For months, Frankie and Horn labored “Loosen up” from a libidinal sketch into an erotic phantasmagoria. Horn had at his disposal a Fairlight CMI, the nascent digital audio workstation newly favored by Stevie Surprise, Herbie Hancock, and Peter Gabriel. “He was one among about three folks in England who owned and knew how one can use a Fairlight laptop synthesizer,” mentioned Rutherford. The machine enabled exact visible sequencing; you possibly can etch melodies and rhythmic patterns straight on the display screen with a lightweight pen. It was additionally the primary commercially out there digital sampler that might report sounds straight into the machine and play them again at any pitch on the keyboard.
Working with a slew of session musicians, Horn teased layers and layers of outré sound out of the Fairlight—a deliciously sleazy three-note bass strut, candied digital horns, a constellation of syncopated percussion—all constructing towards a crescendo he known as “the orgasm impact.” “I imagined it was daybreak, Holly had climbed to the highest of a mosque, held his arms within the air and known as all of those hordes ahead to have intercourse with him,” he mentioned. “I put an enormous orgasm within the center, the most important orgasm anyone had ever been had by anyone.”
It labored. “Loosen up” glad listeners ravenous for sound that walloped them greater than it washed over them. It additionally despatched the competitors scrambling. Early synth advocate Gary Numan mentioned the one “plunged me right into a pit of despair. The manufacturing was so good, the sounds so elegant, that it appeared to maneuver your complete recording enterprise up a gear—we have been all left floundering, attempting to catch up.”
Whereas Horn and the band toiled away on Frankie’s sound, Morley started crafting an equally infectious media marketing campaign. Riffing on Katharine Hamnett’s “Select Life” design (a reference to Buddhism, not abortion), he penned a sequence of enigmatic slogans and printed them on clean white T-shirts in large, black letters: Frankie say loosen up. Frankie say warfare! Conceal your self. Frankie say arm the unemployed. Morley himself appreciated to put on a T-shirt that mentioned, “Propaganda gives you the reality.” In interviews, he was equally liable to sloganeering: “I condemned [manipulation] when it was executed badly. Nice manipulation I like.” By the summer season of ’84, the shirts have been in every single place—a fad, certain, but additionally a prescient little bit of agitprop. Ubiquitous directives with no clear authority behind them may make you surprise about your susceptibility to authority’s instruments normally.
Frankie’s second single, the anti-war rumble “Two Tribes,” debuted at No. 1 in June 1984. With Frankiemania at a fever pitch, the pure subsequent step was to let the band play throughout an album’s size—and with their prefab grandiosity, it solely made sense that their debut LP would sprawl throughout two discs, an opulent oasis within the midst of Thatcherite austerity. Regardless of their cultural maintain, Frankie nonetheless had rather a lot to show. Naysayers claimed they have been too polished, too shiny; all type, no substance; trade puppets lending their fairly faces to Horn’s studio indulgence.
