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Holly Johnson

Holly Johnson

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First with Frankie Goes to Hollywood, then with his own executive solo pop career, Holly Johnson helped shift a seismic reversal in received thinking on parochial gender politics, gay rights and working class Bohemia. Smashing into the draconian national mindset of the early 80's, he did it with wit, style, musicality, poise and danger. There was no apology to his pop persona, just the distinct aroma of playful, artistic raunch. 

When teenage boys of a certain persuasion saw him on The Tube in 1983, cavorting in steely clone-wear to the sound of hard sex, letting out a fertile smile from the side of his mouth between the climactic second chorus and the bridge, it was as if the UK was ready for a summer of sexual upheaval. His was pop music as agent of social change.

It is no accident that Holly Johnson was the last great superstar to emerge before the ethical meltdown of Live Aid changed pop forever, giving it a new shop-front of social responsibility and queasy role-modelling. Holly’s opening salvos were so much more interesting, referencing Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Tom of Finland, the nightclub utopias found in the metropolis under a glitterball. They were testaments riffing on the amyl throb of high nrg, the trash aesthetic of Divine, the high art of Berlin-era Bowie and the gentlemanly savant of Ferry’s Roxy Music. He had grown up surrounded by a surfeit of pop ideology, blurring gender lines and social norms. His heroes drew on a complex worship of otherness. Guided by the deft hand of his pop cultural predecessors his only responsibility was to his art. He marshalled the idea of gay culture from buttoned-up repression into the new terrain of divine decadence. Watching from the sidelines, this turnaround looked insurrectionary. It was as punk as gay ever got.

It is astonishing to think that through all his endeavours in the pop stratosphere, Holly Johnson has never been undone by the mythology of pop music. He is still a believer in and exponent of its alchemical qualities of transubstantiation, of pop’s innate ability to turn the ordinary into the extraordinary. Why? Because he did it.

In late 2015, Johnson co-wrote a song with Gary Barlow for the film Eddie The Eagle. The song "Ascension" was released in March 2016 as the focus track for the album Fly (songs inspired by the film Eddie The Eagle) and appears on the end credits for the film. [25]

In 2018, Johnson appeared as himself in the Series 10 finale of the UK television series Benidorm, in what turned out to be the last episode of the show

Classique has been working with International Artistes from around the world for over 20 years, whether they are ‘A’ list celebrities, Chart Toppers, performers from TV talent shows or Celebrity DJs. Along with our in-house production team, we pull together all the details – dealing with flights, transfers, accommodation and riders for all the major artists and their teams.

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