Backstage at BBC Breakfast in Salford, Holly Johnson is showing
off his teal jacket. “Feel how soft it is,” he marvels. “I think
it’s lamb.” He pauses. “I hope Morrissey doesn’t read this. He’ll
be on the phone!”
It’s a more demure look than when he burst on to the scene in
1983, fronting pop powerhouse Frankie Goes To Hollywood, in
“leather knickers and jackboots”. “The image of the band,” he
notes, “was lock up your daughters and your sons.”
Now 54, Johnson is here promoting his new solo album Europa, his
first release in 15 years: a collection of sophisticated
electro-pop featuring appearances from Roxy Music’s Phil Manzanera
and Vini Reilly of Durutti Column. “I like to think of it as club
music for people who don’t go to clubs anymore,” he says in a voice
that still sounds as if he’s gargling with the Mersey, despite
three decades spent living in London.
As a “ferocious homosexual” (in the words of his then record
label ZTT) in the 1980s, Johnson was a (c)lone wolf. There’s a
scene in the recent film Pride where the head of Lesbians and Gays
Support the Miners tries to find a headliner for a charity concert,
and is told by one record company “there are no gay artists on this
label” – the punchline is we see posters of Elton John and Marc
Almond on its walls. “It was difficult because it was only me, my
bandmate Paul Rutherford and Jimmy Somerville who were out,” he
remembers. “Everyone else was told by their record company not to
talk about it. Part of it was me being northern. Rather than seeing
it as a political act, I just thought ‘up yours.’
Back with his first album in 15 years, Holly Johnson reflects on
life in Frankie Goes To Hollywood, his Aids diagnosis and returning
as a mature student to his first love – art. By Gary Ryan
‘The image of the band was lock up your daughters and your
sons’
magazine Sounds saying that the Relax video, with its allusions
to orgies, “gave gay people a bad name”. “It was a competitive
world in those days. You’d be sitting in the make-up chair and
there’d be some other gay pop star in the other chair not speaking
to you,” he laughs. “Now I see Jimmy [Somerville] or Marc [Almond]
at festivals and we’re all pleased to see each other – it’s like
the 1980s never happened.”
Famously, Relax was given a leg-up in the charts by a BBC
boycott initiated by irate Radio One DJ Mike Read, who objected to
its “explicit” content. “Relax was the first time you heard a man
audibly having an orgasm on record. We’d heard women – Jane Birkin
on Je t’aime… and Donna Summer’s Love To Love You Baby – but we
hadn’t heard men make those particular noises.
“It was a double-edged sword. It gave us loads of publicity but
the media also tried to find controversy in everything we did after
that. That added to a pressure-cooker existence. You’d have the
News Of The World turning up on my doorstep, and photographing me
and my boyfriend going into the house, or – because he’s German –
publishing racist articles calling him a Hun.”
In his 1994 autobiography A Bone In My Flute he broke taboos
again by “outing” himself as having HIV. In the BBC interview that
precedes our chat, the presenter – a graduate of the Alan Partridge
School of Tact – suggests to Johnson that some
“It wasn’t the wisest decision from a business perspective but
it made my life easier and, according to people who still write to
me now, it made their lives easier too – that there was someone who
was, to their eyes, in a band on Top of the Pops and not being all
shy and retiring and marrying someone and pretending to be
heterosexual; that there was another way of living your life.”
In 1984, the then closeted Boy George penned a letter to
music
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