What Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s ‘Relax’ is Really About (2025)

By Oliver Tearle

Banning things can backfire in a spectacular way, and the ‘Streisand effect’ is a well-documented phenomenon. When the BBC banned ‘Relax’, the debut single from the Liverpudlian group Frankie Goes to Hollywood, it climbed to the top of the charts, displacing Paul McCartney’s feeble ‘Pipes of Peace’ from that coveted spot.

Given the meaning of ‘Relax’, there’s a satisfying fittingness – if that’s not a word then it jolly well should be – to Holly Johnson and gang unseating their fellow Scouser McCartney’s innocuous offering from the top spot, not least because ‘Pipes of Peace’ is often viewed as part of a trilogy of anti-war songs, along with two ‘Tug’ numbers, ‘Tug of War’ and ‘Tug of Peace’ (but we won’t go there).

But are the rumours really true? Is ‘Relax’ a song about orgasms, or not?

In all my wasted hours spent nerdily researching the true meanings behind famous songs, I’ve discovered that most songs that people think are about sex and drugs usually aren’t about those things at all. So, contrary to widespread belief, America’s ‘A Horse with No Name’ isn’t about horse (that is, heroin), but literally about a horse; The Vapours’ ‘Turning Japanese’ isn’t about going half-blind from over-indulgence in what our Victorian forebears liked to call self-abuse; and, perhaps most famously, ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ isn’t about LSD but a kid’s painting.

The rumour that Frankie Goes to Hollywood released (no pun intended) as their debut single a song offering advice about good ejaculatory practice has been doing the rounds ever since BBC Radio 1 DJ Mike Read got the song banned from the radio station’s airwaves in January 1984, stomping his feet about its sexual overtones and, in doing so, helping it to sell over two million copies in the UK alone.

In the case of this particular track, the rumour appears to be well-founded. The song is about sex, and specifically about coming, or rather not coming. More specifically, it’s about holding back one’s orgasm until the last possible moment, by ‘relaxing’, slowing down during sex, and delaying that gratification.

But it’s possible that the song, far from being an outrageously scandalous bit of licentiousness, is actually offering a piece of sound sexual health advice. AIDS had first been reported in the news in 1981, just two years before the song was born, and safe sex was being taken up by gay men in particular as a less risky way to sleep around without getting a dose of something truly life-shortening. Learning not to shoot one’s wad willy-nilly (as it were) could end up saving your life.

After all, Frankie Goes to Hollywood – their memorable band name taken from a line about Frank Sinatra in Guy Peellaert’s 1974 book Rock Dreams – didn’t just sell T-shirts by the lorryload that read ‘Frankie Says Relax’ (a clever bit of merchandising dreamt up by Paul Morley, the music journalist who co-founded the band’s record label ZTT with Trevor Horn of Buggles fame). They also marketed ones which bore ‘Frankie Says Use Condoms’. So by association, ‘Relax’ may be about sex, but it’s safe sex, in an age in which gay men were being warned, maligned, and scapegoated widely in the press over (perceived) promiscuity.

If we consider the internal clues from the song’s lyrics, its sexual meaning – less a subtext than just plain old text – pretty much shouts itself from the rooftops. The references to laser beams (come again?), shooting ‘it’ in the right direction, sucking things, and even the splashing sounds which feature in the song all confirm that this is a sex song that actually is a sex song for once.

The original video for ‘Relax’ certainly ramped up the sexual aspect of the song, and was promptly banned too. But it wasn’t just sex that proved controversial: in the video it was clear that it was gay sex (two of Frankie’s members – no, we won’t go there – were homosexual).

That official video, set in an S&M club, feels at times as if it could almost be a reunion of the Village People, without the Red Indian but with a toga-clad man (who bears a more than passing resemblance to the late Mel Smith) being shaved by a man in a policeman’s cap wearing bondage gear over his face, before Mel’s doppelganger promptly pisses over an enthusiastic Holly Johnson and friends waiting below. Well, whatever sets your boat on fire, as a Nordic funeral director once said to me.

Paul Morley later commented that it’s ‘easy to get publicity if you annoy people’, a remark that has since been taken up as official PR practice by record companies in the intervening forty years. What many suits working in the music industry have failed to remember is that Frankie also had catchy, well-crafted songs to offer people, once they’d annoyed them enough to take an interest in what they were doing.

Curiously, knocking ‘Relax’ into shape was such a tortuous (and tortured) ordeal, costing a reported £70,000, that in the final version, Holly Johnson was the only member of Frankie Goes to Hollywood to appear on the actual record. The other band members were away from the studio when the song’s recording was eventually nailed to everyone’s satisfaction, although a sample produced from the sound of the rest of the band jumping into a swimming pool was used in the final edit.

That large splash (let’s not go there) proved to be quite the money shot (okay, I did intend that one) for the rest of the band, and ‘Relax’ is officially the sixth biggest-selling UK single of all time, just behind ‘You’re the One That I Want’ and ahead of a double A-side by Boney M.

So a song about orgasms sits between a good dollop of Grease and Boney’s brown girl in the ring … but we definitely won’t go there.

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