ZANG TUMMM TUMB ARTICLES “the first draft of history”

HOLLY JOHNSON has denied claims that he is planning to blow the whistle on a host of closet gay people. His forthcoming single, ‘Legendary Children (All Of Them Queer), identifies a long list of gay celebrities and artists. But the singer, who kept Mary Whitehouse on the boil in the mid-‘80s with his former band Frankie Goes To Hollywood, refutes newspaper reports of any shock revelations contained in lyrics of the song.

“The purpose of the record was never to out anybody,” he declares. “The story is a load of old trash.” Holly claims, however, that the majority of major record companies would still find the singles content unpalatable: “I didnt particularly feel like walking into a major label with this song, knowing how conservative they can be.

“I feel at the moment I need to have full control over my work. So Ive licensed it to the German label that distributed The Symbols record ‘The Most Beautiful Girl In The World, as I figured they did alright with that one.”

Hollys “outing” list is indeed fairly innocuous, with names ranging from the undisputed — Joe Orton, Divine and Jimmy Somerville — to the vaguely contentious but well-and-truly no longer of this world — Leonardo da Vinci (“his interest in little boys was well documented”) and William Shakespeare (“well, theres no evidence to the contrary”).

“I believe that the outing argument is only valid in a situation of extreme hypocrisy,” explains Holly, “for example, where a person is actually doing damage to gay people by spouting lies or whatever. Only in these kind of extreme cases is outing a valid thing.”

Yet it seems that therell be no anxiety or nights of lost sleep in the corridors of the Houses of Parliament.

“Im not a politician, Im an artist and I dont want to make any comments about alleged homosexual Tory MPs,” laughs Holly. “I dont want to get into that one.”