Doesn’t it stand to reason that, in 2009, being the man from Frankie Goes To
Hollywood should be a much calmer affair than it was in 1984? On the eve of
a new hits compilation, Frankie Say Greatest, Holly Johnson, now 49,
begs to differ. “My record company are working me quite hard at the moment,”
he says between sips of green tea at a London deli, Scouse drawl still very
much intact. “It’s very different to my day when there were only three TV
stations and one radio show. You can understand why pop stars go off the
rails. They have to do so much work.”
Twenty-five years have elapsed since the fame of being No 1 with Relax
collided with the infamy of a blanket BBC ban over the song’s homoerotic
content. With sales of 1.9 million in Britain alone, Relax remains the sixth
biggest single to date. Sixteen places beneath it in the same chart, its
successor Two Tribes shifted a barely less respectable 1.5 million. Few
bands in history defined their era as emphatically as Frankie Goes To
Hollywood, an achievement which will be honoured at this Monday’s Q Awards
when the group make off with the Classic Track award for Relax. But for
Johnson it’s so much water under a very distant bridge. Since leaving the
group in 1987, his discovery that he was HIV positive prompted him to write
his autobiography, thinking that he had only a few years left to live. A
Bone in My Flute appeared in 1994 and, happily, Johnson is still here. In
the interim, he has fulfilled a long-held ambition to go to art school and
has become a widely exhibited artist.
No doubt, this all helps to account for the polite yet unmistakable air of a
man who feels he has better things to do with his time than pore over the
past. “I’m a different person,” he says — and, sure enough, a pair of
ostentatiously studded Prada brogues are the only obvious connection between
the sybaritic ringmaster of those early videos and his blond, bespectacled,
middle-aged incarnation.
But point out that surely no one’s forcing him to do this and it transpires
that, well, they sort of are. Much to his chagrin, Johnson’s two
post-Frankie solo albums, Blast and Dreams That Money Can’t Buy,
have been deleted for the best part of a decade. When his record company
told him about the release of Frankie Say Greatest, he said he would
agree to talk about the record only in exchange for the reissue of the two
solo records.
More stipulations. I was told, ahead of our meeting a stone’s throw from
Johnson’s house, that he would be the sole interviewee in a feature about
Frankie Goes To Hollywood. Wouldn’t it have lightened his workload to have
given his old associates their say? Perhaps, except that Johnson also has
issues about seeing his utterances juxtaposed against the pronouncements of
those who worked with him — in particular Trevor Horn, the producer credited
as the architect of the Frankie “sound”.
In 1988 it was Horn who launched a court action against Johnson, who — having
left the group — wanted to escape his contract with Horn’s ZTT imprint.
Johnson may have emerged from the High Court victorious but, in the interim,
little love has been lost. Mere mention of the producer is enough to uncork
a lingering sense that, in the rush to venerate Horn’s studio genius,
Johnson’s own contribution has been overlooked. “You’re hearing the sound of
my voice and the melodies I wrote and the lyrics that I wrote — and that’s
what most people listen to when they hear a record. Relax might have
amazing production values, but it’s really the sound of the vocal that makes
it exciting.”
Johnson’s contribution to those early records was audible, but the
contribution made by other members of the group was somewhat more nebulous.
Eager to fully realise the Wagnerian future-disco of the group’s Welcome
to the Pleasure Dome album, Horn used old studio hands over other
members of the group. One tabloid trumpeted “Frankie relax while session men
made the hits”, while the music press focused on the former NME
journalist Paul Morley’s contribution to the Frankie “aesthetic”: the
“Frankie Says” T-shirts; the arcanely worded advertisements. In Johnson’s
eyes it all served to make the group seem like a postmodern boy band in an
era that predated boy bands. “We were denigrated for the fact that it was
machines on the records, whereas New Order made Blue Monday and were
hailed as the best thing since sliced bread.”
To those of us gazing from the distance of a colour television, the dynamic of
the group seemed to run along simple lines. Out front, the defiantly gay
pairing of Johnson and his backing vocalist Paul Rutherford transmitting
messages that our parents didn’t necessarily want us to hear; at the back,
the three unreconstructed hetero-rockers, Brian “Nasher” Nash, Mark O’Toole
and Peter Gill. Johnson concedes that there was a divide within the group,
albeit one that didn’t run along sexuality lines. “It was the lead singer
against the rest,” he says. “As far as the record company was concerned, I
was the boy least likely to obey. I’d get phone calls from people [within
the organisation] saying: ‘Don’t think that you’re indispensable’.”
Johnson won’t name names, but in his “paranoia”, he says he then sought to
protect his place in the band by registering it as a limited company.
Inevitably, when the rest of the group found out, they were furious. At “a
solicitor’s office” a showdown ensued that resulted in Johnson agreeing not
to “use the name with someone else — not that it was ever my intention to do
so”.
Despite being the biggest-selling band of 1984, Frankie Goes To Hollywood were
conspicuous by their absence from Live Aid a year later. Johnson says that
Bob Geldof would phone him daily, asking the group to play. By this stage
though, Frankie’s internal affairs had been plunged into darkness. For tax
purposes, the group were told that their second album, Liverpool, was
to be recorded in the Netherlands. Assured that this time they would get to
play on the record, all bar Johnson lobbied for a rockier sound. “They’d had
a taste of touring by that point,” Johnson smiles, “and wanted to be Def
Leppard, whereas I felt the future was in electronic dance music”.
For an album riven with schisms, it was amazing that Liverpool appeared
at all, less still that it spawned two decent singles in Rage Hard
and Watching the Wildlife. Within months of the record’s release,
though, Johnson was left to address other concerns. His boyfriend, Wolfgang
Kühler, went to see a doctor in the Netherlands and had his worst fears
confirmed. Weeks later, however, a further test — back in London — found
that Kühler had been misdiagnosed. In a bizarre twist, it turned out that it
was Johnson who had the virus. “At the end of 1989, I was already showing
signs of ill health,” he remembers. “I had to pull out of a major German TV
show with some mysterious flu. Did I have an inkling? Oh God, yeah. But I
thought that if I didn’t talk about it, it would go away.” Once the virus
was diagnosed, Johnson waited another 16 months before plucking up the
courage to tell his mother.
“I was nearly in the grave,” he says flatly. He registers my surprise. I had
always regarded Johnson as perennial proof that HIV is no longer a terminal
condition. “Well, Holly Johnson was at death’s door between 1991 and 1996,”
he says. By the end of that same period, most of Johnson and Kühler’s
friends were no longer alive. “It was like this family tree of death,” he
says. One of the experimental drugs given to him at the time left him with
pancreatitis, “an agonising condition more common to chronic alcoholics”.
Had it not been for the arrival of antiretroviral drugs that minimise the
symptoms of HIV, Johnson would now also be dead. Although he looks and feels
well these days, he says that he doesn’t feel the need to advertise the
fact. Offers to take part in panel games and reality TV shows “come in all
the time”. All are declined. Not that he won’t tune in and watch those shows
from time to time. He thought his old friend Pete Burns was “brilliant, the
best he’s ever been” in Celebrity Big Brother, “but I’m
not suited to that stuff”.
Six years ago though, Johnson’s twin aversions to reality TV and nostalgia
merged, when he received a knock on his door from VH1’s Bands
Reunited show. He was cajoled by the programme-makers into meeting the
rest of Frankie, but the result made for deeply squirmsome viewing. It also
threw a little more perspective on Johnson’s continuing distrust of the
media. “I agreed to do an interview about the Eighties. Next thing a crew of
15 turns up and they spring this question: ‘Will you meet up with the other
members of the band and, if there happen to be instruments around, will you
perform?’
“I agreed to meet the boys after 17 years of not seeing them. Then a few days
later they did another shoot without me, making it look like I haven’t
turned up for the performance. But they knew I wasn’t coming.”
Six years on little has changed to convince Johnson that Frankie Goes To
Hollywood have unfinished business to address. You suspect there’s little he
would change about his present life. His paintings have hung beside Peter
Blake at the Royal Academy and, for the next few weeks, will share
exhibition space in Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art with Robert Mapplethorpe
and David Hockney. Johnson and Kühler still remain an item. And, of course,
he has his health. Yes, he wouldn’t turn his nose up at the chance to
perform the songs again — not just Relax and Two Tribes,
but solo hits such as Americanos and Love Train. But an actual
reunion? Don’t hold your breath.
“Can you imagine David Bowie trying to be Ziggy again? It’s a perfect pop
moment, and the best place for perfect pop moments is the human memory.”
Frankie Say Greatest is released on Nov 2 by UMTV/AATW; Blast
and Dreams That Money Can’t Buy are released on Nov 9 by MCA
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