cook, and obscured to conceal his identity. ‘Only about five people outside of my family know I make tunes, I think. I hope,’ he says.” (Hancox, 2007). Burial himself has also said that he has a belief that the less you know about an artist the more you connect with their music. 

Without live performances and interviews, Bevan hid behind his producer persona until he was ‘outed’ by the Independent in an article in February 2008. He confirmed that this was true via his MySpace page (MacNeill, 2018) as remembered by Kyle MacNeill in Vice on the 10^th anniversary of Bevan’s identity reveal. 

Notwithstanding his dislike for the spotlight, his music speaks volumes. Bevan claims that he uses SoundForge, the digital audio editor, for his tracks. As a digital editor, not a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW), it would make the production process more difficult. This leads to a swing to the drum groove. It also introduces timing variance in that it is not set to a metronome and cannot be quantized. It was essentially eyeballed but with his ears. As he describes the process in an interview, “Once I change something, I can never un-change it. I can only see the waves. So, I know when I’m happy with my drums because they look like a nice fishbone. When they look just skeletal as fuck in front of me, and so I know they’ll sound good.” (Kottle, 2007).

“Burial decided at the outset to avoid at all costs the rigid, mechanistic path that eventually brought drum ‘n’ bass to a standstill. To this end, his percussion patterns are intuitively arranged on the screen rather than rigidly quantized, creating minute hesitations and slippages in the rhythm. His snares and hi-hats are covered in fuzz and phaser, like cobwebs on forgotten instruments, and the mix is rough and ready rather than endlessly polished. Perhaps most importantly, his basslines sound like nothing else on Earth. Distorted and heavy, yet also warm and earthy, they resemble the balmy gust of air that precedes an underground train.” (Warmsley, 2009)

Off kilter rhythms abound because of the use of an audio editor rather than a DAW. As stated by Romney in his paper a digital audio editor “does not provide the non-destructive editing that makes a digital audio workstation so liberating. As a sound editor, it relies on destructive editing that alters and degrades the original sound file from the moment it is opened in the program.” (Romney 2017). This kind of destructive editing has added to the groove and feel of the work on Untrue. To listen to the difference between the tracks on Untrue and the one track that Burial completed with a DAW, Unite. The difference in the drums is stark, the tracks on Untrue feel more human and have a groove. Unite on the other hand feels clinical. Still musical but does not feel as authentic as his other tracks.

Bevan’s frequent use of samples from video games (Metal Gear Solid, was used extensively) – most of the percussion being sampled from Metal Gear Solid. With most of the samples treated beyond recognition, however some are still raw and unprocessed. When using vocal samples, he tended to pitch shift until they were almost unrecognisable. “I like pitching down female vocals, so they sound male, and pitching up male vocals so they sound like a girl singing. It can sound sexy as fuck.” (Fisher, 2012). He has sampled Beyonce, Christina Aguilera, Sarah McLachlan and others. For Beyonce, he pitched her down as to be unrecognisable, except though her lyrics (Hawthorn, 2017).

Overall though I had listened to this album before I can say that I did not see the complexity of the album previously and the amount of effort taken to create these great tracks.

References:

Fisher, M. (2012) Burial: Unedited transcript – the Wire, The Wire Magazine – Adventures In Modern Music. Available at: https://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/interviews/burial_unedited-transcript (Accessed: November 21, 2022). 

Hawthorn, C. (2017) Burial’s untrue: The making of a masterpiece ⟋ RA films, Resident Advisor. Edited by S. Misrahi. Available at: https://ra.co/films/3102 (Accessed: November 21, 2022). 

Kottle, J. (2017) The making of burial’s untrue, kottke.org. Available at: https://kottke.org/17/12/the-making-of-burials-untrue (Accessed: November 21, 2022). 

Romney, A. (2017) Beyond audacity: Supporting Sonic Futures through the Digital Audio Workstation, Communication Center Journal. Available at: http://libjournal.uncg.edu/ccj/article/view/1590/pdf (Accessed: November 21, 2022). 

Walmsley, D. “Dubstep”, The Wire Primers: A Guide to Modern Music, ed. Rob Young, London: Verso, 2009, p. 92.

“Tariq Aziz” (2012)

It is quite noisy and distorted, almost unsettling. It is very primitive in both instrumentation and production. There is a lot of noise on the individual instruments. There are also points where the sound just stops, again adding to a feeling of being unsettled. Use of middle eastern beats and the strings also help with the aesthetic. While there is repartition in the track, it sounds like the loops are of varying length. This keeps the track from being as repetitive as it initially presents. This type of metrical dissonance has been written about by Butler (2001), where he states, “A displacement dissonance occurs when an interpretive layer sounds like it is displaced from a metrical layer; the conflicting layer is called the antimetrical layer. Since electronic sound production facilitates this sort of nonalignment, it is not surprising that it is a frequent source of metrical dissonance in EDM.” This dissonance creates variety for the listener and keeps the track from sounding too repetitive. There is also a lot of filtering and glitching over the main drum loop, most likely to also provide variety to the loop. 

It is a sparce track in terms of instrumentation. Just the distorted drums along with the strings with a lot of noise. There is not much structure to the track. It starts with the main drum loop, and continues with small variations, mainly with glitches and filtering via EQ with some beats distorted. At the end of the track, it sounds like there is some type of erosion effect to change the bitrate to a lower bit depth before the track stops. 

From Discogs we read that Muslimgauze was “influenced by the conflicts and history in the Muslim world” (Discogs, no date). And from Bidoun: “His project began in 1983 as a personal response to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. ‘Muslimgauze,’ Jones tirelessly explained, ‘are pro-Arab/Palestinian and detest the vile stench of Israel.’” (Clayton, 2009).

However, Muslimgauze, real name Bryn Jones, was not Muslim and had never visited a Muslim country. Jones was a producer from Manchester. Jones reportedly died 37 years of age in 1999 from a rare fungal infection in his blood. Since his death there have been over 50 new releases. This could lead one to believe that some of the later releases are not from the artist. However Jones was known to flood potential collaborators with lots of content in an effort to get collaborations. Maybe these are just coming to light.

Due to the volume of releases and variety of productions released, it is difficult to put his music into a specific genre, however his works are generally described as ethnic electronica. Jones tended to use found recordings, as he never visited a Muslim country, and layered them in rhythmic sections. While most of his works utilise a beat to create the rhythm, repetition of a loop of speech can alter a listeners’ perception of a track making it more musical (Rowland et. al., 2018). 

Regardless of the provenance of the work after his death, this track, for me at least, is reminiscent of war and conflict in the middle east. It is the raw and primitive production work that evokes the feel of a country in conflict.

References

Butler, M. (2014) Hearing kaleidoscopes: Embedded grouping dissonance in electronic dance music, twentieth-century music. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/1790394/Hearing_Kaleidoscopes_Embedded_Grouping_Dissonance_in_Electronic_Dance_Music (Accessed: November 13, 2022). 

Clayton, J. (2009) Muslin gaze, Bidoun. Available at: https://www.bidoun.org/articles/muslin-gaze (Accessed: November 13, 2022). 

Discogs (no date) Muslimgauze, Discogs. Available at: https://www.discogs.com/artist/484-Muslimgauze (Accessed: November 13, 2022). 

Rowland, J., Kasdan, A. and Poeppel, D. (2018) There is music in repetition: Looped segments of speech and nonspeech induce the perception of music in a time-dependent manner – psychonomic bulletin & review, SpringerLink. Springer US. Available at: https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13423-018-1527-5 (Accessed: November 13, 2022). 

1995 Version:

This track (make sure to notice the ‘.NUXX’ which is the indicator that it is the track we are talking about) was first released as a B-side to ‘Born Slippy’ an unrelated instrumental track, in 1995. After it was used in 1996 movie ‘Trainspotting’ it quickly rose to #2 in the UK Singles Chart in July 1996. In this post I’ll be speaking about the original 1995 (.NUXX) version and the differences to the remastered version in 2012. 

Before talking about the difference in production between the original and the remix I’m going to do a short breakdown of the sounds, instrumentation, and the vocals, to compare the use of production techniques between the two versions. 

The first thing you hear in the original 1995 track is the opening pad chords together with the heavily delayed synth that plays B flat major followed by an E flat major chord. There are a few sources that point to a Juno-106 for the synth (Roland, 2022), but some sources also point to the Waldorf Microwave (Music, 2021). 

The vocals come in at 0:13 seconds, these are distorted and have been put through a Roland VP-330 Vocal Synthesizer which they purchased from Midge Ure (Roland, 2022).

As an interesting aside the vocals were done in a single take (Lynskey, 2006). The lyrics themselves are almost a stream of consciousness. Karl Hyde spoke about the Born Slippy lyrics in an interview with the Australian Financial Review, “Musique concrete is the equivalent of what goes on in my head and Born Slippy‘s lyrics are the proof.” (Bailey, 2019). By using short phrases and repetition it sits well with how pop music is constructed to make the track memorable, “the short phrases, regular phrase lengths, simple time signatures and mostly stepwise diatonic melodies that characterize pop music result in simple musical ideas that are easily memorised by the listener” (Warner, 2017). 

The TR-909 hi-hats come in at 1:08 followed by the kick drums at 1:17 and the impetus and drive of this track come to the fore. The 909 kicks are distorted and to get this sound, “It’s heavily driven through a console and processed but it’s a 909.” (Roland, 2022). When the kick starts it turns into a sparce break with only drums (with lots of delay) and vocals from 1:17 till 3:44. The chords and pads come back, which then goes back to drums to fade out.

2012 Remastered Version:

For the new remixed version released in 2012 the main differences that you can see on the track in Apple Music is that it has been released as both Hi-Res Lossless and as an Apple Digital Master. This means that the track has been either re-recorded or digitised from the original tape. From what I can hear across the different versions in general is the 1995 version sounds like there is less dynamic range. The 2012 version is ‘clearer’ and seems to have more dynamic range, mainly on high and low frequencies. These additional frequencies could be due to better mixing, EQ, or other techniques after re-recording the stems from tape, or using a larger bit depth (24-bit vs 16 bit). From research on the impact of digital technology on recording in the 1990s brought up an interesting idea that I did not occur to me. From Christopher DeArcangelis, “Mastering was the site of one of the most significant revolutions brought by digital audio. With vinyl records, there was an upper limit on a recording’s loudness. If mastered too loud, the record would shake the needle and disrupt playback. Loudness would not affect CD playback, and the medium also had a clear maximum amplitude. Therefore, CDs could be mastered a whole lot louder. Mastering engineers utilized brickwall limiters to anticipate differences in the dynamic range in the recordings by pushing its levels to the ceiling.” (DeArcangelis, 2017). The use of digital technology in this way not only changed the instrumentation of what we listened to but also how we consumed it. 

Special Bonus: Underworld playing Born Slippy live in Berlin

References:

Bailey, M. (2019) How underworld’s born slippy was born, Australian Financial Review. Available at: https://www.afr.com/life-and-luxury/arts-and-culture/how-underworld-s-born-slippy-was-born-20190528-p51rz1 (Accessed: November 6, 2022). 

DeArcangelis, C. (2017) How the 1990s changed recording and Music Production Forever, reverb.com. Available at: https://reverb.com/uk/news/how-the-1990s-changed-recording-and-music-production-forever (Accessed: November 6, 2022). 

Lynskey, D. and Simpson, D. (2006) Twelve artists talk about making one of their classic tracks, The Guardian. Guardian News and Media. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2006/feb/24/popandrock2 (Accessed: November 6, 2022). 

Music, C. (2021) The 40 greatest synth sounds of all time, no 32: Underworld – born slippy, MusicRadar. MusicRadar. Available at: https://www.musicradar.com/news/the-40-greatest-synth-sounds-of-all-time-no-32-underworld-born-slippy (Accessed: November 6, 2022). 

Roland (2022) Roland artist interview – Underworld, Roland Resource Centre. Available at: https://rolandcorp.com.au/blog/roland-artist-interview-underworld (Accessed: November 6, 2022). 

Warner, T. (2017) “Simplicity and repetition,” in Pop music: Technology and creativity: Trevor Horn and the Digital Revolution. London, UK: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, pp. 9–10.