Relax

Written by Holly Johnson, Peter Gill, Mark O'Toole, and Brian Nash, "Relax" was climbing the UK charts when BBC Radio 1 DJ Mike Read refused to play it on January 11, 1984, declaring the lyrics obscene. The BBC immediately banned the song from all its stations — which backfired spectacularly. "Relax" jumped to number one within two weeks and stayed there for five weeks, eventually selling two million copies in the UK alone. The original music video, filmed at Heaven, a gay nightclub in London, depicted an explicit homoerotic S&M fantasy sequence that was banned from British television, making the BBC ban one of the most effective promotional tools in pop history.