For months, Frankie and Horn labored “Calm down” 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 in every of about three folks in England who owned and knew methods to use a Fairlight pc synthesizer,” mentioned Rutherford. The machine enabled exact visible sequencing; you can etch melodies and rhythmic patterns instantly on the display screen with a lightweight pen. It was additionally the primary commercially accessible digital sampler that would file sounds instantly 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 referred to 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 referred to as all of those hordes ahead to have intercourse with him,” he mentioned. “I put an enormous orgasm within the center, the largest orgasm anyone had ever been had by anyone.”
It labored. “Calm down” 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 only “plunged me right into a pit of despair. The manufacturing was so good, the sounds so stylish, that it appeared to maneuver the whole 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 huge, black letters: Frankie say calm down. Frankie say battle! Conceal your self. Frankie say arm the unemployed. Morley himself favored to put on a T-shirt that mentioned, “Propaganda gives you the reality.” In interviews, he was equally vulnerable to sloganeering: “I condemned [manipulation] when it was accomplished badly. Nice manipulation I am keen on.” By the summer season of ’84, the shirts have been all over the place—a fad, certain, but additionally a prescient little bit of agitprop. Ubiquitous directives with no clear authority behind them would possibly make you surprise about your susceptibility to authority’s instruments basically.
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 so much to show. Naysayers claimed they have been too polished, too shiny; all fashion, no substance; trade puppets lending their fairly faces to Horn’s studio indulgence.
