Zang Tuum Tumb and all that - recent articles

Article: Noise rejection

Sat, 27 Mar 2010 11:55:07 GMT +1

First published: Fri, 20 Nov 1987

Anne Dudley is 50% of the Art of Noise who have 100% of a new album out. You can see 0.3% of her in the picture and Paul Colbert gets a bit of the story, at least.

Isnt there one tiny part of you which would like to be recognised in the street?

No. What possible reason could there be. Its a terrible idea. I think its what people in the limelight regret the most, their loss of anonymity.

Anne Dudley, a half of Art of Noise, has been entirely certain about this ever since the bands first, unusual success, of which well hear more later. Theyve always sheltered behind eccentricity in their announcements and disguise in their publicity pictures. At first few people outside the business of recording and production knew what Anne and partner JJ Jeczalik looked like. Those inside did, very well. Anne Dudley is one of the best known orchestral arrangers working in rock and pop (vile phrase, but you get the picture), and is sought after for her own production work and keyboard sessioneering.

Shes shortly to start co-writing with Jeff Beck for his new album - a fantastic guitarist a legend who lives up to it - and has just returned from a soundtrack writing stint in Hollywood. Ill tell you what I really like about working on films, she enthuses over a cup of tea in the press officers office. Its the teamwork. Youre involved with the producer, director, editor, music editor, possibly the writers, all of whom have put a great deal of effort into getting this film as far as it is. There are no rivalries and the team sees it through. Sometimes its like that when youre making a record, but so often it isnt. And the music suffers.

But first the new Art of Noise album, In No Sense, Nonsense.

The sounds on this album Ill start again, a lot of the sounds on this album derived from a natural environment, either animals or birds a helicopters not a natural thing, I know, but the sound of it outside is quite stunning. With the kind of scope you can get on compact disc now, it seemed that the chance for exploring these natural sounds should be expanded. Take the helicopter the sound you hear underneath when its landing is pretty staggering, but usually its recorded so badly that when you hear it on disc it sounds pretty naff. But if you make an effort and record it with a good stereo mike and get the levels right it can be just as good on a digital recording as it really is. So when I listen to the album I get a sort of open air feeling

In No Sense, Nonsense was a tighter project than previous Art of Noise output. Recorded over eight weeks, and broadly demoed beforehand, Anne and JJ broke with tradition by bringing in other musicians to see what they could do with something conceived as a Fairlight sequence.

How can I put this theres a great tendency - and I dont mean this in any snide way - for musicians with a very good technique to get a bit well, the word we use is muso. A little bit indulgent. You have to keep pulling them back and say, play like this. I dont care if you can play it in 13/8, I want it in 4/4.

But they can bring out different things in the music, and its nice to have people around, rather than machines.

But do the Art of Noise write songs? Apparently not. In as much as the terms verse and chorus are quite useful, then we do, Anne assents, though only briefly. To me a song is something thats sung and has words. Ive got nothing against songs, and I write songs as well, but the Art of Noise doesnt do them. Unfortunately theres no other easily coinable word to cover instrumental-pieces-of-music-liked-by-a-pop- audience-with-recognisable-tunes-in-it. Bagatelle, aria I dont know.

And while they may start out with a trusted verse and chorus format, the tracks are fairly soon ripped up anyhow. On EFL, its final form was nothing like how it went in the studio. I played it to the bass player, and he barely recognised it. It was a fine piece of music, if you like, but desperately ordinary lovely feel, nice riffs, but nothing really happened. So we got extremely radical with it, used four bars that we liked and looped and looped it round, did something else over the four bars, transposed it, did a piano solo over the end without changing the key, and just took this very cavalier attitude towards the material. The end of EFL (English is a Foreign Language, apparently) does something extremely unsettling to the ear. The final section drops dramatically in speed, as if someone had switched the tape recorder to a slower rate. What it doesnt do is tumble in pitch as youd expect. Peculiar, but not difficult, when left to the Fairlight III.

What does come first, the riff or the sound? I think things tend to happen together, you find a sound then you find something to do with it. A moments pause. I guess that means Ive just contradicted myself right probably the sound first, but the riff will follow pretty soon after, otherwise its not much use.

The search for noise took the Arters outside fairly often: into stations to capture the horn of an Inter City 125 (Galleons Of Stone) and down to Ely Cathedral to record a choir (How Rapid). A fairly outrageous, pretentious thing to do, but an absolutely incredible place. Right through the middle of the best take, the verger walked up the aisle with his keys rattling and ruined it, but sent us all off on another tack. We couldnt decide which sounded better, so we had a bit of both. Incidental sound effects from real life are sandwiched between most of the tracks; a verger here, a door closing in Finchley Road Waitrose there. We just wanted to record these different acoustics.

And having played with the real thing in the real world do you feel disappointed on returning to the studio? Yes, I think you do, to be honest. If you spend an awful lot of time in the studio working with a digital reverb, which is what people do these days, you get a certain kind of one dimensional sound which doesnt occur in a natural environment.

One of the instruments which has suffered most from studio interference has been the innocent drum kit. It seems the hardest thing to record well, offers Anne, and the sound people get in the studio is almost nothing like what drums sound like. If you listen to a drummer playing live, it all spills everywhere and the natural sound of a kit is a real mess. Its part of a drummers skill to sort out a sound that fits together.

When drums started coming to the front of the band people began searching for different sounds all the time. Until fashions in music change thats going to stay. My idea of a good drum sound is, I suppose, one thats compatible. I get very tired of these artificial sounding snares which have nothing to do with anything. Why? People arent always reinventing the piano, are they?

No, but they are always resampling it, albeit not when the Art of Noise are around. Ive never been one to use samples to emulate real sounds, Ann exclaims. I cant see the point. One track, Debut, uses a real string section. Would it have worked on a synth? Maybe, but it would have taken three days and we got the guys in and recorded it in 20 minutes.

The thing is Anne, before all this AON stuff began, did you ever picture yourself as a writer? Me, myself, I? No, its really rather unexpected. I didnt plan it, if, she adds reflectively, anyone ever plans anything. We could all name half a dozen other producers who would give their right Lexicon to step from studio to stage, but isnt there a greater responsibility, and worry, in having to create your own material instead of nurturing other peoples. Oh yes, its easier to do a string arrangement or play keyboard on somebody elses track than it is on your own. When it comes to making Art of Noise records its a completely blank piece of paper - theyre not songs, you dont have a lyric to work to, and often not even a title. It can be difficult to get started. Sometimes we have to discipline ourselves. Weve got six hours in the studio and weve got to get something done. You may hate it in the end and scrap it, but at least youve got something to show for the time.

To be an artist, she holds up fingers for mid-air quote marks round the word, involves a different kind of mentality. Youre not even supposed to turn up on time, but to me thats second nature, its force of habit. I panic.

One last question who do you think youre audience is?

Long silence.

Youll say long silence here, wont you? Let me say that when we first had a record out it was Beat Box, which was only released in America and became number one in the dance charts and was very high in the black charts. We were voted the second best new black act in America that year yes, exactly.

That surprised us. We thought, here we are, these honky whites in suburban London making a noise in New York dance clubs and being terribly hip. I dont think its like that any more, the music is less dance oriented, maybe a little more mainstream. I suppose the audience wed like to have is an audience which appreciates a well made record and is as interested in the sound and quality as well as a few nice tunes. An audience which new age music thinks its aiming at, but which is actually very underwhelmed by new age music. And an audience which hopefully will buy a CD.

Article: All fans of living should be aware...

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 21:10:48 GMT +1

First published: Mon, 18 Mar 1985

WHAT IS WHAT?

great and small promises from

ZANG TUMB TUUM

yours for the telling

ANNE PIGALLE Hé Stranger

All fans of living should be aware that Anne Pigalles first single Hé Stranger is released on March 25, the opening record on Zang Tuum Tumbs nice and new, happy and sad Certain Series. Fans of Laura Nyro, Edith Piaf, and Public Image should also be aware, whilst fans of the pretty-pretty girl in pop can go bite their tongues. Pigalle is preparing herself for presentation in screen, radio and Ronnie Scotts stage during April, and her debut LP and everything could be so perfect will follow in May.

Her autobiography Why Does It Have To Be This Way? is lined up to be Zanglett Number Three, for publication in 1986.

For further information please contact Rob Partridge/Régine Moylett/Pete Johnson (Island: 01.741 1511) or Paul Morley (Z.T.T.: 01.229 1229).

18.3.85

Article: Blast

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 21:06:10 GMT +1

First published: Sat, 01 Apr 1989

HOLLY JOHNSON

BLAST

1961: Born in Rio De Janiero, 9/2/61.

1966: St. Marys Primary School, Liverpool.

1972: Liverpool Collegiate School for Boys.

1973: Stopped attending. Obtained first guitar with cigarette coupons and began writing songs. Inspired by Marc Bolan and David Bowie.

1977: Officially left school. Joined Big in Japan as bass player and lyricist. Started reading William Burroughs.

1979: Recorded first solo single (on the Erics label), Yankee Rose b/w Treasure Island and Desperate Dan.

1980: Recorded Hobo Joe b/w Stars of the Bars, also released on the Erics label in the UK. Formed the original Frankie Goes To Hollywood. Rehearsed for three months. but left to work on a studio-based project for the next two years called W.I.N.

1983: Major record deal was not forthcoming. Formed the second version of Frankie Goes To Hollywood with Mark OToole and Peter Gill with additions the following year.

1984: Signed with ZIT Records and applied to Art College in Liverpool. In November Relax was released and therefore eliminated the chance of going to college.

January saw Relax reach #1 in the U.K. and stay there for 5 weeks.

In June, the second single Two Tribes was released and again hit #1 in the UK, this time for an unbelievable 9 weeks, while Relax re-entered the charts at #2.

In October/November. Holly and the band embarked on their first U.S. tour, where their LP sold over 750,000 copies. December saw the simultaneous release of The Power Of Love single and debut LP Welcome To The Pleasuredome, both of which reached #1 in the UK.

1985: World tour, including Japan. Began writing and recording the second LP. Liverpool. Highlight: met Andy Warhol.

1986: Finished Liverpool. In November, released Rage Hard, which reached #4 in the U.K. and #1 in Gennany.

1987: U.K. and European tour. Warrior of the Wasteland and Watching The Wildlife single released. In March, left band to pursue a solo career. Spurred on by his manager, Holly began legal proceedings against ZIT in order to free him from unfair recording and publishing agreements.

1988: In February, injunction preventing Holly from recording is lifted. He then began negotiations with MCA and started recording his debut solo LP.

1989: Release of solo single Love Train in the U.K., which entered the charts there at #21 and reached #4. The single also went Top 5 all over Europe.

In March, second U.K. single Americanos is released, entering charts at #27 and looking set to repeat Hollys previous Top 5 success.

1989: Blast, Hollys long-awaited debut solo LP, released in the U.K. April 24th. Producers contributing to the album include Dan Hartman (I Can Dream About You), Stephen Hague (Pet Shop Boys, New Order, OMD) and Steve Lovell (Julian Cope, A Flock Of Seagulls, Samantha Fox). Besides Love Train and Americanos, key tracks include Heavens Here and Atomic City.

Also in April, Holly goes on promotional European tour. In the U.K., he participates with Paul McCartney. The Christians and others in a new single of Ferry Across The Mersey, released to benefit victims of Hillsborough football match tragedy.

May saw the release of Love Train as Blasts first U.S. single. The LP itself follows June 7th as Hollys momentum kicks in with no end in sight

MCA RECORDS

UNI RECORDS

Article: Video killed the radio star

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 20:55:23 GMT +1

First published: Thu, 20 Sep 1979

THE BUGGLES: Video Killed The Radio Star (Island). Bruce Woolley helped write this little gem and his band do a fair rendition of it. This is by a couple of geezers with a penchant for sickly production, and ties. Wont be a hit because its too tidy, like vymura. Try again.

Article: Life with the Buggles

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 20:51:45 GMT +1

First published: Thu, 21 Feb 1980

Life With The BUGGLES

An everyday (but frequently interrupted) story of pop persons, as told by Fred Dellar.

GEOFF DOWNES is the one with 20/20 vision, while Trevor Horn is the one with the go-go goggles. Together theyre The Buggles, purveyors of clean-machine pop, living in the plastic age and making the most of their environment.

Good at what they do, theyre ready to say so. No braggarts, they merely state their case with a quiet confidence. Already theyve got a track record to support their words. When Video Killed The Radio Star bowed out of the charts, they promptly replaced it with The Plastic Age.

They also got their names on the production credits to The Jags Back Of My Hand and Dan-Is Monkey Chop, while as songwriters they provided Dusty Springfield with a small success in Baby Blue. But small success equals failure with Buggles and Trevor Horn, who writes most of the duos lyrics, says that he got no kick out of Dusty recording the song.

No-one ever records our songs as well as we can do them - I firmly believe that. Dustys Baby Blue was a bit of a let-down because we had done a great demo. Even Bruce Woolleys version of Video Killed The Radio Star didnt match ours. His wasnt so exciting, he didnt take any risks. There have been lots of cover versions of Video around the world - but theyve all been uniformly naff!

Bruce Woolley, who now runs a band called Camera Club, was once buddy-buddy with Trevor and Geoff. Together the threesome wrote Video, Clean Clean (a track on the Buggles album that could be the next single) and a few other songs, and also set up a band that featured Woolley as lead vocalist. But then things went wrong and Woolley moved off to his own record deal with CBS.

BUT WHERE did it all start? Trevor kicks off the history bit by revealing that he uttered his first cries in Durham, while Geoff claims Stockport as his home-town.

We met in London - we both had the usual ambition to make it in the music business and knew that the only place worth coming to was London.

Geoff, who talks so quietly that his voice only just makes it onto the interview tape, says that he initially got into production through providing radio jingles.

I did jingles for any product that came along - from cars to nappies. Any product - you name it and Ive done it!

Trevor, not to be outdone, tops this with - And I got into the production game because I was living with a pop star who I wont name - though she was called Tina Charles.

Geoff gives him a sideways glance. I thought you said you wouldnt name her?

His partner in plastic grins.

Sorry about that. But the thing is that Id always wantnd to be a producer and even had my own studios at one time. People somehow thought that Id something to do with the making of Tinas records and asked me to do demos for them.

He used to rope me in, Geoff remembers. Wed sort out the songs at my place and do all the arrangements together. Later wed kick the artist out of the studio and spent most of the studio time just doing different things of our own, using every moment to our best advantage. It was a big experience for both of us and after a couple of years of doing that, we had quite a few songs together.

A PHONE CALL regarding a snag in their future plans interrupts the proceedings. Geoff sorts out the problem while the outspoken but likeable Trevor carries on.

It was at that stage that we decided to become artists. We felt that it was about time that somebody started making good, well-produced pop records again. We wanted to give people something more than they already had.

Eventually they signed to Island as artists, writers and producers, in the latter capacity taking on knocking The Jags Back Of My Hand into shape. The song had already been recorded but nobody was very happy with the results. The Buggles remixed the tape, added various keyboards and generally tidied everything up. But though the revamped record became a hit, The Jags proved hardly grateful. In fact they hated the disc - as Trevor readily admits.

I think the reason was that they were pissed off with the record in the first place and later felt that we were foisted upon them. It was a good record though - all we did was to make it into a more professional piece of work.

We believe in perfection we sometimes get criticised for being too professional - but then, people also criticise if you make things rough. Theres no way of winning really. So we try for perfection as far as we can get it in recording.

The Buggles album cost £60,000 to make, and it wasnt just thrown together to cash in on the success of Video. In fact, all of the album was written before Video which just happened to be one of the four tracks they first recorded.

The Buggles claim a gypsy-like existence when making records, trekking from one studio to another, recording backing tracks mainly at Virgins Town House in West London, most of the final mixes being made at Sarm, a tiny studio in Whitechapel, also used by Queen. At one point, the duo even set up mikes in Londons Wardour Street, gaining the attention of two girls who became curious and began tapping the mikes with their fingers. Buggles, being Buggles, kept the resulting sound on the album.

There was a horse galloping, remembers Trevor, And we left that in too - it was all good fun!

Horses and passers-by apart, it seems that The Buggles played most of the parts on their singles and album, the rumour that they used a whole host of session men being totally untrue.

We used about three different drummers including one from Landscape and Johnny Richardson from The Rubettes, whos really good. We also used the occasional session guitarist to play various bits and there were three or four girl singers involved. Apart from that, we did everything ourselves.

GEOFF COMPLETES his phone call, but now an Island Records executive sticks his head around the door and requires a consultation. So the keyboardsman exits stage left, leaving Trevor solo once more. By now hes moved onto the subject of lyrics.

I always wanted to write pop songs with good lyrics rather than the crappy, cliched ones that many people tend to come up with. Some are fine - one band I admire is Squeeze. I thought the lyrics to Up The Junction were superb and the lyrics to Cool For Cats were superb too.

We try not to be too obvious - on the album theres a song that goes I love you Miss Robot but its not really about robots. What its really about is being on the road and making love to someone you dont really like, while all the time youre wanting to phone someone whos a long way off.

Another interruption; someone wants to know which part of the Beeb The Buggles are supposed to be heading for in order to broadcast for BBC Norway. All is confusion. Trevor departs, Geoff returns. Apologies all round. The tape keeps running.

Soon Buggles will move onto the next stage of their career by becoming a live touring band. Its likely to be a five-piece with Trevor handling guitar and vocals, Geoff sharing keyboard duties with another player, with a bassist and drummer rounding things off.

Weve got a few tricks up our sleeves, Geoff says. And there are going to be some very interesting visuals, good back projections, some very odd lights, all that sort of thing.

But the music is the most important thing of all and I think well surprise quite a few people. They think that were such a studio creation that we cant actually play. Actually, were quite experienced at playing on stage and used to back Tina when she did foreign tours.

SUDDENLY THE side is up to full strength again. Trevor, he of the National Wealth specs, is expounding on influences and giving credit to such folk as Kraftwerk.

We use synths to fake up things and to provide effects we wont use them in the manner that somebody like John Foxx does. Hes dominated by synths but were not. I know weve been compared to 10CC by a lot of people but they were a lot more vocal and guitar-based than us. Were more keyboard based.

Geoff adds his bit. Our records have an intelligence layer in them - theyre not just pop pulp. You can take them on a superficial level but theres another layer too. Thats something thats been the hallmark of most successful bands, right from The Beatles. And though we have got this synthetic, arranged sound, it still doesnt really come out as total synthesiser music.

Its a unique sound and if we do score thats probably why. The beauty of The Buggles now is that we can go in about 15 different directions if we want to. We can be a rock band or Trev and I can just go out and do a few shows somewhere.

But what if some megastar should suddenly ask them to lend their studio expertise to his or her next recording? Geoff says that several big names have already approached him to do this very thing.

However, now weve got our own thing going, we wont really have the time to work with other artists - weve been through that for the past three or four years. You dont have total control in those situations. The Buggles, thats our full total and what were all about.

Its a total rejection of all those poor recordings, the banal songs, Babylons Burning, yeah, yeah, yeah and that type of thing. Thats why we took a different line and almost went the opposite way to most new wave bands.

They would never spend as much time in a studio as we do. Most of their time is spent on the road. They go on the road, get a record deal, then go into a studio as a last stage, whereas we started in the studio, then got the record deal and now were gonna go on the road. Everything the other way around!

AT THIS point, the door opens once more and an extraordinarily healthy dog leaps through and flattens me. Down, Buggles down! Trevor yells, as an Island ambassador inform us that the duos car is ready to take them to the Beeb.

Suddenly I understand that line about sending heart police to put you under cardiac arrest. Life with The Buggles aint so quiet for the ticker, thats for sure!

Article: The age of plastic

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 20:37:02 GMT +1

First published: Thu, 07 Feb 1980

THE BUGGLES: The Age Of Plastic (Island). Yet another album with heavy electronic and futuristic flavouring, but by contrast this is quite human and therefore the most enjoyable of the lot. Just as Video was a truly brilliant pop single, this is practically a model pop album - lots of energy, well constructed, imaginative and above all a set of GREAT TUNES throughout. A gem - buy it! Best tracks: Video Killed The Radio Star, Plastic Age. (8 out of 10).

Article: Mother snogging king of sexrock...

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:58:18 GMT +1

First published: Sat, 01 Oct 1994

MOTHER SNOGGING KING OF SEXROCK SINGLE OF THE FREAKIN MILL-BASTARD-ENNIUM, HOMEBOY!

HOLLY JOHNSON

Legendary Children (All Of Them Queer) (Club Tool)

Good golly Miss Holly divvy disco divas through a long, hard, throbbing list of extremely famous REAL MEN who just happened or happen to be samesexers (COINCIDENCE?!). This is fabulously arch record will no doubt encourage thousands of healthy, normal young British chaps to dress smartly and hang around gymnasiums. My God! The possibilities! Perhaps rampant homosexuality is the only thing that will save us from the seemingly unstoppable spread of Crusty.

TEEN: Mum, er, theres something you ought to know

MUM: Yes, Clive?

TEEN: I, um, think Im gay

MUM: Never mind dear, sos your father.

TEEN: and a crusty

MUM: YOU STINKING FILTHY DEGENERATE ROTTON PERVERTED SCUM! GET OUT OF MY HOUSE AND NEVER DARKEN MY DOORSTEP AGAIN!

Will Holly follow up with a record featuring a list of famous lesbians? What about famous heterosexuals?! Are there any?! Will anybody on this record sue?! And will they play it on Radio 1 IN THE DAYTIME? Its all rather exciting!

Article: This four-track Holly Johnson compilation...

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:57:35 GMT +1

First published: Sat, 28 Jul 1990

THIS four-track HOLLY JOHNSON compilation, BLAST, is pretty much what youd expect: ingratiating little Holly going through his costume changes. These sorts of antics, unlike the tape (MCA, £7.99), do not have a long shelf-life.

The best of the lot, Love Train, may have seemed pink-faced and cherubic last year, but now is about as youthful as a fossilised prune. The singing rhododendrons and Magic Roundabout-type scenery are still cute, as is Hollys elfin dancing, but theyre squelched by Hollys patent insincerity when mouthing the OTT lurve lyrics.

Americanos has the advantage of a social conscience - that is, it is set in a Fifties kitsch world where poor families have better luck at the lottery than rich families. A gold-suited Holly pops up as a game show host and delivers enough onhonhonhons to see us through the winter.

Atomic City looks the same - blue skies and bright primary colours - but throws in a gravestone, a picnicking couple, Holly wearing a palm tree on his head and all the dancing extras from Rhythm Nation.

Heavens Here is the stab at sophistication (ie its in black and white), with much slow and stagey footage of groping hands. Holly raises his eyebrows a lot in this one. Not exactly going to make rock history now, is it?

Hollys problem is that hes a pop star without charisma. This hasnt stopped Big Fun you might say, but Holly could do better, He doesnt even try. He minces through his scenes as if the mere shrug of his shoulders were enough to elicit an awestruck response. It isnt.

CAREN MYERS

Article: Holly hangs on

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:56:49 GMT +1

First published: Sat, 13 Feb 1988

Holly hangs on

HOLLY JOHNSON will have to wait until at least the end of the week to find out if he is free to pursue a solo career.

A High Court judge last Friday reserved judgement on an attempt by ZTT Records to prevent Johnson from leaving the company.

During the three-week hearing, which ended on Friday, the court heard how the Frankie musicians didnt play on the big hits Relax and Two Tribes, and it was also revealed that Johnson was still claiming dole when the songs were at the top of the charts.

Giving evidence during the last days of the hearing, Johnson said he became alienated from the rest of the band while trying not to be dragged into a rock n roll lifestyle.

He told the rest of the group and the record company that he would only work during the day because he was determined to lead a normal life despite the pressures of fame.

He denied that his attitude led to higher recording costs by prolonging sessions in the studio.

Further problems arose when the band were on tour, particularly with Johnsons friendship with his personal manager Wolfgang Kuhle, Mr Justice Whitford heard.

Johnson said Kuhle was forced to travel alone by train during the tour because there was not enough room for him on the group coach. Johnson added that when he tried to put down guidelines for the band on tour he was physically assaulted by guitarist Mark OToole.

There were no more assaults, he told the court, but he believed the band tried to disturb him by banging on his hotel door later in the tour, wearing Ku Klux Klan masks.

Johnson added that he earned £980,000 from Frankie records, but said he had yet to receive all the money.

Asked by the judge why he wanted to leave ZTT and make a solo album, he said: I am just not happy working with them under the conditions of their contract. I do not really get on with them as people and I do not think they have respect for me.

Article: Space cowboy

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:55:59 GMT +1

First published: ?

SPACE COWBOY

HOLLY JOHNSON
Dreams That Money Cant Buy
MCA 10278/MC/CD

GAME SHOW host, childrens entertainer, randy space cadet, good-hearted comic-strip villain, doe-eyed lover theres something of everything in the 1991 model Holly Johnson. Everything, that is, but the greedy-eyed KY boy in leather undies who set out to corrupt and deprave the youth of a nation in 1984.

Frankie Goes To Hollywood seems a long time ago when you listen to Dreams That Money Cant Buy, and not always for the right reasons.

Holly has scrupulously cleaned up his act since the messy demise of Frankie. Blast!, his first solo LP in 1989, was all muscular power pop in the then-fashionable House-free idiom.

But it aged quicker than cheese on a radiator, and all the Andy Richards - sponsored hot House injections on Dreams dont dispel the fear of a similar fate. The same problem remains: Holly loves the maximum stomp of classic hi-NRG but he cant always translate it adequately into 90s pop.

When he can hes on to a real winner, like on the opening single, Across The Universe, a self explanatory crazy acid whirl in space with much silliness and bucketfuls of Hollys adorable camp naffness: Astronauts in love! he croons inimitably, as small aliens swoon and cheer from a passing asteroid.

But by the time youre halfway through side one, the dense dancebeats and kitchen-sink arrangements (synth-brass, backing choirs, robo-percussion and unnameable noises by the hodful) will have you reaching for Ativan instead of Ecstasy. The only shade from Hollys blinding disco lights comes in clunky ballads like I Need Your Love, and Holly the Lovelorn was never as much fun as Holly the Voracious Sex Puppy.

Nor was Holly the Patron of the Arts. Boyfriend 65 was apparently birthed when Holly applied William Burroughs fold-in method to the Boyfriend Annual 1965, which doesnt excuse such a pasty-faced love-tune but certainly gets a Brits nomination for Most Pretentious And ill-Advised Songwriting Device.

Contrary to popular belief, Holly has a voice and a half and it seems crazy to swamp it like this. Put him in the studio with Frankie Knuckles next time and perhaps hell come to terms with the 90s as well as he did the 80s.

ANDREW HARRISON

Article: Holly Johnson's best friend

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:55:44 GMT +1

First published: ?

HOLLY JOHNSONS BEST FRIEND

FUNKY

Funky is the coolest poodle in town. What do you say when he gets on the kitchen table? Get down! Funky of course. Just like Quiche Lorraine (the famous B52s poodle), Funky is his name and having fun on a grey day is his game. He doesnt care what clothes you wear. Hell dance to any record. What the hell!

If youre good to him, hell be good to you. Hell even sense when youre feeling down and walk right over and give you a kiss. In fact hes the nicest person I know. Hes got no concept of ugly or good looking, he wont discriminate against race, creed or colour. Hes never made a nuclear bomb! In fact hes taught me a lot.

Funkys been on television and even has his own record label, he wants to record his own song called Funky Paradise with Deee-Lite, his favourite group. He sometimes listens to Pete Tong on the radio, and sheds a doggy tear at Simon Bates sad stories. He thinks Pat Sharp should have a haircut. Hes pretty pleased that Margaret Thatcher has resigned. Thats one bitch he never fancied!

Funkys favourite film is The Lady And The Tramp. Hes eco-friendly, biodegradable and gets a bath every week, but is not allowed in English restaurants.

He practices safe sex and wears a red coat in the winter. When he sees mounted policemen on the street - he barks! The horses dance.

The symbol of world peace, for a new generation. Thats Funky!

MOST NOTABLE PERSON

The three Deee-Lites for spreading The Power Of Love and dressing so well.

WORST EXPERIENCE OF THE YEAR

Appearing on The Word was not a good vibe, and it should have been.

TOP TUNES

Groove Is In The Heart Deee-Lite (they tell it like it is).

Tricky Disco - GTO (the best bleeps around).

There She Goes - The Las (a classic pop moment).

Vogue - Madonna (as seen on the MTV awards).

TOP TV SHOWS

Golden Girls and Twin Peaks.

Article: Halleluja

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:55:22 GMT +1

First published: ?

HOLLY JOHNSON
Halleluja

MCA/Teldec

Sommerflaute auch bei Holly Johnson. Ohne neues Material kein neues Album, keine neue Tournee. Also auch kein Moos für neue Klamotten. Diesem unhaltbaren Zustand hat die Plattenfirma ein Ende gemacht, indem sie die besten (?) Songs des letztjährigen »Blast« - Albums durch den Remix-Wolf drehen ließ. »Love Train«, »Americanos«, »Atomic City« und »Heavens Here« erscheinen im »Je länger, je lieber«-Mix, ohne jedoch nur ein Quentchen an Substanz zu gewionnen. Wer die regulären Maxis hat, kann sich diese Ausgabe hier sparen. Was sich namhafte Produzenten wie Andy Richards, Julian Mendelsohn, Phil Harding und Steven Hague geliefert haben, sieht ungefähr so aus: vorn und hinten

Article: Holly Johnson, formerly the singer with Frankie...

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:54:52 GMT +1

First published: Wed, 01 Dec 1993

HOLLY JOHNSON, formerly the singer with Frankie Goes To Hollywood, is putting the finishing touches to his autobiography which will be published by Random House in spring 1994. Its called A Bone In My Flute - yeah that is as rude as it sounds - and all will be revealed, says Holly. It isnt a pop memoir as such. Its more of a homosexual Huckleberry Finn. Its about growing up gay in working class Liverpool. Theres a lot of that. The Frankie Goes To Hollywood story takes up the second half. Its sort of like a Terence Davis film, in a different era. It wasnt a commissioned book and I didnt use a guest ghost writer. Its all me own work and it was bloody hard. Im editing it now and Im discovering that you cant say fuck-all anymore because of the libel laws. You cant say, for example, that such and such narrowly escaped becoming a heroin addict by the skin of his teeth, even if its absolutely true. I cant express an opinion like is a complete ass licking, back-stabbing bastard!

Article: Blast The Video

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:54:21 GMT +1

First published: Mon, 01 Jan 1990

HOLLY JOHNSON: Blast The Video (MCA, £12.99)

HOLLY JOHNSON has always wanted to be a cartoon star, and on this collection of clips from last years Blast album his wish is granted. All but one of the five vids boast day-glo toy shop scenery across which Holly does his funny frog-dancing in a vaguely menacing fashion, yodelling his little heart out and grinning cheekily.

Love Train finds us in Noddy territory, a slab of beefy disco-pop with Holly playing The Riddler and delivering some of the most blatant sexual innuendo to top the charts since Frankie Goes To Hollywood. With a straight face too.

Heavens Here aims to be the sophisticated slowie, scraping through on a combination of sepia-tinted monochrome shots of snogging couples and a spine-tingling chorus. But best of all is Americanos, Holly perfectly at home as a camp game show host in John Waters-style 50s America, redistributing wealth against a soundtrack of galloping Latin beats and glossily ironic lyrics.

Stompingly attractive plastic pop which just slightly outstays its welcome. Stoke it up.

Stephen Dalton

Article: Holly Johnson has denied claims...

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:53:35 GMT +1

First published: Tue, 01 Nov 1994

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.

Article: Review - singles

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:52:29 GMT +1

First published: ?

REVIEW

SINGLES

REVIEWED BY HOLLY JOHNSON

SINGLE OF THE FORTNIGHT

CHAKA KHAN: Im Every Woman (WEA)

I like this already! (i.e. after about the first note) Throw it down Chaka!!! (Cheers up noticeably and starts to swizz about the floor on the wheely chair hes sitting on and make various funky noises of approval.) Heurgh! Get down! Oh no its got that piano!! (i.e. the horrible house music-type piano that Holly has taken umbrage to lately) Em absolutely brilliant! Climb Every Woman classic! Oh! I mean Im Every Woman! When I used to dance to this in discos in the 70s I used to sing Climb Every Woman cause I thought that was what the words were but then I found out that it wasnt! We love it. Its one of those remix jobbies but rather better than usual except that theres dreadful drum fills you know drums that go ttt ttt ttt ttt ttt towards the middle that arent necessary.

DIANA ROSS: Working Overtime (EMI)

Ooh, come on, put Diana Ross on. I really like her (listens to said disc and looks mightily disconcerted) Oh. Well, this is Diana Ross doing a Five Star B-side. Its a shame really because shes done so many fabulous things in the past but now shes decided to join in with current trends. Its important that she does modern things but modern things that are more interesting than this. I means this could be anyone. It doesnt sound like Diana Ross it just sounds like mundane radio drivel.

DEON ESTUS: Heaven Help Me (Polydor)

Oh, this is George Michael isnt it. Deon Estus is his bass player and I think hes very important to Georges sound. This is written with George and he sings it too. I like George. Me and Wolfgang (i.e Hollys manager) went to dinner with him and Elton John the other week. But this isnt the best song that George Michael has ever collaborated on. The production is typically lush. Pity Deon doesnt sing more on it. Have I heard his voice? No. Ive never heard him sing but Ive seen him do his grocery shopping. He lives round the corner from me. I dont know maybe itll be a hit on the strength of Georges involvement. I think its a very mellow kind of thing. Its the slowie at the end of the evening. It could be a hit but I dont know. Its not one of those records I go ape over.

KYLIE MINOGUE: Hand On My Heart (PWL)

Oh no! Im certainly not reviewing that. Ive got to?! (looks completely flabbergasted!) Its just that I dont think theres anything I could say about it - really. (Hoity toity eh viewers? Still fair enough. But just in case Kylies billions of fans are wondering: This is another of those chirpy PWL tunes that seem to be picked out for Kylie. Its got tons of happy sounding twiddly bits on it and all the usual hall marks of a Stock, Aitken & Waterman tune and will therefore be a huge hit and quite rightly so!)

CHERELLE: Affair (Tabu)

Em. Shes got a really fab voice but, em, this is a rather average Jam and Lewis track (the so-called producers of the record). They were members of Princes band and he sacked them because they were late for a plane one day. But they do fabulous records with Janet Jackson for example. Anyway, this isnt one of their best, but, you know, I like this kind of music when theres a good song there like What Have You Done For Me Lately (by Janet Jackson) and Fake and Criticise (by Alexander ONeal). This isnt a great song.

CHER AND PETE CETERA: After All (WEA)

I dont want to review that. No. I dont even want to hear it.

EDIE BRICKELL AND THE NEW BOHEMIANS: Circle (Geffen)

Ive just bought the Edie Brickell album and its very mellow. This one isnt as strong as What I Am, her last one, but quite pleasant. The sentiments (i.e. its all about how its better not to have a boyfriend because no one can chuck you then) are quite sweet though.

CYNDI LAUPER: I Drove All Night (Epic)

Mmmm Cyndi Lauper nice hairdo - sometimes. But this record is heinous. (Gets up and switches it off after about three seconds!) Its got quite an interesting intro but then it goes into a very ordinary American rock formula. I think shes done some fabulous things in the past. Girls Just Wanna Have Fun I thought was wonderful, and Time After Time. But this is just blandness I think. What a shame maybe I should listen to more of it. I dont like that sort of Adult Orientated Rock anyway but a lot of people buy it. I dont know who. Ive never met anyone like that. Sorry Cyndi but we (just in case anyone is a bit confused, Holly tends to refer to himself as we for reasons best known to himself) dont like it.

BON JOVI: Ill Be There For You (Phonogram)

I dont really want to review Bon Jovi to be honest. (After approximately ten seconds) Go on, get it off. Hm. This is not one of Bon Jovis finer moments. They specialise in those heavy metal epic anthems that this is not. Boooriiiing!

TEXAS: Thrill Has Gone (Polygram)

Oh no. Im not reviewing that. Take it off.

THE FUNKY WORM: You + Me = Love (WEA)

Better than average rehash of 70s disco which is happening a lot at the moment. I cant stand it! I hear it too often on the radio at the moment and its annoying in the extreme. It has got a chorus and I do like things to have that. Em, cant think of anything else to say about this really. I mean theres a lot of it about lately huu huu!! (??) which is a shame but at least this is better than most of em Ive heard. But I hate that piano on it. Its that 70s disco piano and I cant stand it. Its on everything at the moment and it reminds me of a particular type of 70s disco that wasnt my favourite. We like the name of the band though, a lot, as were all funky worms here. (?!)

THE CURE: Lullaby (Fiction)

Ah, everyone here loves the instrumentation but it doesnt seem to have much of a song hidden beneath that. Its very atmospheric. I love the violins and the arrangement of it but in todays world there isnt much room for it on a chart level. Its not one of those fabulous Cure songs. Its a nice vibe more than anything else. It reminds me of Mantovani (writer of romantic orchestral tunes for grannies). I would have expected The Cure to have come back with a much stronger song and thats quite surprising. But no, good luck Robert.

PAULA ABDUL: Knocked Out (Siren)

Yes, well, this doesnt knock me out at all. Its not as good as the one shes got out currently. I cant wait to see that fab choreography in the video. Ill give it five. Thats all Im saying. No. Thats all Im saying. Cant I say something else? Well I give it five says it all really doesnt it?! Heeheh! Sorry Paula. Id love you to teach me a few steps hahaha! But I dont like your record much.

THE PRETENDERS: Windows Of Tile World (Polydor)

No. I dont want to review this one. Definitely not. Oh, go on then. Hm. Is this an old song? (Indeed it is. Its from the soundtrack of a film called 1969 and was written by two old cronies called Bacharach and David.) Sounds as though theyve done a cover version of it. I like her voice (i.e. The Pretenders singing person, Chrissie Hynde). But this is a miss - not a patch on Chaka Khan which is definitely single of the fortnight. Ive got to go now!

Also not reviewed by Holly this fornight!

Morrissey Interesting Drug * Stevie Nicks Rooms On Fire * Carl Marsh Here Comes The Crush * Hue And Cry Violently * John Moore & Expressway Something About You Girl * Tom Petty Black Sorrows * Tom Jones Move Close * Dare The Raindance * Pop Will Eat Itself Wise Up * Black Sabbath Headless Cross * Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock Joy And Pain/Check This Out * The Monkees Last Train To Clarkesville * Mike And The Mechanics Nobody Knows * Stefan Dennis Dont It Make You Feel Good * Living In A Box Gatecrashing *

Article: The nosey parker interview

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:51:38 GMT +1

First published: ?

THE NOSEY PARKER INTERVIEW

HOLLY JOHNSON

*Who are you then?

Who am I? Hahumhmm Well, I its a birrova silly question, isnt it? Lets face it, you know who I am, I know who I am, and thats why were doing the interview, isnt it? Hmmmm

*What have you got in your fridge?

Oh dear dog food, milk, orange juice, cheese, Evian water, em, ice cubes uh, a pineapple, pesto sauce (spook Italian sauce, made with herbs), horse-radish sauce, mint sauce, apple sauce Ive got a lot of other things in the fridge but as Im not actually looking in it at the moment its rather difficult. Oh, Ive got some Diet Coke that my nephew put there last time he was down and, uh, its still there. Like, lots of it. Like, yknow, eight cans of it. Im quite particular about sell-by dates on coleslaw and things, so I have regular fridge clearouts.

*Have you ever written an angry letter to a magazine or news paper?

I dont think I have actually, because I never ever thought it would be printed. I dont know would I write and tell them if I had something untrue printed about me? Oooh, Ive read lots of untrue things, so many that you become a bit used to it actually and you dont tend to bother.

*Do you have any interesting scars?

Mmmmmmmm well, it depends what youd call interesting really. I think Ive got one under me chin where a friend of me sisters was going to push me in a swimming pool and then grabbed me back at the last moment and me chin banged on the side of the swimming pool and I fell in, unconscious. I think that was when I was about eight. Have I any operation scars? (Sounds aghast.) What, you mean like plastic surgery?? Himhimhim! No, I did fall over a banister and land with one of my arms on one side of the door and the rest of me on the other side of the door and I sort of ripped me armpit. This was one Christmas Eve when I was about ten. And I had to get it sewn back on. That was quite painful.

*Whose is the most famous persons autograph that you have?

Eh, Bette Davis (much adored actress from the 40s who had startling eyes). A friend of mine who was buying the book that she wrote queued up in this shop and got a copy signed for me. It was very nice of her. Unfortunately it doesnt say To Holly, its just her autograph

*Do you always give money to people whore collecting in the street for charity?

If Ive got some money on me, sometimes, yeah. But I always insist that they give me the sticker.

*Have you ever woken up laughing?

Do I ever wake up laughing? I think possibly, I cant remember. I usually wake up in a complete daze to tell you the truth. Have I ever woken up crying? (pause) Nooo, himhim.

*Have you ever been arrested?

Ive never been arrested. Ive been picked up - hehehe!! - by a policeman, and taken home in a police car because I was wearing a pair of spurs on my cowboy boots. This was when I was 18 - they were trying to say it was an offensive weapon. He was a really horrible policeman, actually. And I was pretty petrified, because I was wearing one of Vivienne Westwoods (hip street-clothes designer) Nude Cowboy T-shirts at the time, and I had to keep me arms folded all the time to cover up the naughty bits. Because if he was offended at the bloody spurs, he would have been extremely offended by the T-shirt Theyre so macho, policemen, arent they?

*When was the last time you were sick?

Sick? Like (squeamishly) vomit? Oh, not for years and years actually. Oh yeah, thats right - I came out of a Parisian restaurant and threw up, not due to drink, but due to food in the Parisian restaurant. Lamb chops it was. It was a couple of years ago actually.

*Are you scared of flying?

Oh, no. I wouldnt say I was scared of flying. Ive had some not very pleasant flights, yknow, where we nearly collided with another plane and things like that, which I havent enjoyed. I tend to read a magazine and ignore it. (Pauses and decides to tell the truth) I hate flying actually. Its horrible and vile. One day Ill say Im never going on a plane again, and go everywhere on the QE2 hahaha!

*Have you ever had your fortune told?

(Sighs) Yes I have actually, in Liverpool when I was 23. They told me that I was going to be successful (chuckles) in showbusiness. A girlfriend of mine at the time, an actress called Helen Martin, took me there as a treat. I wouldnt go now. Im not totally sceptical, but I often think that they could be psychologically disturbing, like if someone said, Oh well, youre gonna die in, like, two weeks time, or something.

*Who first told you about the birds and the bees?

Well, I remember sex education when I was at school when I was eight. And I can remember being well clued in before that, but I cant remember who clued me in. When I was told what happened I dont think I believed it - it was all so horrific. You just cant imagine your mum and dad doing that, know what I mean?

*When was the last time you blubbed in public?

I what? Oh, cried. I think when I was about six or seven. Well, it depends what you call public. If its in front of more than one person then thats probably public, isnt it? Well, when I was six or seven then, and I was playing Good King Wenceslas in the school play and for some reason forgot me lines on stage and burst into tears

*Have you ever peed in a bus shelter?

Thats a really coarse question, isnt it? I cant actually remember an occasion, to tell you the truth, when I have. I think I would have been more discreet than in a bus shelter, to be honest. A bus shelter isnt my style, because I always find it disgusting if youre standing in a bus shelter and someone has peed in there. Telephone boxes are another, its really disgusting.

*When was the last time you went to church?

The last time I went to church? Hmmm Oh. I dont want to discuss this actually, do you mind? It was the funeral of a friend. If you want to know my religious beliefs, I was brought up in Church Of England actually. Although I dont adhere to any faith any longer. I believe in God still and I sometimes read the Bible.

*Have you ever phoned up one of the perv phone-lines in The Sunday Sport?

Huhuhuhuuu! Yeah, I think I have actually. And then I put it down very quickly. It was just a person saying Hello, big boy Hehehehee!! I cant remember the rest of it. We were in the studio actually and we wanted to record it for the B-side of Atomic City. Unfortunately it didnt make it onto tape.

*How often do you listen to your own records?

Quite a lot actually. More than I used to. As soon as theyre on plastic I listen to them -I quite enjoy playing them. The Blast album I play quite regularly, more than Ive ever played any other record Ive ever made. I listen to it and think Oh God, how did I manage that? How did I get that together? And then I think Oh God, Ive got to do another one now hehe. Have I ever gone into a shop and bought one of my own records? No, Ive always wanted to but Im not brave enough to do it.

*Whats 12 x 8 ÷ 6?

12 x 8? Well, 8 x 10 is 80 and 8x2 is 16. Thats 96. Now whats the other bit? Divided by 6 - 6 into 9 goes 1 so its 16. I did that in me head! Im quite proud of that because I cant do me times tables!

*Have you ever been to the moon?

Ehh hehehehe. Em, Ive been to The Hole in The Moon. Its a nightclub in Bold Street in Liverpool. I love the idea of space travel, Id be straight on that shuttle if I had the chance.

*Would you want to live forever?

Now that is really a strange question. Sometimes, yes, I think I would. One of me favourite films is Highlander (film starring French hunk Christopher Lambert, about a mystic warrior who lives forever) and it does raise the question. I think if I did Id be an antique dealer and store things away sos I could flog them in 200 years time hehe! Its a difficult question and Id have to say I dont know. Id like to be Christopher Lambert though himhimhim!!

Article: Holly-er than thou

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:50:34 GMT +1
First published: Sat, 23 Sep 1989
Holly-er than thou

THE RECORD MIRROR INTERVIEW

When Holly Johnson sang The Power Of Love one Yuletide, a chorus of angels came down from on high. With his new single Heavens Here, Holly has made a return visit. Hollys here! shouts Johnny Angel Dee

The venue for the Holly Johnson interview experience is the restaurant of the Hyde Park Hotel, which is just down from Harrods, overlooking the park itself Its a terribly posh place, waiters fuss around continually, chandeliers hang from the high ceiling and when your meal is served a silver dome is lifted from your plate to reveal dainty, minimalist nouvelle cuisine. In these upper-crust surroundings, the humble rm reporter is somewhat embarrassed to plonk a clumsy tape recorder on the table. Surely, it wouldnt be proper. Holly Johnson has no such reservations.

Whip it out dear, whip it out! he cajoles, nibbling on a cheesy snip.

The BBC really should scrap Wogan and start a new show hosted by Holly. And of course it would have to be called Nothing Special, he giggles, amused by the idea.

Hes a great gabber, sharp witted and devilishly bitchy, when talking about people hes not too fond of. His voice - Frankie Howerd with a Liverpudlian accent - makes things soundfunny even when theyre not meant to be. Above all, hes one of the most charming, frank and friendly pop stars you could ever hope to bump into.

After disbanding one of the most successful and controversial groups of the Eighties, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, and the two year legal wrangle that followed, Holly Johnson released his first solo single earlier this year. Love Train was the perfect commercial pop song that didnt belong anywhere but the top 10. The hits Americanos and Atomic City followed with their daft, colourful videos and now theres the sweet, sparkling pop fizz of Heavens Here.

HOLLY GOES TO HEAVEN

Whats your vision of heaven?

I definitely believe that you sprout wings. Mine are going to be absolutely fab-u-lous, he laughs. Ive got an image of a great big celestial disco going on in heaven - Divine dancing with Cleopatra, Tennesse Williams dancing with Richard Burton.

Who will you be dancing with?

Oh, now that would be telling. I think Id just fly above everyones heads, hovering magnificently and occasionally land if someone was appealing to me.

So who or what is God?

To me God is a power which represents light, endeavour and good. Its like to me, laziness is evil and work is good.

What does hell look like?

The House Of Commons. Cant you just see Maggie with horns and a tail!

Hollys musical career began in a church, he sang in the choir. I was in love with wearing a starched ruff and those big white frocks every Saturday, he recalls, a starry look in his eyes. And the beautiful cobalt blue of the stained glass windows.

HOLLY AND HIS PAINTBRUSH

I was saved from art school by Frankie Goes To Hollywood. I was all ready to go when I decided to sign with ZTT instead. Great moments in pop part 18.

Holly Johnson isnt one of these pop stars who takes up art as some kind of pretentious hobby. Nick Rhodes? His stuff was laughable, to be honest. Mines quite good. Talking to him it becomes obvious that its a major part of his life. Ive just done a series of religious paintings actually. I painted myself a guardian angel to put above my bed and Ive painted Marilyn Monroe as Mary Magdalene. Im very mean with my paintings, Ive only given two away - one to my sister and one to charity. I like my own work, I definitely paint for me, although I do paint with communication in mind - I will show it to the world one day.

HOLLY GOES SHOPPING

Its definitely my favourite past-time, although I dont do it as much as I used to. Shopping is a bit of a crime really. When you first start earning money you do it a lot and then you do it so much that you cant really afford to do it anymore. I still cant go to the Kings Road on a Saturday without buying something special.

Are you good at making decisions or are you an um and ahrer?

Im a terrihle um and ahrer. Ive missed fabulous things through indecision. I was at an art exhibition once and I was offered a great deal on these two paintings. So, I thought if theyre so cheap maybe they not very good. So I went away to think about it for five minutes and didnt I bump into bloody Bob Geldof who chewed my ear off for half an hour. I went back and theyd gone. Bloody Bob Geldof!

HOLLY PLAYS POP

I love pop music because it communicates to the most people. Snobs say its the lowest common denominator dont they? I think those people are missing out. Their lives are enriched by serious music. But, you know, I make serious music, its serious pop. Is there more value in a Kylie number one or a Morrissey B-side? A Kylie number one certainly communicates to more people. But, I know what I prefer. Its quite a dilemma really.

Pop is

An irresistible sound the latest sound. Pops life magnified. Its Coca-Cola, Pepsi. Its an alternative reality thats much more interesting than the real thing.

HOLLY WATCHES TELEVISION

Last night I was crying over an Australian mini-series, it was terribly tragic. In my house the TV goes on at about six and stays on for the rest of the night whether you watch it or not. I dont watch Saturday night TV cause Im not really a fan of game shows. I watch them in America because theyre so over the top and sicko. Here, the prizes are so insulting. You become the laughing stock of your neighbourhood if you win. A week in Yugoslavia for two - is it worth it?

Is it worth kissing Leslie Crowther for?

Nothings worth kissing Leslie Crowther for.

Who is your favourite Brookside character?

Rod and Tracys gran - Julia Brogan. Shes such an un-holy cow. She makes me sick. Id like to stab her 62 times with a carving knife, I really would. Gladys Ambrose who plays her did a great advert for Blast on the radio. Holly does an impression - his own voice, only louder. Dont let your kids near im that Olly Johnson, the way he bumps and grinds. She sent me an autographed photo and I was really pleased, only the dog chewed her name off, I was upset for days.

HOLLY TAKES HIS DOG FOR A WALK

Whats your dog called?

Funky. Hes a really nice dog. He doesnt care whether Im hip this week or not. Hes a poodle. I didnt know he was a poodle till bought him. He doesnt look like a poodle cause we dont clip him with that ridiculous haircut poodles have. Poodles are the most intelligent dogs, and they dont moult, which is handy.

HOLLY BECOMES A SUPERSTAR

I dont really think of myself as a famous person. Sometimes I play the role, but its not like clear the room, Im entering. I think I was very famous during the court case. That was a terrible glare. Its been like two years of profuse ulceration. The News Of The World camping on the doorstep isnt very pleasant. But I wont really get that again now, unless Im involved in some sort of sex scandal- which is highly unlikely at my time of life!

Do you feel as if youre being watched all the time?

Sometimes I feel self-conscious, but only on the days where youd feel self-concious anyway. The last time I was mobbed was by this posse of German tourists while I was looking at second hand jeans. I fled Im afraid, smiled politely and fled.

People always seem incredibly surprised when they see me. They seem quite shocked that I should be walking along the street with a Tesco carrier bag, he pauses for thought. Well a Plaza Foods bag.

Article: Tibia pilgrim

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:49:46 GMT +1
First published: Sun, 01 May 1994
Tibia pilgrim

HOLLY JOHNSON

A Bone In My Flute

(Century, £15.99)

I wore my glasses, a suit and a dickie bow. Everyone else looked like tramps, writes Johnson, as he remembers another confrontational meeting with Frankie Goes To Hollywood.

Johnsons autobiography is at its best during dramatic, quickly observed moments-after taking half-a-dozen sleeping pills, Billy Johnson (the Holly came from Walk On The Wild Side) plays out his pre-pubescent suicide by lying down clutching a ring-binder full of my adolescent poetry.

As he discovers his sexuality, Holly changes from Big In Japans black-tighted, bi-sexual bassist into the full homo-erotic tease of the Frankies. For the debut Top Of The Pops performance of Relax, Holly slips a yellow handkerchief into his back-pocket, a signal to the S&M fraternity that the wearer is into Golden Showers.

By turns vain and self-effacing, Holly eschews over-analysis for some moving and occasionally brutal accounts of his clashes with producer Trevor Horn, his abhorrence of The Lads in FGTH and his love-hate relationship with dancer Paul Rutherford. At the tail end of the 80s, a more world-weary star finds himself in court fighting over an unfair recording contract, and at the sick bed of his friend, Wolfgang, who is (wrongly) diagnosed as suffering from an Aids-related illness. The latter is something which Holly has recently experienced first hand.

A Bone In My Flute is, nonetheless, a technicolour, spleen-venting tale of a sling backed poseur who once defined true glamour as the day George Michael invited him into the back of his gold limo.

8

Steve Malins

Article: The next biog thing!

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:49:21 GMT +1
First published: ?
THE NEXT BIOG THING!

A Bone In My Flute. Is it a) like Tennis Elbow; b) muso-talk for being ready to rock; or c) Holly Johnsons autobiography?

Youve already read a bit of Holly Johnsons autobiography A Bone In My Flute - Select ran an extract late last year detailing how the one-time Frankie singer came to terms with his HIV infection. But theres more to this story of an ugly duckling who sprouted wings, wore ruby slippers, waved a magic wand, had three number one records and learnt to fly right out of that wheelchair. It is, in fact, a fine read, relying not on Hammer Of The Gods-style bluster but a straightforward, stylish account of a life, studded with camp asides (his sexual style was a bit too sophisticated for me, he muses after an extra-wild display from an energetic liaison). Its best on Hollys teen years, with Pete Burns, Paul Rutherford and Bill Drummond all making cameos; the sex (a fantastic New Years Eve in Heaven will have Garry Bushell frothing at the mouth); and Hollys neat, sometimes bitchy observations about life, Liverpool, the music business and growing up gay

So why write the book?

I wanted to tell it like it was, to reveal rather than hide. I also didnt want a dodgy pop biog knocked out at an opportune commercial moment, so I wrote it myself. Mainly, perhaps, to release any old resentments - you know, a grudge held is a cancer tumour in five years time, and I cant afford any of that. Although I dont pretend that Im now purged and no longer have any psychological problems, ha ha!

The picture of your dad is pretty harsh.

I dont think it is. I think my father comes over as a very hard-working provider, working two jobs to feed four kids and the wife - a positive, humorous portrait. Whats important is to show people of their generation, and how they were unable to get their heads round having a flamboyant homosexual for a son. The way my dad behaved was his instinctive way of trying to protect me - he didnt want to see me get beaten up or found dead on the floor of a public toilet. My parents and I hadnt communicated for a number of years when I told them about my health, but when you hit crises like that you cast aside your petty squabbles

Why say that Frankie were to the 80s what the Pistols were to the 70s?

Because no other group made such an impact or were as iconoclastic in the 80s as Frankie. No one toyed with the taboos of a generation or created quite as big a media explosion.

Boy George did, surely.

Yes, but that only lasted five minutes. I love Boy George and I dont want to demean what he did, but he came onstage as a pantomime dame, denying his sexuality. He wasnt going, Well here you go, Im a homosexual, lock up your sons! It was, Oh look at me, arent I androgynous, but arent I accessible at the same time and I would rather have a cup of tea than sex, so you dont really have to worry about me threatening your lives. Frankie were just so much more subversive and more unapologetic.

How have the other members of FGTH responded to your illness?

One wrote me a letter - the one I least expected to - and wished me luck with my fight against it, and I thought that was very touching. It was Brian Nash, actually. One member found out about it before I had a chance to make my announcement and went round telling my friends. And the others have not made any comment.

Did the potential public reaction to the news that you are HIV+ worry you?

I knew on the morning it hit the papers that I had to go out, take the dog for a walk and buy my newspaper and me pint of milk in exactly the same way as I always had done. Otherwise it would be more difficult to go out the next day, and even more difficult the day after that.

You say you were sure you were a genius when you were young

Thats what I felt like as a teenager. When I was nine I felt Id been put on this earth for a special purpose. Hmm, I feel even more like that now, but not with the religious connotation I think the book, in a way, is demystifying homosexuality and what its like to be HIV positive. People with HIV and AIDS are rather marginalised by all these well-meaning organisations who wont have us presented to Princess Di and so on. We should be employed by these organisations who collect revenue on our behalf. It would be much better if they gave us jobs.

What did you leave out of the book?

I didnt leave anything out, but my editor blue pencilled a few things

MIRANDA SAWYER

Article: ZTT pay half million bill

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:48:39 GMT +1
First published: Sat, 12 Mar 1988
ZTT pay half million bill

ZANG TUMB TUUM Records has to foot the estimated £500,000 bill for their unsuccessful legal action to stop Holly Johnson pursuing a solo career, the High Court ruled last week. Andrew Bateson QC, counsel for ZTT and publishers Perfect Songs, asked Mr Justice Whitford not to make any order for costs. He claimed that they had soared after the introduction of thousands of unnecessary documents and unduly lengthy cross-examination of witnesses by counsel for the former singer with Frankie Goes To Hollywood.

But the judge, who last month ruled that Johnsons contract with ZTT was nonsensical and unreasonable, rejected the request.

He agreed the hearing last month was unnecessarily protracted, but ruled that ZZT should pay the costs because Johnson had successfully defended himself against their attempt to force him to honour his contract.

Johnson is now pursuing a solo career with MCA Records.

Article: Frankie rage hard, rock loud, get sensible

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:47:31 GMT +1
First published: Mon, 01 Dec 1986
THUMPING

Frankie rage hard, rock loud, get sensible

FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD
Liverpool
ZTT LP/Cass/CD

And all they ever really wanted to be was Bob Seger. Just listen to Watching The Wildlife, a thumping, rumpty-tumpty rocker full of scowling lead guitar and howling vocals. Consider Lunar Bay, a thundering slab of rock-disco, immaculately recorded to suggest enormous distance and a bottomless dynamic range. Fans, its a hairs-breadth away from heavy metal. Frankie Goes To Cleveland.

Once again, Frankie bounce out of their corner with a bloody great racket, a crushing monolith of sound guaranteed to test the finest loudspeakers to destruction. Liverpool is better than Welcome To The Pleasuredome in all sorts of sensible respects. The songs arent fillers, because you can tell the lads have really been working on them. That ballad, Is Anybody Out There? What taste, what class, what crafty major seventh chords. What a wracked and sob-evoking vocal. Why on earth didnt somebody give this song to Dusty Springfield?

There arent any Bruce Springsteen songs or jokey bits of nostalgia either, and there appears to be the absolute minimum of bad taste or things which might cause moral outrage. Liverpool is in fact an absolutely unimpeachable mainstream rock record, exhilarating in the way that all big rockers are supposed to be (despicable? You tell me).

I think it may all be an elaborate pastiche. The opener, Warriors Of The Wasteland, sounds exactly like Iron Maiden, featuring a monster riff and chorus with guitars that sound like hungry machines eating old cars. It would make a perfect theme tune for Mad Max XII. Its utterly crass and rather exciting.

Rage Hard you know. This is the one where the Frankies take a very belated revenge on Martin Fry, for some crime we can only guess at. This is ABCs aluminium disco pumped full of explosive gases and convulsively detonated, and maybe Pete Wylie never landed the Frankie frontman job because he could never have parodied Fry as perfectly as this.

But while Frankie were always a sort of novelty act, it seems a shame that theyve already become a post-futurist Barron Knights. Growing up means never having to say Paul Morley Made Me, but half the fun was always that he did. Now, the group appear to want to grow up and become mature, well-balanced citizens, which sounds like a damn silly way to wage war on showbusiness.

Liverpool is, once again, a brilliant noise. For all I know, its the most epic barrage of controlled decibels anybodys ever made. Unfortunately, this merely means that the New Year honours this time round go to man-at-the-faders Steve Lipson instead of Trevor Horn. Buy it for your in-car stereo. ***

Adam Sweeting

Article: Hometown boys

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:46:52 GMT +1
First published: Sat, 05 Jan 1985
HOMETOWN BOYS

FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD
Royal Court, Liverpool

FRANKIE say homecoming.

In Liverpool an old lady sits on the bus to Pier Head carrying a shopping bag with Relax written on the side. Is she aware of the cultural phenomenon that represents? In Liverpool tonight, its hard not to be. Everyone, it seems, wants to be here. Its an important occasion.

Statistics, success, first live British appearance since

Finally its time for the proof. And if this is to be the denouement of the Frankie legend, were in the right place. In Liverpool, they already know Frankie exists, not just as a commodity or a concept but as part of a community. They know too, Frankie can play: its been seen even if it was a prehistory. Since then, Frankies style has been squeezed into image. That was then and this is a turning point.

By the time you read this, Frankie will be last years thing. Will they be this years thing as well? The answer takes place in the space of an hour. It opens and closes with a disembodied voice: Welcome and Frankie say no more. In the interim, seven men who arent Frankie produce or accompany music that varies from the mundane to the mighty.

War, for starters, is as hard as you could ask for, but with Relax and The Power Of Love following soon after, you wonder whether theyre wise to use all their cards so quickly. Relax, with phallic fireworks at appropriate moments, is wonderful but The Power Of Love Hollys star turn, proves (without pictures) to be not much of a song. Little further on and Im no more interested that I would be at the local gay disco and no more moved than watching the videos.

In a club, Frankie could be marvellous but in a theatre and its not a large one either theyre not even really spectacular, which is the least we could have expected. After all, this should have been the ultimate show, a feast of salacious narcissism, the greatest story ever told.

Frankie should be epic all the time but this time their finest moments like all their other achievements are not of their own making. War, Born To Run and Ferry Cross The Mersey have the power to move thats unmatched by the rest of the set, though Two Tribes does whip up some extra excitement. The accompanying images are still from the video and you can see, frozen, how little the protagonists resemble what they represent just like the band, in fact.

I dont think anybody else minded that much; at least they were there. It was, after all, an important occasion.

PENNY KILEY

Article: From diamond mine to the factory

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:45:55 GMT +1
First published: ?
FROM THE DIAMOND MINE TO THE FACTORY

Interview by Jim Shelley

Photographs by Robert Ogilvie

Are Frankie Goes To Hollywood millionaires?

Will Rage Hard repeat the success of Relax and Two Tribes?

How long before Holly Johnson seeks fresh pastures?

Will he say too much?

Will he say enough?

Its just one of those phrases, isnt it? Like, OH MY GOD whats that appalling smell? Oh, I think its Something In The Music Business

I was at this party and I said to this bloke in a High Street suit and briefcase and ridiculous dark glasses, to make conversation, I said, So what do you do for a living? and he said, Well, er, like, hey, Im like, er, something in the music business

I said, What do you mean, like a crotchet? (John Dowie)

HIYA, COME IN, SIT DOWN, HOW DO you do, do you want coffee or tea? Sit down. You know, this is the first time Ive done an interview at home. Weve been here about 18 months, weve just had it done up. The day we exchanged contracts we went off on the world tour so Im just getting used to it. The neighbours? Oh theyre very ok yah types but quite nice really. Shall I be mother? Have we started yet?

Holly Johnson is at home in Parsons Green. Holly Johnsons coffee cups are modern yellow. Holly Johnsons voice is sing-song Liverpool camp Frankie Howerd. Holly Johnson is entertaining.

Yeah, I do miss Liverpool, the way it was, my amazing flat in Catherine Street, the way people knock on your door and pop round all the time and you know what everyones doin, yeah, its quite touching. Where are you from? Brighton, oooh, nice. I still go back but a few of me friends have moved down now and its not the same. I dont feel as comfortable there now. Peoples reactions have changed slightly. The Merseyside Echo describes us as Merseyside Millionaires which really isnt the case. Me mum gets attitude off people: Ooooh your sons a millionaire, worra you workin for? People can be weird.

Holly Johnson is at home with the camera click-click-clicking and the tape slowly running. Holly Johnson is almost entertaining me.

The album is going to be called Liverpool now, yeah, which I didnt really like at first. I wanted it to be called From The Diamond Mine To The Factory, which was more artistic, which is my personal, you know, bent. I felt that was more relevant, though Liverpool is a very strong title. Es standing on my sink! Youll slip and break your neck and all for a few photos. Anyway, as far as Im concerned the albums written and recorded, so to my mind Im interested in the next project - thats what Im thinking about and workin on at the moment, knowworrimean?

Holly Johnson is thinking: I wonder if he knows, I wonder if hell ask me, what shall I say, will he believe me, what if I say too much, I hope he doesnt make me

Its all been a bit of a blur, really, the last two years. From signing on to suddenly being Number One, then signing off the dole and ZTT kindly giving us a wage cos we couldnt really sign on when we were Number One. No, I never really liked being a Star. You mean, acting the glamorous celebrity, well I can do it, yeah. I did it for a week. No, really I did! It lasted a week. Its terribly fickle, you know, its so phoney, youre flavour of the week cos youre at Number One. I got bored with it. Of course the papers make up all sorts, you ignore it. People ring up and go, Ooooh, whats this about you in The Sun Today? I have a laugh with the girls at the grocery store. Thats it. To be honest with you, Ive enjoyed the lull. We went to Ireland to write some songs and then to Ibiza to do some demos, then back to Ireland, then to Guernsey and we recorded it in Holland. We went there cos the studios good. We couldnt use Sarm cos its too expensive. It was quite nice in Holland, a bit boring. The canals were all frozen and children skating on them, it was dead pretty. What else? I wrote a book of poetry and Im working on the illustrations at the moment. Whether Ill even try to get it published I dont know. Nothing ever seems good enough, doyouknowwhatimean?

Holly Johnson is pretending to sell me Frankie Goes To Hollywood. I am pretending to be considering buying the idea of Frankie Goes To Hollywood. Holly Johnson is not really interested in Frankie Goes To Hollywood anymore. Neither am I.

The new music is much less commercial, it isnt as hi-tech, its more real and more honest, less synthesised sounds. Its got Trevor Horn down as Executive Producer. Its more rock orientated, which isnt particularly the best direction but it is a direction. No-one has a whip-hand, no. I manipulate my own taste onto it, as best I can, but Im not prepared to have a running battle to have my own way constantly. I will have my way - when the time comes. What do I think about it? I think that my input - the lyrics and the melodies - is brilliant. I think Ive done really rather well.

Holly Johnson is biding his time, buying time, selling Rage Hard, which is a minute too long, a year too late and sounds like ELP, or, indeed, Queen. This seems the only thing worth saying right now.

The business side is horrible. I employ people to deal with it for me but you cant remain in ignorance. I do understand it all now but its a horrible learning process. The bands never win because thats the way society is structured: the working classes are never in a good bargaining position.

Considering that three years ago when we signed a contract I had NO IDEA what I was signing, I had NO IDEA what the first paragraph meant, the education Ive had in the last three years in this business has been incredible. I know now, yes, every infinitesimal possibility, I have every permutation calculated. See, I got mixed up in this incredible whirlwind of fun, right, and then I thought, hang on, just WHAT EXACTLY IS GOING ON HERE? And as soon as I thought that, the whirlwind of fun ended. All the constant touring, TV, hotels, airports, that horrific tour, I got really depressed, which is really out of character for me cos I was always a pretty chirpy sort of person. Right now Id like to do an album that says ABSOLUTELY NOTHING - politically, artistically. People do it all the time! I wanna do that. I like calypso rhythms right now, stuff like that. It would be terribly easy for me to slag ZTT. Naivety did have a lot to do with it. Obviously Jill Sinclair and Trevor Horn are extremely astute, but not as astute as people might think. They make mistakes too. We made terrible mistakes, terrible. I do have great respect for people like Jayne (Pink Military), whove got their own label, who do things at their own pace and style, like What I Wouldnt Give, which was fab, yeah, and eventually that will happen. My advice to young kids in bands would be DONT SIGN ANYTHING, hahaha. No, you have to get the most expensive lawyers you can, not one of these run-of-the-mill Music Business lawyers whose name gets bandied about from record company to record company:

Holly Johnson is thinking, Well half the people in the music business are saying were living as tax exiles and half are saying we owe ZTT half a million and Im tired of what people say. Holly is right.

Business and friends dont mix very well, no. It changes your relationships. When theres a business decision to be made, some of you are on one side of the fence, some on the other and some on the fence. You dont become a person anymore, you become the ARGUMENT. The Eurythmics seem to have got it right. Dave and Annie, hahaha.

I dont know how much weve made. Ive got a good idea. Ive got a few bob but theres no way I could stop working. Put it like this. I dont know any millionaires.

This is a good way of putting it. Holly Johnson thinks, How can I put this, how much should I say, how will it sound, I hope I dont tell him, I wish I could tell him.

I love singing and I love writing songs and Id love to do other things too and I have to carry on in order to reach the next chapter. I think about it all the time. Ive had offers to do certain things that I want to do. Like what? Haha. I cant really talk about them (giggles), Im sorry, I cant really talk about them at all. You cant be any vaguer than that!!! Well Im interested in film, you know behind the camera, definitely behind. Paul (Rutherford) never discussed his shops with me. Youll have to ask him about that, I read it somewhere but I dont know anything about it It is a horrid business, people outside always say, Everyone you meet in the music business is just disgusting and you do constantly meet people you hate.

Holly Johnson is doing the dishes.

I like Alison Moyet (giggles) and I met Elvis Costello and he was rather nice too. Im a bit snobby, actually, mmm. I tend to kind of think of everyone else as sort of POP MUSIC, Oh Im not in that (giggles). I met Gene Kelly, he was quite pleasant. I met him at MGM. Oh God, Body Double! OH WOW. You shouldnt have mentioned that one, hahahahaha, well, you live and learn America God. I liked watching TV in America. I liked San Francisco. I didnt like New York, I didnt like Los Angeles, I didnt like Detroit. It was so sad. The whole tour was pretty horrific, really.

Holly Johnson is giggling but probably only because he knows he wont be doing any of THAT again. Holly Johnson is crossing his fingers, holding his breath and hoping he can keep talking, holding out, holding on, not give the game away.

Well Has it become a rock group I dont know I hope that never ever happens. No, I dont think it has happened. Otherwise we would be doing just more of the same and we arent. I dont think what I do is heavy and cumbersome. I think thats what makes it interesting - the taste clash. Its like Roxy Music, for example, a lot of interesting elements. Whove I got on my side? No-one. I dont think what I do is routine. Its not empty-headed pop music I said what I wanted to say and I said it in a way that I dont find embarrassing. The way its done is important to me, yes. I mean I could never write a line like Call me good, call me bad/Call me anything you want to baby. I could not write a line like that. Thats what matters to me. I do think about the future a lot, yes, about the next thing thats going to happen, yes. I worry about my particular job more than anybody elses, thats what Im interested in. Im not interested in what they do so much. Im interested in what I do. We have had a particularly difficult time, yeah, as a unit, but Ive never made any public statements about this, so why are you so certain Im going to leave? Am I going to? Oh God. Hahahahahaha.

Holly Johnson thinks this is it. At least hes asked at last, I can stop evading and he can stop hinting, but can I say I wish I could tell him? I hope I dont tell him.

Put it this way, I never ever want to be in a situation like Queen, who are fabulously successful and very clever and all that, but Im not interested in this forever pop group. I always said I could only see three albums. As I said, I like the work that Ive done on this new record and you have to compromise sometimes and yes it is really difficult.

Holly thinks that must be enough, I hope its enough. I hope its not too much.

Why am I putting up with it? Youre putting words into my mouth, hahaha. Cant you see my position?! Cant you see youre asking me a ridiculously difficult question and to answer it Im just going to compromise myself incredibly? Its a very special situation, yeah, incredibly complicated. I dont have to say anything thats going to upset anyone, lets face it. It would be bad for me to do that. Everything is in a very fine balance. I dont want to complicate it any more. It would be good if I could just get on with it, yeah, but things arent as simple as that. I could do it like Sylvian, stay with the label Isnt that good enough for you, hahaha?

Holly thinks, Lets change the subject.

I dont think Ive changed that much from the early days, why, what did I used to look like? More extreme? Oh, the leather and that Well Im not Brian Ferry now, not by a long chalk, haha. I was more into fashion at that time. I was into, you know, FASHION, hahaha. Im not interested in fashion anymore, no. I never was in the first place, but I thought I was. I always thought: WOW! Id love to go into that shop and buy THAT and then all of a sudden I could, so I did. I did it like hell and then I thought, well that was a bit stupid, wasnt it? Being taken in like that. I do go through a lot of phases, though, yes. When it becomes, like, this season, that season, next season, thats ridiculous.

Holly Johnson is called Holly for dancing to Walk On The Wild Side; he is not very wild these days.

No, not really. I went through my hedonism phase before Frankie broke, really. The others got into it, yeah. I went to this great Brazilian restaurant last night. I bought a nice sideboard, really nice sideboard. Last week I was supposed to go to Venice but I couldnt go cos I had no roof. Do you want another cup of coffee?

Holly Johnson, slipping away from secrecy, is back being himself now that hes remembered to be more Norman Wisdom than Noel Coward. One day he might like to be Truman Capote though it might end up like Kenneth Williams and sometimes will be a bit Frank Spencer. Never mind: he is entertaining.

I never wanted to be be David Cassidy like you, no. I wanted to be David Bowie for a bit. The bit between Ziggy and Baal quite a big bit hahahaha. He is very good, though. Modern Lave was great, too. The words were great. Ive never met him, no. I had the opportunity to meet him a couple of weeks ago, I knew where he was going to be on a certain day at a certain time and I knew for a month in advance. I had a great time thinking, Im going to meet David Bowie and what shall I wear and what shall I say and when it came to the crunch I thought, Nahhh. Nahhhhh.

Holly Johnson is thinking, Well at least I didnt say very much? At least I didnt say anything I shouldnt have. He is thinking it wasnt too bad at all, really. Holly Johnson is dead soft, really, not at all conceited or spoilt, not really at all obnoxious or ridiculously pleased with himself. Not at all like something in the music business.

Hey yeah, I met Andy Warhol. Andy, hahaha. I kept wanting to say, Hey, Andy, give us that painting (giggles). Thats a Warhol print on the wall there, yeah. Do you wanna see me painting room downstairs in the basement? That Warhol exhibitions useless, isnt it? Whos Don Watson?

Holly Johnson is a quaver in the music business.

Article: Dome is where the art is

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:44:57 GMT +1
First published: Thu, 08 Nov 1984
DOME IS WHERE THE ART IS

FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD

Welcome To The Pleasure Dome

(ZTT IQ1)****

NOT WITH a bang, but with a?

With a cordial welcome to the pleasure dome, complete with overkill, overjoy and over compensation. This is not the real world, inconsistent though it be; were asked to raise chilled glasses of Pomange to Frankies make-up, make believe and make do, and its sheer indulgence in the extreme.

FGTH are about the senses, in a totally senseless way. To their infinite credit, they blend the hip with the witless-merit badges to those whingeing in the office that it sounded like Pink Floyd before reading the sly credits to them inside. What it amounts to is a major (to miner) coup in a way only touched on by McLaren, reeking as it does of hype and hypocrisy, while out of the mud bath crawls Frankie, smelling sweetly of amyl nitrate.

Lets submerge, indulge and fantasise. Wrapped sensuously around the ejaculations of Relax and the wind scales of Two Tribes comes a garden of Eden, made into an adventure playground. Wallow in the gyre with them, and gimble in the wabe (yes, paedophile Lewis Carroll gets credit in there too). Accuse them of Zola, of Neitzsche; uncover every plagiarism in the book, yet the masquerade remains intact. Life is a cabaret, old chum

Lets pause for breath though to point out this aint no value for money bumper package. Double gatefold gloss it may be; but one side youll have already, while another frolicks in spurious versions of San Jose and Born To Run. But then, we all knew Frankie was a yob. Still, you can send off for Frankie designer bags, boxer shorts, even Frankie stick-on tattoos. Designs on your bodies as well as your minds, in a convenient package that doesnt stain the vein.

Meanwhile, back at the dome, FGTH are embracing the climatic and the aftermath, with a fair amount of aural exercise in between. Frankie says quite a lot, actually, pretentious rubbish for which were rewarded with almost illicit ecstasy. Recoiled melancholia bursts upon our palate in The Power Of Love; disco dementia on The Onlv Star In Heaven. Frankie makes gullibility fashionable.

Make love, not nuclear bombs, they say, because either way well get an almighty bang. Welcome to the nightmare.

CAROLE LINFIELD

Article: After three Number 1 British singles...

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:43:12 GMT +1
First published: Wed, 01 Mar 1989
After three Number 1 British singles, Frankie Goes To Hollywood took a year out in 1985, divided between a three-month American tour, four months at an Irish converted castle studio complex (above), two months in Jersey and three months recording near Amsterdam. Effectively barred from performing in the one country in which they were a real commercial concern - Britain -theyd lost their loyal following on their return in 86.

Article: Local hero

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:42:46 GMT +1
First published: Sat, 04 Feb 1989
HOLLY JOHNSON LOCO HERO

WITH HIS DEBUT SOLO SINGLE, LOVE TRAIN, CHUGGING UP THE CHARTS, HOLLY JOHNSON TELLS STEVE SUTHERLAND THERE IS LIFE AFTER FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD. PICS: TOM SHEEHAN

EXCUSE ME WHILE I PULL MY trousers down.

Holly gives a wicked little wiggle and laughs.

God, I dont think I should wear the tie, do you? The buttons are nice, arent they? I remember now - thats why I bought this shirt, because of the buttons. The tie is kipper and green. The buttons are mother of pearl. The trousers are down.

Will you look at this? When youve got curly hair, theres one day a month when it does the right thing.

The make-up lady asks him if he knows its a full moon. I ask him if hes ever tried to straighten the unruly locks which are breaking forth from his forehead like cresting waves?

God yes, with curling tongs, everything. Everyone wants what they havent got, dont they? David Bowie was one of my first heroes, so I just had to have poker straight hair.

Holly wriggles his trousers back up, tucking in his shirt tails. I tell him that, of all the people Ive interviewed, more have said Bowie doing Starman on Top Of The Pops was the moment they wanted to be in a band than any other single event.

Really? He flicks his quiff and struggles with a glove. For me it was probably Marc Almond doing Jeepster or Metal Guru or

Dont you mean Marc Bolan?

Yeah. Marc Bolan. Sorry. I met Gene Pitney on Tuesday

HOLLY Johnson is back where he belongs in front of mirrors, messing with make-up, gathering poise to face the cameras. With Frankie Goes To Hollywood a glorious memory that tarnished in the courts, hes braced once more for the big-time. His first solo single, Love Train, put him back on his beloved Top Of The Pops - still a thrill after all hes been through, all hes seen and done, all hes learned

What have I learned? Oooh, thats a hard one! Um to get photo approval. It doesnt matter what they say about you in the interview, if the photos good, its alright. I love to see good photos of people whether they be David Byrne, Andy Warhol, Joseph Beuys, anyone.

You dont believe, like some primitive tribesman do, that every time you have your photo taken, you surrender a little of your soul?

I think, possibly, its true, but its probably the vain part of yourself which is taken away, which aint a bad thing. Theres a certain amount of self-centredness in performers and singers and all the attention can increase that. Dyou know, quite a few of the people I know have said, I dont envy you and I dont envy me either ha ha!

But surely Holly is enviable. I mean, when youre little, you want to be an astronaut, or a lion-tamer or a pop star or something. You want to be Holly Johnson, you never want to be a brickie or an accountant.

I wanted to be a magician or an archaeologist or in a movie like Gene Kelly and Judy Garland. I wanted to be those kind of things.

So youre attracted to glamour.

Glamour! Weve arrived at glamour! Glamour is a completely illusory thing, a completely media-made existence. There is no such thing as glamour except in the eye of the beholder. Yknow, I find a great deal of glamour in a photograph of Tom Waits, although what hes about is anti-glamour isnt it? But that man cant take a bad photograph - he looks great in every photo Ive ever seen of him.

I think people shouldnt believe in glamour but that it can be inspirational, dont you?

Oh yeah! Glamour isnt just red lips and sunglasses, which a lot of people think it is.

Do you think pop has a responsibility to be larger than life, to be an escape from the humdrum?

Yeah, I tend to be attracted to people who are extreme and I think pop music should be larger than life, or more intense than life normally is. I think the responsibility is definitely to inspire, to take people from the humdrum, to move them.

Do you get emotional about it?

Im not emotionally easily moved by pop music. Only some things will amuse me or make me feel passionate. The older I get, the fussier I get, the more critical. There were records that made me feel passionate, that I would just listen to endlessly for six weeks and want to learn every chord and every lyric. There arent as many albums like that any more. Maybe its just that theres less mystery involved for me in the making of records.

I think the mystique of a record has a lot to do with the love of it, not knowing too much about how they did it and what their relationships were like. For example, those albums by David Bowie and Brian Eno hold a great mystique for me. The Smiths albums work on that level as well.

Are you saying you dont cry easily?

Oh, it depends! Im very good at holding back tears but Im a sucker for the sentimental. I do believe in sentiment and romance and I think cynical people who frown upon them are really missing out in life.

Hasnt AIDS done it in for romance? Isnt writing songs about love and sex just moon and June stuff now, fantasies in the face of the horrific reality?

Well, for me, Riding The Love Train is the actual sexual act and I think its realistic.

Keep me up all night Stoke it up Theres a lot of ooo-er innuendo in Love Train isnt there? Part of the thrill must have been to slip some darker purpose or more devious pleasure past the self-appointed censors of our morals, to, in some way, have polluted the mainstream.

If it doesnt work on two levels for me then I dont feel Ive achieved the right balance in the song. If I feel that I havent managed to write a populist tune and I havent been able to slip some kind of twist into the lyric, then the song isnt good enough for me.

HOLLYS finished powdering his nose so we break from the interview for the photo-session. Holly goes through all his moves, as ever reminding me of The Riddler in Batman.

His manager/mentor/minder and lover, Wolfgang, is lounging in the far corner, under a parachute, on a chaise-lounge.

You look like youre in an opium den, Holly informs him.

Oh, I wish with the opium being served by naked young boys. And coffee the black being served by white boys, the white by black

Wolfgang seems to delight in administering mild shocks. While Im hanging around, he fantasises about going down on Jack Nicholson, narrates the tale of an aging singer-songwriter who unsuccessfully tried to pick him up in the bar (I said You wrote The Road To Amarillo, you f***ing take it!) and asks me if I have enough interview yet to stitch Holly up.

He was called Holly Fatty Arbuckle once!

That was Record Mirror, says Holly. I remember stuff like that. I have a little black book. I have a strange memory - I can remember, perfectly, conversations I had three years ago and then I cant remember where I put my glasses.

BACK in the dressing room, Holly changes gloves and I ask why he quit on Frankie?

It just ceased to be my baby. I no longer had the amount of control over it that I wanted. It went too far away from my original image of it. Musically it was no longer seductive, rhythmically. Thats it basically. Thats what I like in music - the seductive image in the groove - and it became too white boy for me. Yknow, there is some rock music I do like and I kind of went along with it to a certain degree, but only up to a certain point

Do you ever regret it?

Not at any time have I regretted the decision, no.

Hollys refusing to touch the cotton wool because, unless its wet, he says, he has a thing about it - it sets his teeth on edge. Then he wonders if Ive ever interviewed Bonnie Tyler because shes always so nice to him when they meet on TV shows, not like that Marc Almond who always looks away when you pass him in the street.

I say Ive never met Bonnie, but she always struck me as a female Shakey which makes Holly laugh. Then I say, as an onlooker, it looked for a while as if Frankie ruled the world, as if they could get away with anything, could get away with murder. Frankie could do no wrong.

Or Frankie could do every wrong! I think a lot of that was to do with it being a particularly good summer in 1984 and certain people were excited by what we were doing. It was an illusion that we all took part in, both the onlookers and the perpetrators. I think we all fooled ourselves slightly or, in our youthful exuberance, enjoyed that epic aspect of what was Frankie Goes To Hollywood.

I CAN see Frankies legacy everywhere. The fact that their rebellion was a sham, controlled from within ZTT, inevitably led to those sons of Trevor Horn - Stock, Aitken and Waterman - following suit, dumping the outrage, just keeping the control. And poor old Sputnik would surely have been given more of a chance if we hadnt grown wise to Frankies shenanigans.

Holly says he sees Frankies legacy in the unashamed hedonism of Acid House. Philosophically, its a throwback to the pleasure principle Frankie once espoused and, musically, he considers the Frankie 12inches have been influential in the way they shifted moods and sampled vocals.

The difference, of course, is that Frankie were built on personality, on the star system, and Acid House is the opposite, almost totally anonymous.

Yeah, its a faceless thing, but then thats great isnt it because it gives those people with zero charisma an opportunity to make successful dance records. Being in a pop group is about entertaining and charming people, but there are very talented people in the world who arent capable of doing that. For example, Vini Reilly from Durutti Column played on a couple of tracks on my album and I think hes an immensely charming person but he doesnt have a particularly strong visual image. Hes painfully shy and he cant project himself in the way that, say, George Michael can. What a shame that is.

Thats funny - I had you marked down as a real advocate of the star system. I always thought you wanted to be the ultimate star.

Yeah, well, I think we all had a sense of charm in Frankie Goes To Hollywood. Its like Alan Bleasdale said: Everyone from Liverpool should have an Equity card.

Does Liverpool still mean a lot to you or have you become cosmopolitan now?

I dont think Im cosmopolitan at all. I have travelled quite a bit but I think Im really, really English and quite provincial in a lot of ways. I live in London, but Im trying to remedy that. Theres some great aspects about London but its so dirty and I hate drinking the water - I try to avoid drinking the water as much as possible.

Londons really not the social centre that its supposed to be. Its not conducive to having friends or living life to a high quality. Its conducive to getting really out of your brain, which a lot of people have to do to cope with the everyday hard work that you need to survive here.

How do you relax?

I watch far too much television and painting and drawings great when I can calm myself down enough to do it. My paintings rather primitive, it really is. Its not abstract, but it could be classified as expressionist.

Would you like to exhibit?

Um not yet. It would be bloody imagine! Having to be there at the opening of the exhibition dressed up like a dogs dinner, pretending to be drinking champagne and oooh! That sounds hideous to me. If I could do it in complete disguise under an assumed name, then I might. Imagine ooooh! Mind you, it might be quite amusing if I didnt take it to heart.

WE arrange the details of Hollys photo approval - we promise not to use shots he doesnt like if he promises to get the session back to us by 10am, Tuesday - and I wonder whether he really considers this a fit job for a grown man?

Its not a very respectable job for a grown man at all and I wouldnt have it any other way. Im afraid I dont think Id want to do it if it was respectable. Im still juvenile enough to enjoy that.

Is it as much fun, as much of a crack as it used to be? After all, there was a context created around Frankie - a lot of sloganeering by Paul Morley, a fabrication of a modernism of which Frankie were the vanguard. There was a political atmosphere, a turbulent playpen, whereas Love Train just slipped out like any other single.

Yeah, thats true, but our atmosphere wasnt a Socialist one or a Conservative one. It didnt adhere to anything like that. It couldnt have fitted into Red Wedges scenario. It was definitely its own thing. I suppose it was a humanist approach. Like, for example, what pisses me off is factories buying toxic waste and putting it next to a council estate. I suppose it sounds a bit hippy but thats just one aspect of me.

Theres something essentially optimistic about every song I write and, so, in that respect, Im on a crusade to cheer everyone up.

How much of what youre doing now is motivated by having to prove yourself, especially as a lot of people would have been looking for you to fall flat on your face without Trevor Horn, without ZTT, without Frankie?

Like success is the best revenge? Id say there was definitely that aspect to my character. I cant deny that, but its not the sole motivation and neither is the financial reward. The greatest motivation is being creative because thats what I really enjoy doing. I feel worthless if Im not working on something or creating an object that wasnt there before. I love doing that, whether it be writing, painting, writing a song or singing, just creating something out of nothing.

You used to revel in performing so much, I wonder if you miss it?

I love doing TV and video. Thats the thing that I enjoy most and feel that Im best at. As far as live shows are concerned, I like them when theyre very theatrical, when theres lots going on like fireworks and costumes and make-up and lights.

Maybe you should be acting.

Hm that is a whole talent in itself and a whole lifetime of experience. Its not that I dont fancy it, but Id step into it very carefully.

Youd be scared?

Oh yeah! Absolutely, because everybodyd be looking at Holly Johnson the singer trying to be an actor.

The David Bowie syndrome?

Well, I would never presume to compare myself to David Bowie, but it is difficult for singers to become actors because they get very dependent on Okay, this is me, this is my persona and work and people love me and they find it very hard to break out of that. That was explained to me by Alexandra Sandra Pigg recently.

It seems bloody unfair that actors like Jason Donovan and Kylie Minogue can make hit singles but singers cant make hit films

Oh, well Sting does doesnt he? Hes one of the very few people who can actually act.

A debatable point.

Well, I think he pulls it off a lot better than certain people. And, of course, theres Phil Collins - hes a natural.

I TAKE a deep breath after that one and Holly says he has to go to the studio to oversee his albums final mix which has two or three working titles, none of which hell reveal just yet.

Wolfgangs hovering, so I fire a parting shot or two: Whats the high point in your career so far?

I dont know. I really enjoyed getting an Ivor Novello Award. Yknow, it sounds like Im bragging a bit, but it was quite a nice little statuette and it looks very nice on the mantelpiece.

Is there anybody youve met through being a pop star that youve been really excited about?

Andy Warhol. It was quite a thrill meeting Annie Lennox because I think shes really beautiful and really talented. But it was just such a thrill to meet Andy Warhol because Id been such a fan of his since I was about 15 and, yknow, David Bowie and Velvet Underground and his links with that. I was always trying to get into his films when I was only 15 and they were X films.

He was my first view on art. I got interested in art through anti-art and it was just great meeting him. The second time I met him, I said, Do you know Quentin Crisp? and he just picked up the phone, dialled a number and handed me the receiver. Quentin Crisp was on the other end of the phone which I just thought was great. I invited Quentin Crisp to a concert which he sadly declined and I just gave the phone back to Andy. It was a great experience, Ill just never forget it.

I found him quite normal in a way. Another thing I said to him was, How do I get to be on the cover of Interview? and he said you had to sleep with the publisher, which I thought was rather good. He had this kind of strange plastic beige thing in his ear which was an acupuncture thing for him to lose weight which I thought was a bit odd.

Were you shocked when he died?

I was really, really surprised because, to all extents and purposes, he was really healthy and had started to be quite productive again. I think there was some negligence somewhere along the line from what Ive heard. The worst fear that comes to mind is that he was bumped off by a sinister art world.

Is there anyone you would really like to meet that you havent? Alive or dead.

Jean Cocteau. What I liked about him was he was a dabbler - he dabbled in all kinds of things and called everything a poem whether it was a sculpture or a film. He was a self-publicist and a stylist but with a real talent and there arent any artists like him anymore.

Holly also expresses a liking for the English Vorticist movement. He mentions Wyndam Lewis, David Bomberg and William Roberts, says hes tried to incorporate some of their style into his record covers and bemoans the fact that any other country except England would have celebrated these talents more.

Its a real flaw in the English personality. What was it Queen Victoria said? Never shake hands with an artist, you never know where his hands been. Theres this strange attitude towards anything slightly bohemian.

We British dont like Renaissance men. We like people to be good at one thing

But not that good. English people worship the underdog. They worship people who are unsuccessfully doing something brilliantly. Commerce is a dirty word, like money and glamour. Ha Ha

The British are very jealous of success arent they?

Yeah, especially when its their friends. My relationships have been affected. No one likes to see their friends get on, although they dont like to admit that.

Theres a subtle change that occurs between Im as good as he is. I should be doing as well to Hes as good as I am, so how did he get so bloody lucky?

I think Im a really lucky person because Ive been allowed to indulge myself pretty much completely on an artistic level. Ive been able to play my joke so to speak. Yeah, Im dead lucky.

So apart from taking your life, what would be the worst liberty someone could take from you?

Oh, Id hate not to be able to go shopping again.

Article: Rocket man

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:40:22 GMT +1
First published: Sat, 22 Apr 1989
ROCKET MAN

HOLLY JOHNSON

BLAST

MCA

CONSIDERING Hollys career has been established around a clutch of perfect slogans and considering his debut solo LP is peppered with pregnant gems like Beat the system before it beats you, it seems reasonable to assume that there was a fair amount of scratching the impeccably coiffeured bonce before he arrived at the title. Anyway, however you look at it, Blast is a revelation.

The same vengeful confidence which gives a Blast to All the Unbelievers and Deceivers on the inner sleeve (he also gives the thumbs up to Percy Wyndam Lewis and God) throbs through the hard-on, haughty syncopation of Atomic City and the skirt- twirling Latinate sarcasm of Americanos. This is an album of erect justification, a poke in the eardrum for those who considered Holly merely a cuddly marionette acting out his camp fantasies to the beat of someone elses genius. It may lack Trevor Horns exotic depth and sweep but Atomic City has learned enough from Frankie to locate a hiatus of pastoral serenity in the midst of the swelter, a breather before hurtling back into the synthetic brass sweat bath.

Blast also incorporates the frustration of exclamation. Holly, it seems, is the squirming embodiment of righteousness and he never lets up wagging a warning finger. Hes got a real thing about TV, has Holly. During the Jackson 5ish Deep In Love, which unashamedly appears to glue verses of his predeliction for small p political truisms to choruses melting like butter with romanticism (ie: Relax meets The Power Of Love), he tells us we watch too much box while Atomic City informs us Theres more to life than a TV gameshow.

Americanos is a right miff constructed around the fact that Holly reckons we get conned a lot into buying stuff we dont need which, coming from a man who made a pile selling us umpteen Two Tribes remixes and Frankie Say tee shirts, is pretty rich frankly.

Still, Hollys indignation is hearteningly targeted. S.U.C.C.E.S.S. (I bet he could murder those Sputniks!) isolates the symptom of our spiritual malaise quite neatly, bombardment from the media undermining our better instincts so that wanting a new dress and wanting world peace become equally as important and, hence, equally as trivial. On the other hand, Hollys a great one for the notion that social improvement begins with the self. We are all prospective gods and the sweet Heavens Here tells us, This is your lifetime, Deep In Love admonishes us to, Make your dreams come true, animate your imagination and, when Got It Made gives over telling us to be grateful for small mercies, it says: From a very young age you must realise theres nothing in your way you cant overcome.

Of course, this susceptibility to optimism inevitably leads to some pothead philosophising and Blast often slips from hip to hippy. A phrase coined by dopers inhaling hot smoke to induce nirvana, the blast that gets you high, the blast that finds peace, harmony and love divine is the same blast that prompts Holly to his customary Ows at the height of excitement, the same blast that propels him, again and again, to surrender to the rhythm.

For Blast is essentially a dance LP. There are exceptions - the showy Love Will Come is a warm ballad straight from an imaginary musical, Perfume is a misbegotten stab at Prince, trying too hard to relax into the risque, and Feel Good is smooth, loin-girding encouragement - but mostly its smart, ankle-shuffling stuff like the cute mini-masterpiece of pneumatic innuendo, Love Train.

By nature, Blast is a cocky bop with the odd intriguing couplet. I like, If time stood still on my window sill Id squash it like a fly. Its good that.

STEVE SUTHERLAND

Article: Blast

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:37:20 GMT +1
First published: ?
HOLLY.JOHNSON

Blast

(MCA, £7.99)

This 25-minute cassette brings a visual version of Hollys 300,000-selling debut solo LP. The video includes Lovetrain, Americanos, Heavens Here and the previously unseen 12 inch version of Atomic City.

Article: Four popular misconceptions...

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:31:30 GMT +1
First published: ?
February 9: Holly Johnson

Four popular misconceptions about HOLLY JOHNSON

1. Hes a keen pigeon-fancier and sends messages to and from his American record company tied to the foot of his trophy-winning pedigree homing bird, Harriet.

(Unlikely because, of course, thats a bit too far for a pigeon to fly, probably.)

2. Each week his mum sends Holly a de luxe home-baked cherry and chocolate chip gateau through the post to his home in Tooting, London.

(Unlikely because Holly lives in Fulham, London and you would reckon his mum knows where he lives, wouldnt you?)

3. Hollys love of all things artistic was stirred as a child when he discovered the early works of his uncle, Rolf Harris, in the dusty attic of his familys semi-detached home in a leafy suburb of Melbourne.

(Unlikely since, of course, Holly bears absolutely no family resemblance to Rolf Harris whatsoever.)

4. As a teenager, Holly actually had his social security number dyed in his hair on the side of his head.

(Unlikely because no one is quite that daft. Hold on a minute. oh, sorry, he did do that. Good grief!)

Article: Dreams that money cant buy

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:30:15 GMT +1
First published: ?
HOLLY JOHNSON
Dreams That Money Cant Buy
(MCA)

The titles correct. Money cant buy the dreams of a Bolan, Warhol and July Garland fixated scally who managed to escape the humdrum only through a gently wicked mixture of camp glamour, pervy promo-vids and orgasmic howls.

Johnsons exuberance and low humour made FGTH much more than Trevor Horns expensive executive toy. But as the engaging hedonist became a self-conscious aesthetic (with a growing art collection), the quirkiness was replaced by big but banal sounds, big but banal choruses and videos with plenty of big, bright colours.

Poorly executed clichés, concepts and arty namechecks are de rigueur here. William Burroughs, Jacques Brel and Warhol are cited to the end only of a love conquers all, be free to party but dont get wasted on drugs disco-blast.

Occasionally this is effective, but it often lacks badly for the sleaze and titillation of Relax. Even the camp humour of Across The Universe sounds hideously dated and forced. Sorry - but astronauts in love and Major Tom riding an atomic bomb? Do me a favour!

(4) Steve Malins

Article: My favourite TV programme

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:29:33 GMT +1
First published: ?
MY FAVOURITE TV PROGRAMME

ROSEANNE

CHOSEN BY HOLLY JOHNSON

I had a regular Friday night ritual: says Holly Johnson (above), currently celebrating his third solo hit, Atomic City. I sat down in front of the telly and watched my favourite shows: Cheers and Roseanne. I never videoed them, I just made sure I was in on a Friday night. Theyre the only programmes that make me laugh. Out of the two, Roseanne [right] is my favourite. I like it because its set in a real American home, every thing is a mess and its not at all pretentious. Its also nice to see a working-class family in action rather than Cosby-style stereotypes where all the family wear £500 jumpers. Roseanne is down-to-earth and hilarious at the same time. Her one-woman stand-up routine which was on telly recently was brilliant, too.

Americans are much better at producing sitcoms than the British. They seem to have a much bigger budget than our TV companies, so can afford to spend more on sets and story lines. But I think that British dramas are much better than American ones.

The telly is always on at home if Im in. I read or eat or chat with my friends while its on, but unless I really want to watch something I basically ignore it. And theres one thing I refuse to watch on telly - American-style game shows. Theyre absolutely mindless and a real subject of ridicule. But I used them in my Americanos video to show how intrinsic they are to the American way of life.

Videos are very important to a song because they represent your image worldwide. Its all very well doing Top Of The Pops here, but that wont get your song played elsewhere. An impressive video will. I always have lots of meetings with the record company over how a video will look and it really pays off.

NR

Article: Holly Johnson's gourmet tips

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:26:58 GMT +1
First published: ?
FEB 9 HOLLY JOHNSON

Holly Johnsons Gourmet Tips: Yorkshire Pudding

When making Yorkshire Pudding, use a Kenwood Chef to splodge up the mixture (milk, flour, water, eggs, lard, seasoning, greased baking tray etc.) because then they rise really well assures Johnson. Yum!

Article: Hollelujah

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:26:00 GMT +1
First published: ?
HOLLY JOHNSON
Hollelujah
MCA

Heres a tester for you. When is a new album not a new album? When its called Hollelujah. It should strictly be called Blast - The Remixes. Apart from the title track, which cant really be called new considering its based on one of Handels old hits, this is simply five tracks from last years brilliant Blast LP remixed.

Frankie Knuckles has been let loose on Love Train while Atomic City and Heavens Here were entrusted to Julian Mendelsohn. The latter is the only version that benefits from its overhaul, but maybe thats because its just longer. Martin Phillips and Madame X toy with Perfume while Phil Harding and Ian Curnow end up with Americanos.

With these illustrious names and such great material to work with the result is disappointing. Most of the songs having the life mixed out and the rhythm left bare. Holly is a precious and charismatic talent and Blast was one of the best albums of 89, but this was obviously conceived by a record company who credit the public with less sense and shorter memories than themselves. So Hollys still alive and working on his second LP, just tell us. Well understand.

The songs are still good its just the idea that sucks

**

Kevin Murphy

Article: The coming of the sex captains

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:21:22 GMT +1
First published: Sat, 01 Dec 1984
THE COMING OF THE SEX CAPTAINS

New York style-watcher David Fricke has just emerged from FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOODS American blitz. Will the Americans continue to love Frankie or are they laughing up their sleeves. The Maker Say Read On! Photos by Janette Beckman

FRANKIE SAY BUY ME!

THE last provocative chord of Relax, a fireball crescendo of bass guitar throb, brittle staccato guitar and hallelujah synthesizer, has come crashing down around the audience. Momentarily stunned, they watch Frankie Goes To Hollywood take a final bow. Then suddenly, as Frankie gallop off stage and the final embers of that chord die down, their hands shoot up in the air right behind the delirious cheers of More!.

A slide lights up on the backdrop curtain; it reads Frankie Say No More. And there isnt. After a 50-minute dash through most of Welcome To The Pleasure Dome with two encores, the New York debut of Frankie Goes To Hollywood - the first of three sold-out shows at the Ritz - is over.

But the marketing goes on. Downstairs in the small Ritz lobby, the exit is choked by a logjam of teens waving American green - mostly 10 and 20 dollar bills - at the tee-shirt vendors. There are three different Frankie Say shirts for sale at a reasonable (for rock concert souvenir wear anyway) 12 dollars apiece. Matching buttons are an extra dollar.

Business is brisk. And as the 1600-plus fans file down the stairs past the tee-shirt table, it soon verges on the hysterical, following a trend that hit an early peak at Frankies Philadelphia show four nights earlier. There, customers lined up 50 deep bought all three shirts and all three buttons, the kind of panic buying last seen in these parts at the Jacksons concerts.

It doesnt end in the Ritz lobby either. At a group autograph session the next day in the giant Tower Records store in Greenwich Village, Pleasure Dome albums bearing prized new Frankie scrawl walk out the door practically to the exclusion of all else. All along the Frankie tour route, radio stations fall all over themselves trying to get a piece of the Frankie frenzy; in the industry tipsheet Album Network, in the tours first week, 55 of the publications nearly 70 reporting stations listed Frankie as hot, a band to break, a record to play.

The selling of Frankie Goes To Hollywood in America, a campaign planned with Napoleonic ego and greedy vigour right down to the last minute detail, is in full swing and, in all apparent respects, paying off in spades. There is only one loose end. Just what exactly are we buying?

FRANKIE SAY LOVE ME!

WERE from Liverpool - so clap!

If Holly Johnson thinks that kind of arrogant snip is going to get him landslide applause, hes got another think coming. He couldnt have gotten a bigger yawn if hed said: Were from Bayonne, New Jersey.

But it is obvious that on Frankies first US tour - indeed first official tour anywhere proper attitude must be maintained. The Frankie that arrived in North America October 30 for this 22-show tour had already been elected Gods Gift to Pop 84 in Britain. They had sold over a million copies each of their only two releases and launched an improbably successful line of tee-shirts - actually the size of a small Bedouin desert tent - that would no doubt have gone platinum if the garment industry had such an award.

Yet in very practical terms, at least from an important Yankee perspective, Frankie Goes To Hollywood became a phenomenon without actually doing much. They didnt perform live. As their producer, Trevor Horn turned two good songs, basically disco-funk with an axe to grind, into ribald, cinematic magic. As their chief propagandist, Paul Morley gave them snide promotional poesy and an epic romantic profile. And would it be out of line to suggest the banning of Relax by BBC radio was more important, in a commercial sense, than the actual making of it?

It seems from here that merely being Frankie has made Frankie Goes To Hollywood English pops biggest thing since, ahem, Adam Ant. So, Frankie, as one English journalist once said to our own David Johansen - okay, what makes you so fucking great?

ITS definitely not the dry ice. Frankie makes liberal use of it in the show - to heighten their otherwise quite matter-of-fact entrance on stage before launching into the opening salvo War, to give Holly Johnsons energetic reading of The Power Of Love the proper epic setting. Its also definitely not the staging, a surprisingly modest arrangement of briefly diverting slide shows (including a mildly X-rated series of playful porno for Relax), periodic flashing of the militaristic Frankie logo and bombastic taped theme music (actually well and bang from the LP). For a group travelling to America on the wings of extraordinary hype, Frankie zips through its paces with unexpected diffidence.

Indeed, the live Frankie show sends out confusing signals. The flimsiness of the staging doesnt match the awesome boom of the band (supplemented on tour by Peter Oxendale who handles keyboard duties and a second guitarist backing up Brian Nash with auxiliary fretwork, fattening the Frankie fury with a little neo-metal crunch). In the lower registers, when bassist Mark OToole and drummer Peter Gill lock into the fearsome dub-wise passages of Relax and Welcome To The Pleasure Dome, Frankie can rattle your ribcage with extraordinary power, summoning up a groove thang that at the time - caught up in the Sensurround swirl of the live mix - seems, impossibly, the equal of the records. Tonight the incredible kick in Krisco Kisses - already fortified by the sassy tribal grunts led by Frankie sex captain Paul Rutherford, vigorously towelling his ass with the arrogant cheek (literally) of a Times Square stripper - is righteous enough to put a big hole in the Ritz back wall.

Yet with all that physical and emotional power at their command, why is the pacing of the show so illogical, so careless? Relax is played twice, once at the start of the set and in a very short, perfunctory manner like a brisk severely edited single, and then as a more expansive funked-up second encore. Barely two songs into the show, Holly suddenly brakes for the grand ballad, The Power Of Love.

And after the randy opening blasts of War and Relax, the songs epic gestures sound improbably puny, so MORdinary. In yanking the songs out of the albums carefully considered sequence, Frankie has stripped them of their essential operatic context and dramatic momentum in Pleasure Dome. They become merely good, sometimes undeniably great, pop songs, but no longer the design for living ZTT propaganda would have you believe.

Which isnt such a bad thing. Before all else, Frankie Goes To Hollywood is a pop group. And before all else, pop groups are human. This show is perversely refreshing because it reassures us how ordinary Frankie can be. Holly Johnson doesnt always hit those high notes in The Power Of Love. Paul Rutherfords exaggerated bumpngrind is a wicked pleasure to behold, a welcome lampoon of cliched gay disco camp. But it is his only significant contribution to show, hilariously trivial compared to his much-vaunted role as Frankies self-appointed Minister Of Style.

Its good to see Frankie stumble once or twice, to be underwhelmed by the staging because it shows just how powerful they really can be when Relax kicks in or Wish (The Lads Were Here) accelerates into its exhilarating disco locomotion. All other things being equal, Frankie Goes To Hollywood are a very special pop dance band.

Unfortunately, they have sold themselves or allowed themselves to be sold, depending on how seriously you take the puppeteering here - as immortal. Subsequently, in America they are being judged as such. The Frankie concert experience simply does not glow with the same kind of playful meticulous detail that has gone into their media presentation. It does not transfix you with the same articulate mischief and smart-alec condescension.

Holly Johnson is certainly an arresting presence on stage in his white military-style tuxedo and black gloves. But he sings everything in a declamatory bark that sounds more like a command to party than a gleeful declaration of independence. And Two Tribes is taken at a reckless, impossibly fast pace that cheats you of the carefully orchestrated blood rush in the multiple Trevor Horn mixes.

You have to admire Frankie for daring to tour America, even on this abbreviated scale, for trying to beat its system on its own terms. Indeed, when they could have come on as a living larger-than-life jukebox with every cheap trick at their command, Frankie Goes To Hollywood cuts away most of the bull and plays it straight and hard. But while it is brave of them to come out from behind the hype to make their stand as a band, they have also set themselves up for a mighty fall. Believe me, Americans are not going to love you just because you tell them to.

This second rate disco group is what Britain has been saying is the freshest thing to happen to the pop scene in years, sneered the critic from the Philadelphia Inquirer in his review of the show. This collection of smug twits that performs for less than an hour is our new set of rock stars?

Well, yeah, maybe.

FRANKIE SAY WEVE ONLY JUST BEGUN

I HAVE little doubt that America will be as beguiled by us as Britain has been, declared Holly Johnson to the Philadelphia Inquirer in an interview shortly before that critic bared his fangs. He has good reason to be confident. The numbers certainly bear him out. An Island Records spokesperson in New York claims advance orders for Welcome To The Pleasure Dome totalled an extraordinary 400,000 copies, just a mere hundred thousand shy of gold certification. Island sales reps, she adds, were worried that even if they were able to fill those initial orders, re-orders on the album would come so quick that pressing plants would not be able to keep up with demand.

Their worst fears may be confirmed. In November 24 issue of the American record industry bible Billboard, the Frankie album debuted at number 57 on the LP chart, a strong showing for a debut album. (The new Culture Club LP, alas, debuted on the chart at 30, but Frankie had Big Countrys Steeltown beat by almost 40 places.) US concert promoters who have a piece of the Frankie action on this tour have discovered that, in some cities, they could have sold out their shows three and four times over. And it is worth noting that the same American concert booking agency that handles Frankies affairs here - and enjoying every minute and dollar of it - is taking a beating with their Culture Club tour of less-than-sold-out hockey arenas. What young America takes with one hand they nevertheless give with the other.

But this Frankie tour is only a stepping stone. One source close to the cash registers admits quite openly that this series of high-profile shows in low-key venues - mostly large dance clubs and colleges - is designed to generate so much hype and exposure that Frankie can return to these shores in February or March for a major tour of, gulp, large arenas. ZTT and the band consider this venture to be an investment in a rosy American future. The consensus in US industry trade publications is that its not Frankie Goes To Hollywood, its Frankie Goes To The Bank.

What about the media relations on this tour? Quite frankly, there really havent been any. The group did no significant national music press interviews. Instead, they pumped ticket sales (in those rare cities where the shows did not sell out within days of going on sale) with phone interviews with local dailies and stroked their egos with fashion photo layouts for high-priced spreads like Esquire and Vanity Fare.

It was an astute move. Because of the monthly frequency of most music publications in this country and their lengthy production and distribution schedules, any Frankie interviews done now would not appear in print until well into 85. Frankies promotional effectiveness is based on the instant Zap, catching you unawares, shocking you just when youve seen it all. What little media exposure Frankie needed to prime the dollars pump had to be immediate.

The result so far has been immediate. The Jacksons tour slogs along, raking in millions but getting only occasional headlines back near the obituaries. As a concert act, Boy George is an astonishing stiff, the result of a sub-standard new album and over-familiarity. The current American Prince tour is breaking ticket sales records with casual regularity, but his sudden overwhelming popularity is actually the result of a slow patient penetration of the white rock market over nearly four years. Frankie? In less than a month, they have a top-selling album and a concert ticket you cant beg, borrow or steal.

But will it last? Central to Frankies scheme - indeed it seems central to a great deal of British pop exported to this country - is the premise that pop music is a survival mechanism, a lever with which to move the world or at least the bastard part of it that weighs you down. Of course, the Frankie idea of dressing up and revelling in your sexual fantasies is a rather creative way to beat an oppressive system responsible for so much unemployment and personal misery. Yet Britain believes and I say hurray to any pop unit that can cause so much glorious stir.

In America, though, pop music stopped being a weapon for revolution as soon as Madison Avenue figured out how to package Woodstock as a leisure activity. Stateside, Frankie is just another novel New Wave act, an eccentric English pop group with an engaging, sometimes titillating twist. Whats more, the backlash is already in motion. Who Gives A Fuck What Frankie Says shirts are appearing in New York with surprising frequency.

Thats okay, Holly insisted in that interview. We are here to stir things up. Even people that hate us have to admit that weve already succeeded in doing that. Love Frankie or hate it - thats just what we want, a strong reaction.

For the time being, anyway, what Frankie wants Frankie has.

Article: Welcome to the scouse of fun!

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:19:55 GMT +1
First published: Sat, 13 Apr 1985
WELCOME TO THE SCOUSE OF FUN!

FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD

Hammersmith Odeon

WE expected pomp, ceremony and the kind of gratuitous self-indulgence that events in this type of venue take for granted. Frankie had a lot to prove this night and many a hack had polished his or her dagger-like wit for the occasion. Frankie would make complete tits of themselves, wed all have a not-so-quiet snigger in the bar and exit clutching outraged dignity and a horde of scribbled sarcasms.

But Frankie turned the tables on us all with such well-channelled devil-may-care that carping at their modus operandi would be ridiculous. See Frankie live and realisation dawn that their seemingly irregular methods are not all divorced from the more orthodox pop autocracy.

And the Word became flesh. Not inelegantly but fiction cant shadow fact and if Frankie had a weakness it was bound to show. The stage is a great hurdle and Frankie leapt it in style.

As expected the stage itself was a piece of inspired artwork. Two huge back projection screens flickered a myraid of imagery through each song and a positive fairground of lighting effects welcomed you to the pleasure dome. And here they were, shaking their tails at the crowd. Eat My Ass was the message and none too subtle either. War is declared, Jim Morrison and Bruce Lee scowl from the screen, Holly beams a coquettish greeting and gathers strewn bouquets. Melodrama bows to downright cheek - The Power Of Love gets the full trimmings of a crucifixtion scene and sober thought surrenders to a profusion of fantasia. Welcome To The Pleasure Dome is a jungle, Holly dons his wacky baseball cap and jumpsuit, Rutherford struts an elegant swaggers on the catwalk and the lads? Well hey, the lads are rocking OUT

Who said these boys cant play for nuts? The man is clearly insane. The peak arrived early with the most inspired cover version EVER. Frankie steal Marc Bolans Get It On and we do, oh yes we do. This HAS to be a single sometime, boys. The unbiquitous Relax inspires a devilish flood of soft-porn slides on screen. Holly giggles like a naughty schoolboy. Two Tribes instigates a near riot with probing spotlights seeking out a quarry overhead and the lads are overcome. Nasher is off on a Jimi Hendrix trip, wanking his guitar like theres no tomorrow.

Im well hard grins Holly as an ad-lib intro to Ferry Across The Mersey, the Andre Previn of a grand sing-along. Born To Run à la Frankie is a garish affair. Relax rears its head (sic) again as an encore, George Michael springs from nowhere, clutches all in a beefy embrace and executes a neat pas de deux with Paul without the least hint of an upstage.

The fact is that Frankie cant BE upstaged, not on this form. Be square or be there. Frankie have few rivals, theyre too clever for that. I like Frankie, theyre UNIQUE.

HELEN FITZGERALD

Article: Swiss franks

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:19:46 GMT +1
First published: Sat, 25 May 1985
SWISS FRANKS

Finally, FRANKIE relaxed and invited Helen FitzGerald to chase them round picturesque Montreux. So what did happen in that brothel in Frankfurt? What do Frankie and Duran get up to behind closed doors? Who wants to be a millionaire? From the heart of Switzerland, this delirious report Candid cameraman: Tom Sheehan

HOLLY: First I wanted to be a ventriloquist, then an archaeologist Then, oh God, I wanted to be Gene Kelly. I really liked him. I wanted to be in those films where life is stunningly happy and there was always a totally wonderful ending.

NASHER: I think were the most unlikely teenybop idols that youll get in the next 20 years, never mind the 20 years just gone. We thought wed get all these fan letters and all that, and its a bit strange.

PAUL: I loved Bowie when he was Ziggy and thinking there was something very daring about liking the guy. There was a sense of him getting away with something and that in a way is what Frankie is about as well. Thats why we did it in the first place really.

PED: I was playing around on drums in a couple of bands and I used to say Please God, make something happen.

MARK: Its a bit of a Lewis Carroll here but if it stopped tomorrow Id just think well, that was a blast, and carry on. Theres no rules here cept for one. Everyone we meet, we wind-up, and if they can take the wind-up, theyre alright, if not, they get the full treatment.

WHOS girlfriend are you then, love? I see youre travelling with them. Listen, weve heard theres going to be a party later, sit down with me for a minute, can I get you a drink?

Everything you imagine about the low-life press is distressingly true. And Suddenly The Sun Say: Pop Sells Papers - and grown men and women are sent to all corners of the globe with the sole intent of exaggerating and, if necessary, lying about the everyday trivia of someone whose name we all recognise. No morsel is too absurd - and its getting worse. The fact that Simon Le Bons new-shorn shock hairstyle (I can never feel the same about you again, signed your number one fan) didnt make the front pages is probably down to the Bradford fire disaster - which is a bit frightening.

Simon was instead relegated to an inside downpager, but would you have been surprised to see them share prime billing? Remember Andrews nose job, Boy Georges mansion, the Duranies coke habits? Its all here in your glorious, friendly, family newspaper

And theyre all here. Camped in the foyer, eyes glued to every entrance, some trying to blend in, others too blase to bother, they pester Frankies publicist like determined desert flies. Hey, you understand, we have a job to do as well. Were only human. By the way is it true Holly spent three grand on leather gear in Ibiza last week? Whats the story on Nasher wrecking those hire cars? (Nash crashed one car, by accident of course. Frankie quit Ibiza leaving trail of wrecked hire cars ran the story.)

Is Hollys boyfriend here? The two guys from People magazine came knocking on our door at 4am. (Party noises were too much for their nosy constitution.) Wed like to see Holly please. Hes asleep. Well maybe a few pictures just, yes?

This is all true.

EVERYTHING IS POSSIBLE (One Night In Montreux)

Ah, one night in Montreux in this company and what more could you want? The Casino that hosts this tacky Golden Rose Festival is just like your local Mecca Bingo hall - right down to the worn brown and orange check carpet.

This is not opulence but, of course, its the company you keep thats important. Theyve all come to mime to their records in front of an audience who are mainly irrelevant. They just make the festive aura. Its the four and a half million TV audience thats the bait. Most of them dont want to be here but they know the score.

Besides, you get to meet a few old chums - Elton dahling, havent seen you for so long. Most are just here to do their jobs and move on. Tears For Fears and Depeche chum it up at the bar. Howard Jones and his wife chat in a corner.

Sting makes a grand entrance, nose in the air, projecting that splendid air of complete indifference while the eternally pert Agnetha is getting rattled cause shes being overlooked. Noel Edmonds is buzzing around somewhere, but no-ones quite sure exactly why hes here.

The Frankies, of course, are on form. The last 12 hours have been strange and the best is yet to come. Last night we travelled 10 miles up a mountain to a non-existent party (Claude Nobs, where do you live?), drank everything including Kirsch and even smashed the bottle to eat the pear inside, listened to Pink Floyd all night at Mark and Nashers insistence and dispersed only when Nash had puked in the lavatory and Ped had reluctantly muttered: Its not that Im blueyed, I really want to go to bed.

This morning we were buying diamond earrings with Mark. The sombre Swiss jewellers had never seen the like.

Do you think theyre dead ostentatious or what? hes giggling.

Nah, Ill take the smaller ones, these ones are girls earrings.

A dozy waiter resigned all over the lunch at the hotel. His slothly pace provoked a Wheres the soup, dickhead? from our table. Unfortunately the guys English was less elementary than first suspected. Frankie make a Lifestyle of putting their foot in it. Everything youve seen and heard is true.

Holly: We provide a distraction, an entertainment, a fantasy. Oh, you could definitely say that its the cliché of wanting to escape your surroundings were unhealthy or bad, but they were poor, you know what I mean? He laughs.

Theres nothing unrespectable about being poor. We still are believe it or not we still are.

Paul: I can understand now, being on this side of the fence, how people get cold and aloof, that whole trip yknow? Cos it is a lot to deal with, the way people treat you and everything. You get very cushioned, cut off from reality.

There is no hierarchy, there are no divisions. No social or sexual stereotyping here. Exaggeration is funny, a vibe.

Holly: If it does peoples heads in, I like it. And if you cant see the point youre not trying hard enough.

Hollys very crafty in the nicest of ways and droll beyond belief. He is impossibly likeable. What do you think of these kegs, then? Theyve got a special seam to make me bum stick out.

Paul feels like hes watching a permanent film, only its a brilliant film, one you dont want to end. Paul is possibly one of the dearest men alive.

Were all into very different things and yet were all into the same things. I played a Mozart tape on the bus the other day and the lads had hysterics. They made me take it off. But the whole thing is totally mad. The five of us were walking down a beach in Ibiza the other day and it was like, what the hell are we doing here? You really do forget where you were the day before yesterday. Its very strange.

Nasher acts the wild boy, but hes a little boy let loose in the biggest toy-shop hes ever dreamed of. But Nasher knows what nihilistic means, dont let the Van Halen and Led Zep tapes fool you. He may well hove a better grasp of the real world than you or I.

Mark is thinking about everything. Seeking things outside his previous terms of reference but not wanting to lose touch with the grounding influence of Lad cameraderie.

Im just growing up. I wouldnt want to be totally cool - but I wouldnt want to be a total lad either. Hes got his head together.

And Ped. Peds the dark horse and on acknowledged cornerstone. He doesnt say a lot but hes alert to whats going on before it even happens. El Presidente knows a lot more than hes telling.

Its just a word, sex its the word sex that the lads like to mess around with, not the actual act. I dont know, it gives us like, a mad front. I suppose. (Peter Gill from And Suddenly There Came A Bang)

LET YOURSELF BE BEAUTIFUL (People Think Youre Weird When You Tell Them The Truth)

THE People people are skulking in the foyer which, to the trained eye, means that Frankie are partying it up again. This time Duran are the sole invitees and from behind closed doors I can exclusively reveal - aaargh, its catching.

Andy King Weed Taylor and Nasher are soul-mates and drag a fridge across the room to investigate its contents. If beer does not arrive in minutes, veiled threats hove been made concerning the in-house TV and video console. Mark and JT are slogging each others hearthob status, Pauls chattering with Nick and Julie-Anne, the champagnes arrived and Holly and Simon are both looking ravishing.

Someone has scattered Duran fan mail all over the bathroom floor and Martin Gore just sneaked in wearing that strange black skirt. A very memorable evening all round. Beyond that, my lips ore sealed.

OH, DO WE HAVE TO BE SERIOUS NOW?

MARK: The new stuff weve done is great. Some of it is dead poppy and some of it is a bit weird.

HOLLY: Put it this way our relationship with ZTT is a purely business relationship, purely business. More than that I cannot say. Except they never had more influences on us than we had on them. Though they might think that they had. Trevor has given us a very individual sound, we always had an individual sound but hes made it technically flawless.

In fact were a very rough bond, he laughs. Thatll show itself in the new records.

Paul: The new songs are harder, a bit more rock n roll maybe, but then theyre very Frankie as well. Watusi Love Juicy! Listen! Were the silliest bunch of fuckers around but thats healthy, to me its healthy to have that.

Playing live has done a lot for us - its still, like, a big thrill. Even when youre not feeling up to it or have a hangover or something, you forget about it when youre up there. I think musically speaking, playing live has been very good as well. Weve learned a lot.

Mark: You lie awake sometimes worrying about writing more songs and that. You lose touch with friends. Ive only really got one mate left whos been great about it all. Hello Paul Barry. Hell be dead chuffed it he gets a mention.

Frankie, in fact, have a lot more in common with John, Paul, George and Ringo than mere geography. This statement is potentially outrageous and possibly true. But before their bell tolled the Fab Four certainly werent averse to a little, ahem, fun.

Frankie are consummate realists, yet they are judged to be absurd. This in itself is very amusing.

Ooooh - do you think she means were psychedelic, boys?

Frankie are for people who read Tom Robbins and gaze at the sky. Also Frankie are for everyone. This is a very equitable arrangement indeed. Closet hippies and Cosmonauts, theres room for us all.

That is the official Frankie vibe.

THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

PAUL: I dont attach too much importance to any of it really. Im glad were being treated more like a band now. I think the press have got over the shock of it all. I love it but I know its transitory, nothing to get excited about. That sounds very facetious but its not meant to.

I just mean that its not the be-all and end-all. Youre constantly being brought down to earth like meeting sick kids and that. Youre glad to have given them something but you feel dead weird that meeting you has made even a tiny difference to their lives. Sometimes it really does my head in. Id never leave though, never ever

The partys over and the debris is quite impressive. Mark and Simon are lingering over a bottle of port and swapping stories that are getting more and more vulgar as time wears on. What are the most important qualities in a good minder. What its like to feel invulnerable sometimes. What Paul and Mark did in a Thai restaurant in Brussels. Why Simon needs to do that boat race. The story of the Frankfurt whore-house. All totally unbelievable, all wonderfully true.

Theyre alright, the Duran boys, arent they? Mark jibes. An you thought they were going to be right bastards.

Simon says hell do an interview with me if I show him my tits. The offer is declined, gracefully of course, and we come to on amicable arrangement. Simons asking Mark if it would be okay for him to get up on stage with him in New York, just for a couple of numbers.

Frankie Goes To Hollywood are special - everybody knows that. They are also quite a conventional rock n roll band. This is what annoys people, I think.

Paul: I know people think were dead uncouth but its all a game really. Mark and me got slung out of a Thai restaurant in Brussels a while back for having a fight with them hot towels they give you. It got a bit out of hand. We were over there doing a TV appearance. The studio wrote a letter to Island saying they never wanted us to come back there.

We got a bit cocky with them cause we got this dead scabby dressing room and they were drooling all over Jermaine Jackson. So we ordered hundreds of sandwiches and stuff and then chucked it all over their corridor. They werent very pleased about that.

That sounds dead rock star, doesnt it? Were not like that really. Were always having a laugh with Duran about them having bigger limos than us.

Holly endeavours to look elegant in the cruel light of morning but even he is subdued. They fly to Boston this morning for the first date of the American tour. Mark has been up all night and Nasher cant remember where he is.

Oh, its always like this, Holly grins, especially when we meet Duran. Its like, clear the aisles. Wolfgang looks a tad pissed off. Its just another town, another airport for him and America stretches far over the immediate horizon.

Im dreading it, Paul groans groping around for the tapes he was playing last night. Has anyone seen me Aladdin Sane?. America is a bit much, even for us. Its a bit of a head trip - you know what I mean?

Frankies minder is a 17 stone skin head with a colourful past who breeds tropical fish and is a perfect gentleman. Hes giving Simon quiet tips on the art of self-protection. Hand to hand combat. Simon was almost roughed up in Paris and hes still a bit shook up. Mark and Simon are having a hug in the hall and Fleet Street have missed their big moment.

No stamina, these hacks, theyve all tracked off to bed. Back to their lairs where they belong, Hollys giggling. We really led them a dance this time. We did a photo-call for them but we wouldnt all go out at the same time, we went out in pairs so they couldnt use anything for a poster. Oh, we have them well sussed.

Cars arrive to ferry us all out to Geneva airport. Holly makes me sit between him and Wolfgang and then goes to sleep on my shoulder. Holly is a bad boy.

Was it how you thought wed be?. Oh indeed sir, everything and more. Holleeeeeeeeee the girls were screaming outside last night and he smiled that enigmatic smile. It gets them every time

Frankie are an education and a blast. Alright there gerl, well see you again an dont forget Viva El Presidente!

Nasher: Give us a hug Nasher. Piss off woman.

Paul Rutherford: I couldnt decide on the ties so I had to wear them both. Why dont you like the Prince album? Its dead good.

Ped: El Presidente inspects the troops. Do you think shes sound Ped? Shell do.

Mark OToole: A scallywag in Yamamoto drapes. The last book I read was that one about the Kray Twins. It was well heavy.

Article: Ambisexuality

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:17:48 GMT +1
First published: Sat, 12 Dec 1992
AMBISEXUALITY

RICHARD SMITH examines the contribution of gay culture to the development of rocknroll and argues that it has never been fully acknowledged.

ALL rocknroll is homosexual - Richie, Manic Street Preachers

If you want to know what rock n roll would sound like without any gay input, imagine a Michael Bolton record playing for ever. Gay men have been instrumental in shaping the direction the musics taken over the years. But although their position has been central, its also been extremely fraught. Because they can be, have to be, or are made invisible, theirs has been a secret history. All rocknroll isnt homosexual, its ambiguous ambivalent - ambisexual.

Its made people ask questions - Is he or isnt he? or Is he a she? - but has rarely seen them answered. Its hinted and denied but rarely specified. The grand total of out gay men to have performed on Top Of The Pops (as good a yardstick as any) barely scrapes into double figures. Yet that programme, like pop itself, has been absolutely riddled with camp, androgyny, male effeminacy and moral outrage.

Much of the shock of the new wave of ambisexual acts (Suede, Manic Street Preachers, Fabulous, Army Of Lovers, Right Said Fred) comes because things have been disturbingly quiet on this front since the Gender Bender explosion of the early Eighties. But the ambisextrous have always shown this alarming tendency to radiate and fade away. Their secret history makes it seem as if theyve come out of nowhere and thus dooms them to going straight back there. Gay men are in the unique position of being central yet marginalised; informing mainstream culture, but rarely making any real in-roads into it.

Each time something that theyve fostered crosses over, theyre left standing in the shadows unloved. With the roots denied, it ceases to have any meaning beyond being a fashion and is thus doomed to rapidly fall out of favour and out of sight in the way that fashions always do.

You cant talk about or trace a gay music in the same way you can black music. At best, gay men have been allowed the stuff that no one else wants. Because the rock snobs of the Seventies despised Disco, it could be dismissed as faggot music (Disco Sucks), yet the gay origins of its more fondly regarded modern counterpart, House, which are if anything more distinct, are denied.

Early punks were more than happy to take inspiration from ambisextrous Americans like Lou Reed, Patti Smith and The New York Dolls, and to take refuge in gay clubs. But when punk properly got underway over here, gay men were only allowed to ride in on its coat tails, attaching themselves to an aspect of its outlook that would afford them a voice - either through outrage (Jayne County) or political comment (Tom Robinson).

I THINK the world is ready for a true fairy - Jobriath, 1973

The ambisexuals act as shock troops, testing and contesting the climate for the out gay acts that follow in their wake. In the Seventies, the world could cope with the fey campery of Marc Bolan and David Bowie but, despite the gay glam rockers assertion to the contrary, it still wasnt ready for a true fairy.

The first mass breakthrough wasnt to come until 10 years later, when the Gender Benders were swiftly followed by Erasure, Bronski Beat, Frankie Goes To Hollywood et al. Even Boy George, whose image had previously been more asexual than ambisexual.

I WOULDNT has missed that f***ing bender for anything Anonymous fan after Erasure concert

Gay stars can be liked in spite of their sexuality, or because of a reading of it that perpetuates the myths the fan most needs to believe. Their position is difficult and theyre guaranteed a hard time. No more so than if theyve politicised their homosexuality. Few artists have been so persistently vilified and ridiculed as Jimmy Somerville, as if audiences are happy to be entertained by him but dont want to hear about the problems he articulates. Its a very English attitude - they dont really mind what you do, as long as youre discreet about it, as long as you dont frighten the horses.

Little wonder then that, for many, the ambisextrous star is even better than the real thing. And no wonder they arouse such suspicion and contempt from gay men - who view them as either gay cowards or straight thieves.

The former are dismissed as traitors, taking an easier option than fully coming out. The straight thieves steal from gay culture and appropriate its imagery to embellish their act with a little of the erotic exotic. This is the kind of aural voyeurism The Velvet Underground perfected - posing as a sodomite, wearing the dresses, but rarely having to suffer the consequences.

Of course, pops always been about plunder, but what grates is that this debt is rarely acknowledged. And when such things are taken up by those who arent fully immersed in the culture from which theyve sprung, they never get it quite right. Camp goes from being something specific but indefinable, to something meaningless.

Content to only touch the surface, everything they do rests not on conviction but artifice. Is there really any difference between what Brett from Suede is doing and what The Black And White Minstrels once did? If its only an act, are audiences allowed the luxury of laughing along with it before going merrily queer bashing into the night?

At its worst, ambisexuality is a mask straights use to boost sales. For Paul Morley, Frankie Goes To Hollywoods homosex was no more than another marketing device. Used and abused like this, much of the time this particular gay man will be left screaming Come out or fuck off.

Article: Domewatch

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:16:47 GMT +1
First published: Sat, 01 Dec 1984
DOMEWATCH

FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD

New York

EVEN THE Americans knew they were being hyped. And without a hit record to back up all the ballyhoo, Frankie Goes To Hollywood had to be content with a polite welcome to the Big Apple.

But then America seems unnerved by the latest wave of British chartbusters pounding their shores. Culture Club have been getting the kind of reaction the Stones provoked 20 years ago Candid Cameras idea of a stunt over here is to knock on a suburban door and ask whether the occupants would mind if Boy George used their house for a video. On more than one occasion, the response was almost hysterical.

Frankie may have stirred up a lot of interest among the rock fraternity - Tom Waits and Kid Creole were among the onlookers for the second of their three nights at New Yorks Ritz Club but curiosity seemed to hang heavier in the air than anticipation, even among the gay contingent. But then they probably still remember the Village People.

When the lights went down, smoke drifted across the stage as the tapes began to roll and the band filtered on. Cue slides, cue lights, cue War. Frankie say you cant beat a good old fashioned rock and roll intro.

Holly Johnson, in his long black teachers gown and slicked-back hair, brought back visions of the Damneds Dave Vanian. Paul Rutherford cruised around in black knee length boots, white pants with a black stripe and a pink handkerchief hanging from his left buttock pocket - I was too much of a wimp to ask any of the Greenwich Village leather boys exactly what that meant, Im afraid. The five musicians around them attacked the central riff with a gusto that owed as much to the Kinks as it did to Edwin Starr. And after a frenetic Wish The Lads Were Here, they boogied into Relax with a distinctly heavy metal flavour.

Maybe Ive got befuddled by all the megamixes but this, like the first two songs, seemed surprisingly short and edgy. Hollys vocal authority on The Power Of Love proved to be the turning point of the gig, however, as he crooned away with Johnny Ray-style passion and teased the front rows into a minor frenzy with his white scarf. And the guitar solo at the end was pure pomp.

Welcome To The Pleasure Dome surged out of the backing tapes with more assertive control, bassist Mark OToole hammering home the famous Frankie trademark vigorously. It was about this time that Paul, whod been twisting and twirling around the stage thus far, started wiggling his bum at the audience. And once hed started, he seemed unable to stop what became an increasingly irksome habit.

The crowds response continued to be somewhat muted - particularly on the more unfamiliar songs like The Only Star In Heaven and Krisco Kisses although they squealed volubly enough whenever Holly expressly told them to. And everyone got their rocks off on the final, booming Two Tribes of course.

The show was over in not much more time than it takes to play the album. The encore was Born To Run which was a brave choice in the city where Springsteen is God but they succeeded by turning the song into a punkish thrash that had more originality and fervour than they managed on record.

They then brought back Relax to give it fuller justice as various female imposters - including a stunningly accurate Tina Turner pranced on and proceeded to mop the boys brows and other bits with Kleenex that were then tossed into the audience. It was enough to make Wham! choke on their shuttlecocks.

Frankies amateurish approach was both their saving grace and their come-uppance. It gave many of their stunts an engaging freshness but they sometimes spilled over into childish exhibitionism.

What the gig really highlighted was the gap between Holly and the rest of the band. The group are competent and keen but some way short of the image ZTT have been thrusting upon us. Whether Frankie will be able to get away with being just another rock band in Britain remains to be seen.

HUGH FIELDER

Article: War is stupid

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:14:20 GMT +1
First published: Sat, 13 Apr 1985
WAR IS STUPID

FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD

Hammersmith Odeon

HALLO HAMMERSMITH we are U2! Holly say. Some say, ha ha, very funny; I say, many a true word spoken in jest.

Welcome to the power trip. As of now, Frankie Goes To Hollywood are making a career out of proving the law of diminishing returns. Relax and Two Tribes thrilled because in every respect Frankie manned a machine-gun of comparative climaxes in a pop-era crammed with anticlimaxes. Their excitement sprung from everybody elses yawning gap. But now the whole world wears a Big T-shirt

Start with an earthquake and build from there, old Hollywood mogul Sam Goldwyn used to say. The logical consequence of that is the disaster movie, and here we have it, in living boring Dome-o-scope.

Thus War sets the pace. Holly, the banana republic generalisimo, locks into the joyless, sweating, mock-saturnine mode which we are to endure for the next 75 minutes. Paul, a less cynical trouper, doggedly throws himself through the motions too, only permitting himself a few half-smiles of enjoyment towards the end when hes down to his nipple-rings. Spike, Eccles, Bluebottle, Ringo and Bert pound away and gambol around the stage like spring lambs or fresh-faced young pomp-rockers, whichever come sooner. Technical-ability muscles are flexed and much ado is made of their brickie heterosexuality. Mucho macho muso.

What we have here are a pair of one-joke cabaret dames fronting a gung-ho British neo-rock band on a dry run for the American stadium circuit. What we have here is that smelly beast, the show of effects without causes. From bombast to boredom in the space of three smoke-bombs, the first chorus to one of those interminable driller-fillers from Pleasure Drone, and the disappointing revelation of glib back-projected images that quite likely would fall far short of inducing foaming consternation in watch committees from Tunbridge Wells to Weston-Super-Mare.

The audience say thcweeeam!!!, long and loud, coyly lobbing onstage outgrown 32-A cup bras brought specially for the purpose, safe in their participation in a phenomenon so Hi-NRG pantomime and all-popular as to alienate them neither from their parents nor indeed their own peer-group.

Flash back to that shameless minx Marc Bolan. Frankie honky-tonk Get It On into a jolly Tiswas knees-up without so much of a whiff of the leg-over breathed so heavily in the salaciously syncopated original. No, Frankie are not funky. They are road-menders, pumping pneumatic energy into a limp routine. All hot air, no tension-and-release, no drama.

Exhibit B: that swaying anthem to roots England, Ferry Cross The Mersey. Frankie-wise, its Imagine as performed by The Boomtown Rats. Get the picture? Exhibit C: The Power Of Love, their idea of A Song For Europe for the 80s, my idea of the grandest, least moving ballad of all time, lumbered out at a Queenly pace, a pompous brontosaurus-beat. Exhibit D: Born To Run going nowhere fast, grinding to a halt in a crescendo of keyboard screech and metal-buckling worthy of Emerson, Lake & Palmer.

You dont get an encore unless you scream your heads off! Louder! LOUDER!! Keep it coming!

Holly, old chap, I can see it now - summer nights at the Houston Astrodome and the triumphant homecoming Christmas shows at the Liverpool Royal Court. Meanwhile, keep pressing the panic button until somebody wakes up and asks where, exactly, is the fire.

As any astronomer will say, Shooting stars never stop, just turn into lumps of rock

Mat Snow

Article: Welcome to the pleasure poll

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:10:38 GMT +1
First published: ?
WELCOME TO the pleasure poll or RM Say OK Frankie, You Win Yep, were proud to announce that you lot voted the Mersey boy wonders as pretty much the most exciting thing to happen all year. And who can argue with that?

The Scallies scooped top placings in five categories (best band, best single, best sleeve, best 12 remix and best video), so yall lapped up the ZTT marketing campaign with no complaints.

All three Frankie 45s got a mention in the best single and sleeve categories and Holly made an impression on his own in the best male artist and plastic surgery categories.

But we must not forget the mighty thrust of Wham!, or rather Georgie Michael for although the dinky duo came in as runners-up in the best band section and appeared in two others, George came up trumps as best male artist and person most in need of plastic surgery, also getting a third place in the beaut stakes.

Careless Whisper totted up votes as second fave single, eighth fave 12 remix, fifth best vid. Sorry Andy, you only managed fifth in the plastic surgery stakes! They nose, you know

Article: Two Frankies and a Morley

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:09:16 GMT +1
First published: ?
TWO FRANKIES and a Morley: pix by Paul Slattery

Article: Bang!

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:07:25 GMT +1
First published: Sat, 06 Nov 1993
FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD
BANG!
(ZTT)

FRANKIE said, Relax Dont Do It, and got banned by Radio 1 because Mike Read (who?) thought they were talking about (gasp) the sexual act (they were). Frankie said, War Hide Yourself, and it was kind of near the knuckle because we were living under the giant shadow of nuclear Armageddon at the time. Frankie said Arm The Unemployed and that was very near the knuckle because at this, the height of the miners troubles (summer 1984), dozens of teenagers chose to wear T-shirts with that slogan emblazoned across the front on Top Of The Pops.

Frankie said a lot. They did even more. They had three Number Ones with their first three singles (all of which appear on Bang!). Their second single, Two Tribes, stayed at Number One for nine weeks while Relax, their debut, climbed back up to Number Two six months after being at pole position. Their third single, The Power Of Love, flirted with religious imagery in the same way that its predecessors flirted with sex and war. Frankie managed to wind up our moral guardians and become the biggest threat to public order since The Sex Pistols, and all because they happened to say that, yes, there are such things as cathedrals, genitals and grenades.

Maybe it was the way they said it. Their shock tactics may have been punk, but the production values and presentation/marketing techniques of masterminds Trevor Horn and Paul Morley were anything but. Basically, FGTH caused a civil disturbance and couldnt just we dismissed as five Scouse gits because of the sheer intelligence and sophistication of the operation.

Every Frankie sleeve, poster or advert was a work of art, crammed with (depending on your mood) literary wit/pretentious wank courtesy of the now ridiculously derided Morley. And the records were built like spaceships by Horn, the culmination of all those fantastic synthesised concepts from the (now mysteriously discredited) early Eighties such as Lexicon Of Love, New Gold Dream or Dare.

However, as with ABC, Simple Minds and The Human League, Frankie stopped being brilliant when they started listening to their detractors - on their follow-up to the lavish Welcome To The Pleasure Dome double LP, Liverpool, (whose lesser hits, Rage Hard, Warriors Of The Wasteland and Watching The Wildlife are here) Frankie seemed to be consumed with guilt about their extravagant past. (Theres probably a psycho-social point to be made here re- Thatcherism.) Liverpool was more Rambo than Rimbaud. It proved that Frankie could play their instruments, suggested that they didnt need Morley or Horn, decided that ZTTs packaging was mere cake-icing. It was crap. Worse, it was more rock than pop, just like everything is more rock than pop these days - were still living with that sense of guilt. When Frankie Goes To Hollywood - the last great record company idea, the last truly astounding chart act whose private lives spilling out into the public domain actually mattered went rock, pop didnt stand a chance. Bang! It died. I, for one, miss it terribly.

PAUL LESTER

Article: Bang! The Best Of Frankie Goes To Hollywood

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:06:23 GMT +1
First published: ?
FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD
Bang! The Best Of Frankie Goes To Hollywood
ZTT

Bang! Relax! Hide yourself! Arm the unemployed! Please adjust your dress before leaving! It is impossible to overstate just how fantastic Frankie Goes To Hollywood were In their day.

They had the gargantuan symphonies of pop excess, they had rampant, rapacious homosexuality on a scale never before seen on Top Of The Pops, and a trio of fiendish shag-happy scallies too. Their T-shirts swept the nation like bubonic plague, their promos (Ronald Reagan twisting Konstantin Chernenkos bollocks? Yes!) were never off the video jukeboxes that began to infest every pub in Britain, their records sold in obscene quantities. They got banned from everything and everywhere. Rock bores hated them. They were ace.

Half the fun was in ZTTs typhoon of hypermarketing as Dadaist art statement (nine formats of Two Tribes? Yes!). This audacious carry-on led to as much brow-furrowing in the then-Stalinist pop weeklies as there was hysterical bleating from Mike Read and John Blake. Were the Frankies not symbols of fin de siecle capitalist decadence? Was shag-o-matic heavy-metal disco not inherently immoral? Could they, you know, play their instruments?

The answer on all counts was a resounding Who cares? In just two singles - both here - FGTH Mark One reached the pinnacle of everything pop should be. Relaxs hilarious pelvic-thrust mantra said more about teenage lust than any record before or since, and Two Tribes managed the nifty double-header of playing on mid-80s nuclear anxieties and filling dancefloors too.

After that, an LP was bound to be rather an iffy proposition. Frankie could write good songs, they just couldnt do it very often, so like the singles before it, Welcome To The Pleasuredomes hubristic double-debut concept wound up heavily padded with covers. Three are on Bang!: Edwin Starrs War recreated as an eleventh-hour tour de force of nuclear doomsaying, Ferry Cross The Mersey revealing the Frankies weakness for dewy-eyed fab-gear scouserism as well as a decent conceptual gag, and a riotous homoerotic Born To Run which, needless to say, was miles better than Bruce Springsteens.

And then they pissed it all away in a five-star rigmarole of tax exile, internal strife, alcohol-assisted writers block and the fabled wrangle with ZTT. Trevor Horn spent £800,000 tarting up the half-ideas that made up their serious second LP Liverpool, leaving just Rage Hard - with Holly in Dionysian love-god mode - as a reminder of the gigantic Frankie that was.

Oddly enough for this latest in a slew of 80s re-releases, Bang! is pretty honest warts-and-all stuff, with lots of sludge off Liverpool as well as the genius stuff that school discos are made of. But then it never really had an alternative - theres not a lot of Frankie to choose from.

What does amaze, though, is that its got the four-minute versions of Two Tribes and so on instead of the sprawling epic 12-inches, studded as they were with funny voices, gags and ludicrously obscure philosophical references. Its a pity. The real best of FGTH was in the multi-media mayhem they caused, and you cant put that on a CD.

***

ANDREW HARRISON

Article: The Smash Hits Book Of Personal Files

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:05:35 GMT +1
First published: ?
Holly Johnson

(FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD)

NAME: William Holly Johnson.

BORN: February 9,1960 in Khartoum, The Sudan.

FIRST RECORD BOUGHT: Blackberry Way by The Move. And thats the truth. It cost 7s 6d.

FIRST CONCERT: David Bowie at the Liverpool Empire. The date was June 9, 1973. Oh it was fab. The best show ever. He came on to all these strobes and Clockwork Orange-type theme music - weve ripped that off a few times - and he had a really fab costume which these girls came on and ripped off. It was all part of the show. Mind you I did get beaten up afterwards. I was pretty outrageous for the time, with make-up and everything.

FIRST CRUSH: Miss Schofield, me infant teacher. She used to wear those really woolly jumpers and fab perfume.

DID YOU HAVE A TOUGH CHILDHOOD? Oh, incredibly. Doesnt anyone born in working class England? And then theres the brainwashing of an English education and all the power struggles of being a child.

NICKNAME AT SCHOOL: Joyful Johnson, I was such a happy child.

PREVIOUS JOBS: Pizza chef, labourer and a little bit of theatre.

PREVIOUS BANDS: I was in Big In Japan between 77 and 78. Then I went solo, releasing a couple of singles. Then I joined the Dancing Girls who turned into the Sons Of Egypt who were then whittled down into Frankie Goes To Hollywood.

WHATS YOUR ULTIMATE GOAL? Success. Ill go to the end of the earth to be a success. If you reach for the stars you can always land on the moon.

WHEN WAS THE FIRST TIME YOU TRIED DRESSING UP? I was a choirboy. But only because I used to love dressing up in cassocks. It was fab. I used to go on choir outings and you used to get sixpence a show. You did! It was like being in the theatre. Later on, I got into Judy Garland. That was fab. A great big D.A. (hair-do) with a huge peak and I used to wear Forties jackets with big shoulders. It didnt last though; I was only about 14 then. I used to walk around singing Rock-A-Bye Your Baby With A Dixie Melody.

WHAT OTHER POP GROUPS DO YOU LIKE? I dont like any pop groups. I dont class what we do in the same category.

DO YOU WATCH BROOKSIDE? Some friends of mine are in Brookside. I know some of the kids and Petra who was kicked out is a friend of mine. I think its getting better all the time.

WHAT MAKES YOU CRY? The thought of my mother and father having a bad time. Thats worth crying for.

HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT PEOPLE CALLING YOU OUTRAGEOUS AND SHOCKING? People shouldnt take all this too seriously. It should make people laugh - the folk it outrages are the ones we are laughing at.

WHAT WAS RAGE HARD ALL ABOUT? Have you read the poem Do Not Go Gently Into That Good Night by Dylan Thomas? It was kind of inspired by that. Its an incantation against death and lethargy, and its supposed to encourage lots of creative idealism in the listener.

DO YOU LIKE HAVING LOADS OF MONEY? I used to say when I hadnt any money that I wasnt into material things, and I did things like throw the television out of the window. As soon as I experienced money though, and I could buy some of the things I liked, I started to enjoy that. And, whatever people think, Im not a millionaire or a half-millionaire or even a quarter-millionaire. Im not stinking rich because Im not the greatest businessman on earth.

HAVE YOU DONE ANY PAINTINGS RECENTLY? Some flowers, the head of a statue, a blue man, and a woman with her head coming out of the waves.

WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO BE WHEN YOU GROW UP? Id like to be Jean Cocteau. I always want to be doing something creative, to do with conjuring something from nothing.

DO YOU MIND HAVING TO SIGN AUTOGRAPHS? People who ask for autographs can be a bit horrible because theyre not always your fans. Some idiot in Liverpool the other day said Arent you in Frankie Goes To Babylon? and in Holland I was mistaken for the lead singer of the Pet Shop Boys. I laughed me head off!

HAVE YOU GOT ANY NICE CROCKERY? I got a nice hand-painted tea set. Its lovely - its got cornflowers and poppies on it. I use it all the time.

DO YOU EVER HAVE THE OTHER MEMBERS OF FRANKIE ROUND FOR TEA? I havent asked the lads round for tea because I dont think theyd come. Thats not their idea of a good time. Theyd break the place! Well, they wouldnt, but I think theyd get pretty bored if I didnt have any blue movies.

DO YOU SOCIALISE WITH THE OTHER LADS IN FRANKIE? We only meet up for work. I think its disgusting to stick together the whole time. Each of us has his own private life.

FAVOURITE TOY: My yellow and black leather torch. Ive also got an Action Man which I like and a Superman pop-up book. Id love a black Porsche.

FAVOURITE ITEM OF CLOTHING: Brogue shoes and I mustnt forget my pair of red roller-derby shorts which I bought in the States.

BEST THING ABOUT LIVERPOOL: The people. The place is just full of really strong characters.

WORST THING ABOUT LIVERPOOL: The unemployment.

WHO WOULD YOU LIKE TO BE CAST ON A DESERT ISLAND WITH?: Harrison Ford. And Sophia Loren.

PETS: No. I did have a Venus fly trap but that died.

Article: Down and out in Paris & London

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 22:14:14 GMT +1
First published: Fri, 01 Feb 1985
Down and out in PARIS & LONDON

After a year on hold as a result of Frankies worldwide success, Anne Pigalle is due to release her first record for ZTT this month, and great things are promised. Interview by Simon Garfield. Photographs by Richard Croft. Styling by Hellen Campbell. Makeup by Laetitia Fox.

HOLLY JOHNSON could conceivably be one of those popstars who never feels bad. And at the beginning of December most people in his position would have felt awful. The Frankie single was down. The Frankie album was down. The US tour was over, and outside the ZTT building just off the Portobello Road it was raining and already dark at three in the afternoon. Yet here he is -bouncy, trouncy, flouncy and fun, wrapped up tight with a raccoons tail dangling from his hat, scraping around the office for Power of Love cassettes and teeshirts, in fact anything he can find to give to Liverpool friends for Christmas.

A rough-mix tape of Anne Pigalles first album fades out between tiny Johnson squeals of Oooh, give us that! and Oooh, is that for Ped? Lucky sod - how come he gets all the friggin pressies?. Then he hears the tape. Oooh, is that Anne Pigalle?

Yup.

Oooh, how depressing! Id go mad if I sounded like that. God, shes ruined my whole day!

A MINUTE later Anne Pigalles in the room. Holly Johnsons gone, of course, but you can hear him somewhere downstairs: Oooh, girrus that! Cor! Oooh! Oooh!

Upstairs, Pigalle snaps the tape from the machine and suggests we talk somewhere quiet, anywhere away from Frankie, Frankie, Frankie. Why not concentrate instead on an artist ZTT signed well over a year ago and whom she feels is currently receiving less than proper treatment; namely, herself.

If it wasnt for Frankie she might already have achieved one of her true life ambitions, she says: to be heard widely in the country where she believes it matters. If it wasnt for Frankie she might already be a small star. Then again, without Frankie its unlikely whether youd now be reading this. Unlikely whether thered now be so much interest in ZTTs latest (and only) offering from Paris, a wraparound slink of a Piaf-style chansonnière, perhaps the only thing on earth that depresses Holly Johnson.

The name, she says, is pretty well the only false thing about her. In fact its the thing that tells you the most. Its the sleazy French tourist angle down to an artform. Its the Paris streets, shes fond of explaining. The prostitutes. Come, come. Her works what we understand by the tourist angle too; dark, stealthy, emotionally thick-set ballads, richly accompanied by accordion and, one suspects, street-corner, monkey-bearing organ-grinder. They would not work well on television, and they wouldnt work well at the Hammersmith Odeon. Theyd work a treat at the clubs and on radio, but theyd work better still if the clubs were smoke-choked and if the radio crackled through the very small hours of a weekend.

Yes, on first hearing its that kind of smooth, hacky sound associated with just about all the French clichés you can handle. And with that as a base, Pigalle has built ambitious and far-reaching love dramas that stand apart effortlessly from what she considers to be truly depressing happy-happy chart-pop. Its nothing that new, but it sticks out because of the time in which it falls.

You could say theyre after-the-party songs. Youve had a great time but you have to question yourself afterwards about your relationship with others. Youve got to ask yourself: Was that good or was that bad? before you can go to a party again. Unless youre a complete idiot. I like to do the sort of things in which you can involve art. I want to make it clear that Im not just a simple soul

Her real name and age embarrass her and shes unhappy about disclosing either. Her early life is drawn out of her equally painfully. The interview is still a new toy and her fluent English appears wary of trick questions and personal prying. She takes exception, for example, to any enquiries about her parents: Maybe, she hesitates, they just wouldnt like to be talked about. An uncertain, dark past seems altogether more romantic to her.

The way she tells it, her early years were spent ninety per cent very street-hip and one hundred per cent artist. Looking back, Its a bit like a film script. And I think I was aware of that fact from the age of two.

BORN IN the South of France, Pigalle moved to Paris aged five days and grew up in relative poverty - a pretty low life, she recalls. I think I must have been an introvert from birth. I was shy, very sensitive, and up until eleven I was best at everything there was. Sport, maths, writing - I was always first in the class. But after eleven I just couldnt get into that any more. I thought learning couldnt bring me much and I became fascinated purely by people. I used to be shocked by people who I first liked and who later turned out to be really disgusting beings. I developed a lot of hatred for people who I thought were ugly in the head. And true to the spirit of the times, Pigalle did her own spot of rebelling. Her clothes began running out of synch with the rest of the street, and most days, she ran home from school to practise the I cant take it, its all to much routine.

Aged thirteen, Pigalle took to the streets with two girlfriends, leaving school each day to drop in with a lot of mixed-up music freaks in the sort of community spirit she reckons has now gone for ever. But when her early band Klaxon Flirt failed to bear fruit she began to look increasingly to Britain as the sort of place where she might get some of her ideas out of the old system at last.

She packed her big trunk for Stoke Newington at sixteen. And she got by, just, living in designer Al McDowells squat and surviving on schemes and, er, warm love. I could never do the sort of jobs where horrible people were superior to me. Well, you can imagine I didnt get too far. I always think you should remain poor if the opposite means you have to compromise anything. But people were good to me and I gave them my whole friendship in return.

The concept is a little hard to grasp. Well, I didnt sell my soul. I exchanged it, like in the old times you exchanged a piece of meat for some other service For instance, I think Im attractive to some people simply because I can see things very clear and fast.

Financially things havent improved too much - her five album ZTT deal certainly hasnt made her wealthy yet - but you cant help thinking that Pigalle feels she ought to suffer a bit more for her art. Shes big on classic myths that way. I could have found some really rich guy, you know what I mean? The album were finishing could have been a lot more commercial too, but I dont like the idea of that. They say why not make something commercial first and then change, but you cant do that. You become marked, and people will not think its true.

The odd film appearance (done for cash because it was a lot more interesting than working in Woolworths) helped to smooth the way at least a bit. And as the lead female voice in The Kiss, composer Michael Nymans nine-minute Channel Four exploration of that little build-up before oral harmony, Pigalle plumped for the sort of cheesy romantic sophistication which accompanies her songs perfectly. Not least because the slightly mousey femme fatale flatly refused to kiss her partner at the end. All that fuss and then nothing

She also had a small part in Truffauts The Last Metro. For The Kiss she was cast because she looked Etruscan; for the Truffaut because the crew thought shed make a great whore. But when I arrived they saw I was too pure. They put so much lipstick on me and I still didnt look right.

But I dont really think I can act anyway. Thats actually rare modesty there - not much of that around all interview. When she came here Pigalle didnt really think she could make it as a singer either. Or at least she says she wasnt too keen on being one. Even now I just want to explore ideas. Like? You cant explain it - you can just do it. Fine. Ive always wanted to express myself, but sometimes I get so excited about something that I just cant express it. Mmm.

As always, of course, the expression is right there slap in the middle of the music. After-the-party songs and all that. But spontaneous art it isnt - parts of the first album have endured a gestation of about three years, right from the time Pigalle met Nick Plytas down at the Wag Club.

Jazz-based sessionist Plytas played organ with guest vocalist most weeks. Pigalle still lacked a cohesive style when the two were introduced by a mutual friend, but the hit if off at once and Plytas joined the poverty circle.

The record companies didnt fancy them at all. Pigalle throws up her arms in disbelief, and this youve probably heard a few times before: God, everyone was really horrible - and that was only if you could get to see them! There are so many bad people in this industry, so many bad every things. There are so few people who have any imagination at all Dread to think how cynical shell be in two years.

Two demos, recorded very horribly and including the proposed first single, Why Does It Have To Be That Way, were hawked far and near, and the duos repertoire turned in on itself yet more, becoming yet more inaccessible for anyone unwilling to take chances. It was a depressing time. We knew it was good, but you do need a bit of support. We looked around and there wasnt any.

The still dormant ZTT was a last resort - over a year ago they knew little of either its pretensions or its talents. Morley, she says, liked the idea (which was true to form), and enthused after a performance at The Titanic. A straightforward love song. Mmm, no ones done that for a long time! chuckled Trevor Horn, who at one point looked like hed produce the album (it was eventually done by Luis Jardin). They signed only Pigalle, although it was understood that Plytas would remain her closest collaborator. Horn went down the stairs and along the corridor whistling something about the power of love songs.

And youve still not heard a note! In short, Pigalle was placed in a mink-lined box with a Do Not Open Till Spring label stuck on the lid. Spring 84. But then Frankie effectively replaced it with another one that said Hold Till Autumn. Now its February 1985. Its been pretty bad for me, you know. I dont just want to get my picture into the magazines

Indeed the publicity train, in ZTTs case always a good few absurd months ahead, began to look a bit foolish. Ads began appearing in June with Pigalle posed raising one arm, cigarette spliced between the fingers, as if to say, hi! or merde!, promising something so pure and superior for the autumn. Brief interviews began appearing in September. But maybe well never hear Pigalle on record at all

Oh dont. The real problem is that the things I do get ripped off so unbelievably - I see it all the time now. She claims the ad on the back of last Julys BLITZ - that cigarette wave - has already been stolen by a well-known artist. Its a little game for you to discover who. But even inside ZTT things get stolen, which doesnt make you feel too good. People tell me not to think about it and say that true original talent will always come through. Its probably true, but I still cant help getting annoyed.

AT A PARTY in Holborn a few hours later she turns round and says: Ive got a little bit of culture for you.

Oh goodie!

In the twenties, or thirties or forties - when was the gramophone invented anyway? Well, some time ago there was this chansonnière called Damia, whom Piaf copied a great deal. Anyway, when people heard Damia sing, a lot of them later committed suicide. Suicide! Thats interesting, dont you think? Personally, Ive always been a great fan of hers

Article: Morley on pop stars & music journalists

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 22:12:32 GMT +1
First published: Fri, 01 Feb 1985
MORLEY

like kids imitating journalists

MORLEY ON POP STARS & MUSIC JOURNALISTS

Extracts From Paul Morleys Third Book

The first, And Suddenly There Came A Bang! is published on February 4th by Z.T.T. etc. The second, You Can Even Feel Lonely When You Make Love To Your Wife, is published next autumn by Faber. The third, Framed In Basic Syncopated Groovy Themes, is published in 1986. Hence these extracts are a miracle, and a treat.

1 - Buzzcocks Live

The tradition / of buzzcocks / a pop group framed in basic syncopated groovy themes / is in preparation / theres a lot to observe / he says / a spatial junkyard sound / hell say / attractive / precise / untamed / hell continue / and note if you can / afford the record / Girl trouble prints part one of youngs / review of the second buzzcocks gig at the band on the wall / may the second / nineteen seventy seven / part two appears in popzine ghast up number two / make up your own part three I ritualistic bang-bang on the tom-tom /

properly punctuated

A unique development of a traditional form. Never neglect the little things in life - whatever happened to the yellow pages? - the structure of the feeling of the actual is often a loss of faith - oh shit - and an essentially uncertain waiting. The simplicity of everyday speech - Ive been waiting at the supermarket - and an edging of this simplicity, defining this suburban-surrealism, semi-realism with patterns of repetition and recurrence, an emphasis of key phrases which go beyond what is otherwise the simple exchange of conversation between peter shelley and me I you its strange, but shelleys seemingly non-imposing cute quaint camp stance is dramatically a lot greater than is apparent. An appeal as if to someone or something beyond them, which is also, in immediate convention, the technique of the stage figure, a comedian perhaps?, appealing to and involving as much as possible a theatrical audience.

The first set included all four method contrasts off the expressionist love-resent fragmentary blurred disc spiral scratch.

Thats boredom - where the technique of repetition is used is used in different and several ways; the guitar muscling-riff obvious but functioning with deadpan underlying imagery. The guitar break a non-reference to a system of traditional ways and meanings. The blank boredom spoke straight out of the mouths of decades of souls, speaking of hope deferred. The berdum, berdum reinstating that, like jean genet maintained, a function is a function. Theres a voluntary relationship between bass and drums.

Theres a crack in space. A crack between domination and being dominated. The speaking is lively. The words are up, irrepressible, comic and accepting. The instrumentation an unmade bed But the pattern (energy-full) does still not cancel the movement, or the tone (aggressive) the feeling {tedium} It is just their tension that is the real action, the real language/meaning of the play. Play? One way. For the message similarity with becketts waiting for godot is no, mere coincidence - the pattern is desperate and yet the movement paradoxically hopeful.

Thats times up, vain and humiliating urgency of desire. A hardness that breaks complacent visions.

Thats breakdown, blind stumblinggabbling, a mind in breakdown-haunted by scraps of traditional learning, years of brainwashing.

A sharp fusion of terror and habit.

Thats friends of mine with characters yearning to be sketched by Ralph Steadman and interviewed by Paul Krassner. Fatigue and compulsion; all these pieces.

2 - To Show How Complex Selfishness Is

I love to Boogie - Bolan needlessly re-affirms with steady understatement, audacious echoing and groovy four-to-the-bar-speed beat his love to boogie. From his boogie era-which most critics accept to be 1972. The b-side is Baby Boomerang, a track lifted from a 1972 album Slider to emphasise the time scale. It also cunningly lifted and re-used at fear of rip off out roars for those hip to recent sensation Patti Smith unknown to many the two mistreated and misunderstood poet/workers had a short sharp raging affair back in 72 and Boomerang is Bolans exasperated but typically cheerful lament to the lady. Two other tracked poems from Slider also hint at the secret - Baby Strange and Mystic Lady - but its Baby Boomerang where Bolan revealed all, for those just too deaf to hear. The song is basically about the bitter separation. The first verse is the cruncher:

Slim line sheik faced
angel of the night
Riding like a cowboy
in the graveyard of the night
New York witch in the dungeon
of the day
Im trying to write my novel
But all you do is play.

The second verse is more oblique and obscure. Smith appears to have severed connections with Bolan, and Bolan searches through the garbage looking for a friend. Bolan returning attack assumes the role of a scathing personal attack on Smith. Bolan hints at some perverted incestuousness that Smith may have participated in with her uncle.

Your Uncle with an alligator
chained to his leg
dangles you your freedom
then he offers you his bed

The affair seems irretrievably over. The final verse has Bolan detachedly observing.

It seems to me a dream
is something too wild
In Maxs Kansas City
You a belladonna child
Riding on the highways
On the gateways to the south
Youre talking with your boots
and walking with your mouth.

Preceding the final few bars Bolan painfully cries, Thank you maam. Despite the inevitable traumas in an affiar between two such neurotic workers, Bolan enjoyed the affair. Perhaps thats not surprising. Baby Boomerang refers to Smiths intriguing twixt sheets technique.

3 - The Language Animal

Q: Do you ever feel people regard you as a hero? The name Lou Reed and the things it supposedly stands for.

Yeah.

Q: Is that a kind of pressure?

Is that a kind of pressure? Yes youre getting a very straightforward interview so relish-it

Q: That pressure affects you?

Yes.

Q: Youve mentioned the pressures of being on the other side of the Berlin Wall

I can only try and imagine that

Q: Sure, but as Lou Reed youve pressures that other people can only try and imagine.

Everybody has pressures. And everybody has pressure that other people can only imagine. You have pressure that I cant imagine its just a matter of degrees I would suspect. Although there are some pressures which you can probably imagine my biggest pressure is to live up to my own expectations.

Q: Your own?

Mine, not anybody elses.

Q: Not your reputation

Oh no, Oh no, I mean that I have to live down to! People think that way and other people have another version. Their expectations may be somewhat along the lines of my own. I dont know if my expectations are that high. Its just that theyre very hard. Harder than I give credit for

Q: Expectations to do what?

TO BE THE GREATEST WRITER THAT EVER LIVED ON GODS EARTH in other words Im talking about Shakespeare Dostoyevsky

Q: What kind of writer?

A writer I want to do a rock n roll thing thats on the level of the Brothers Karamazov starting to build up a body of work, yknow, I could come off sounding very pretentious about this, which is why I usually dont say anything I prefer not to It, um, gives people things to talk about I like playing in a band. I like making records, but I hate talking about them. I mean Ive mastered the really funny, insulting interview and all that, so we dont go near anything of great concern to anybody since thats not what theyre interested in anyway.

Q: A lot of your interviews are simple comic repartee.

(snigger) What else? How else can one deal with the absurd? The questions that Ive been asked and the people whove asked them have always struck me as comic. Its like Ive always thought of it as something straight out of a very bad soap opera on T.V its like kids imitating journalists I mean, Hemingway was a journalist, Dorothy Parker was a critic, Delmore Schwartz was a critic

4 - I am writing this in a tiny room in Paris

Glam Rock preferred to be disgusting rather than dignified. Because Queen and Steve Strange and Kiss bungle so lovelessly what should be a glorious route to transcendence they deserve our utter contempt. One respectable compromise between Glam and Glam rock was Gary Glitter. He got pissed out of his skull exploiting glam rock costume, but his best music had a vivid resonance that matched the joyful drama if not the slight beauty of T.Rex and his self-mocking attitude suggested Glitter was faithful to glam spirit, if a little shattered by lifes complications. His glamorisation was brash and funny, but there were always sad undertones. This sadness was compounded when a largely unaltered Gary Glitter got caught up in the early 80 glam rock bubble represented by Gods Toys, Shock, Classix Nouveaux, the boys and girls in the Stevo stable. Gary Glitter, like Marc Bolan, was ultimately too lazy to spin away from the first glam blast with the versatility of, say, Ray Davies. Sweet were a muddled and meagre group adding a commercially sound exhibitionist slant to a hearty bubblegum rock, wryly contrived for them by the sporting Chinn and Chapman. Sweet were boorish brickies breaking wind in a posh public bar and trying to disguise the smell with the cheapest perfume imaginable. Not quite the glam rock pits - imagine the pits - but nothing that will redeem them in the eyes of the Lord. The foolhardy Steve Harley pleaded that he was caught up in the beauty and terror of glam, claimed he was game enough to cleanse the crap out of rocks corridors, but his Cockney Rebel were just occasionally attractive charlatans. Bumptious, virulent glam rock: weakest glam. Slade padded themselves out in satin and that because it was the thing to do: they were a flare of fun now and then. Their bullying antics, ruttish projection, bawdy personalities and punishing good time music was the absolute opposite to glam grace. Slade typify lumpish glam rock: where sarcasm turns into a bad joke, and an opposition to reserved rock passivity breaks up into fatuous pieces.

5 - The Tongue Set Free

I could tell you about how pop has ended with Nick Rhodes and Gary Kemp. I could tell you about John Blake in India

I could tell you about Lou Reed

In Brixton

I could tell you about the neat new Pete Shelley single

I could tell you about the gorgeous triple album Marc Bolan Compilation released only on E.M.I. Australia

But no doubt youd rather read the lost writers in the low weeklies and pretend with them that there is a direction its up to you, its your fault.

If I were you, Id stick around here.

For journalism and criticism. I would tell you more

But Insignificance.

Next column: As Wittgenstein said, if you have nothing to say, dont say it.

Article: Frankie say: the earth moved

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 22:10:50 GMT +1
First published: Sun, 11 Oct 2009
Paul Lester on Frankie Goes to Hollywoods reign

Ahead of the release, Paul Lester remembers the two years when the band ruled the world.

Twenty-five years ago, Frankie Goes to Hollywood were the biggest British pop group since the Beatles and the most controversial since the Sex Pistols. They had just spent nine weeks at No 1 with their second single, Two Tribes, the 12in version of which, subtitled Annihilation, was propelled by an immortal bass line and featured almost 10 minutes of lavishly orchestrated (by the producer Trevor Horn and the arranger Anne Dudley), thunderous disco rock, interspersed with air-raid sirens and voices instructing us at the height of the cold war what to do in the event of nuclear attack.

Its predecessor, a blast of synthesized boogie called Relax, which extended to a positively tumescent 16 minutes on the 12in Sex Mix, had been banned by the BBC for its allusions to orgasms, although that didnt prevent it reaching No 1 and becoming the seventh best-selling single ever in the UK.

By the time the third single (and third No 1), the sumptuous ballad The Power of Love, came out in November 1984, people were so accustomed to scandal from the Liverpudlian five-piece that they took one look at the Nativity scenes filmed by Godley & Creme for the accompanying video and imagined sacrilege where there was none. Frankie were pin-ups and pariahs.

I would always defer to Boy George, says Holly Johnson, considering the question of who the biggest pop star in Britain was back then, walking through Fulham to the house he has shared with his boyfriend, Wolfgang Kuhle, since Frankies heyday. The front man does, however, concede that his was a more subversive presence than his quaintly flamboyant rivals. Indeed, Johnson and the bands dancer and backing vocalist, Paul Rutherford, were talked up by their record company, ZTT, as ferocious homosexuals. George was more cuddly and accessible, Johnson decides. I was the dangerous option.

One of Frankies brilliant coups was to have Johnson and Rutherford out front, while the three token straight men collectively known as the Lads did all the handy work, with Brian Nasher Nash on guitar, Mark OToole on bass and Peter Ped Gill on drums. They were the Matlock, Cook and Jones of the piece; Holly and Paul were a double dose of Johnny Rotten, only with a fierce gay agenda.

What we had that the Sex Pistols didnt was the inflaming of peoples sexual morality, says Johnson, pouring tea in his front room, surrounded by art books and his own paintings on the wall. The Pistols had a political aspect, but they didnt challenge peoples sexual values. He compares Frankie to the Rolling Stones in the 1960s and David Bowies Spiders from Mars in the 1970s, acts who offended polite society with the threat of promiscuous abandon, although in this case, as Johnson states: We were saying, Lock up your daughters and sons.

He is less keen on the notion of Frankie bolstered as they were by Horns sonic bombast and the arch sleeve notes and scams of the NME journalist-turned-marketing strategist Paul Morley as a sort of high-tech, avant-garde boyband. Take That, he declares, are incredibly popular, but completely unchallenging in respect of society and its mores. Frankie came from a different milieu, he says; an early-1980s scene where groups such as Soft Cell and the Human League daringly stretched the boundaries of normality. Nobody pushed the sonic boundaries in the 1980s like Horn, but, despite his signature being writ large all over Frankies releases that Wagnerian grandeur on synthesizers, as he puts it he is keen to stress that, without the input of the five members, they wouldnt have made history.

You can talk about production all you want, but the idea was there, says Horn, who points out that Gill and OToole proposed that Frankie should combine the rock theatrics of Kiss and the pulsating proto-electro of Donna Summer. The beautiful bass line underpinning Two Tribes was also OTooles, and as for those song lyrics, which caused so much furore in 1984, they were Johnsons, as was the bands image-consciousness. That all came from Holly, a painter with a certain vision. People like me, we enable people. Its my job to turn somebodys idea into a reality. But you have to have a band that people are interested in, and for that year people were interested in Frankie they were funny, different, something new, and they looked great.

Horn knew that ZTT, the label he founded in 1983 with his wife, Jill Sinclair, and Morley, was on to a winner when Top of the Pops nervously agreed to allow Frankie to perform Relax in January 1984, with the condition that there should be no messing about, naked women or bad behaviour. That, Horn decides, made me think, This could be really good! It was this air of menace, as much as the technological arsenal Horn brought to bear on the sound, that kicked Relax into the stratosphere.

If anything, Two Tribes probably the only example of rock subversion where the record is not scratchy and raw, but over-produced; what Horn describes as aggressive in a lavish way was an even greater phenomenon. It sold millions and sent shockwaves around the country, as Frankie-mania took hold in summer 1984. It was like riding a rocket, says the producer, who witnessed queues round the block for Frankie product at a record shop in Bournemouth. In my whole career, Ive never seen anything like it.

Much of this success, although this was a heretical contention in the Frankie camp, was due to the ingenious marketing of Morley. By means provocative and playful references to obscure philosophers and manifestos, adverts that resolutely refused to say simply out now, those T-shirts, emblazoned with his slogans (Frankie Say War! Hide Yourself, Frankie Say Arm the Unemployed), that became fashion must-haves he subverted the idea of pop manufacture, like a dissident Simon Cowell.

The group would have been quite happy to be more conventionally packaged, says Morley, who insists he was merely trying to make them seem bigger, stronger, bolder, in the way that Trevor took their songs and made them bigger, stronger, bolder.

His intention was to find out whether it was possible to take the unusual and unexpected into the charts via exuberant blasts of the imagination. Much to his delight, his ploys didnt so much annoy the public as arouse their desire for Frankie paraphernalia. I was fascinated to see that people were less irritated by the intellectual play than the critics were.

Morleys argument, then as now, is that there is a greater capacity among audiences to accept strange, outlandish ideas than they are given credit for. He loathes the continuing abuse of the British people, who, he says, have their own genius to respond to unusual things, as theyve proved time and again responding to the Beatles takes a kind of genius, and it takes a kind of genius to respond to Radiohead.

Its a wonderful thesis: that Frankies success was the result of the combined imaginations not only of the five band members, their producer, the marketing man and the business whiz Sinclair, but of the record buyers. By a supreme collective effort, we managed to will superlative pop records up the charts for one shining moment.

Of course, that moment couldnt last, despite Morley feeling, at the height of Frankiemania, as though ZTT and the band were ruling the world. Welcome to the Pleasuredome, their debut double album, was an act of hubris too far: the title track and fourth single became their first flop that is, it only reached No 2 in March 1985 and following the ludicrously expensive follow-up album, Liverpool, in 1986, and a subsequent world tour, tensions in the band caused them to split in 1987.

I probably should have left earlier, Johnson reflects. An attempt by VH1 to reunite the band in 2004, despite talks, came to naught when Johnson had to step back into a dynamic that didnt work in the first place, although he is loath to forensically dissect the personality clashes within Frankie Goes to Hollywood. He would rather remember those amazing first few records.

Horn, despite a high-profile court case in which Johnson managed to extricate himself from his contract with ZTT, resulting in the pair not communicating for more than two decades, has only fond memories, saying: Like anything, when lots of money comes into it, success can be tricky and people start to change.

He is delighted when I tell him how well Johnson, who was diagnosed with HIV in 1991, is looking, and believes that Frankies best records remain lustrous artefacts from an innovative era. They sound like modern records, he says. In fact, they still sound like theyre from the future.

Its this futuristic quality that means Morley who believes their radical showbiz model still holds up, sonically and visually cant envision a 21st-century Frankie to go alongside the other re-formed 1980s bands. The paradox is that doing it with the same spirit means you couldnt do it with the same people. It inherits too much sadness, he asserts. But thats the theorist in me overruling romance. Of course, Im claiming this in hindsight, but it wouldnt suit Frankie, because Frankie were by their very nature designed and meant for the year 1984.

Frankie Say Greatest is released by UMTV/AATW on November 2

Article: People think Im a prat...

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 22:09:08 GMT +1
First published: Fri, 01 Feb 1985
STEPHEN DUFFY

People think Im a prat.

They do?

People think Im George Michael with art school pretensions. Even Sounds call me untrendy.

Well, all this is understandable, even if its not strictly accurate. Stephen Duffy is, after all, as one press release put it, the notorious ex-fifth Beatle, the man who once used to sing with Duran Duran. And then there was the TinTin episode: after an abortive spell at art school, Duffy was kitted up with a cartoon name and a record contract and released his debut single Kiss Me, and the follow up Hold It (not worth listening to, he warns). Neither single broke any records, and even Duffy cant muster much enthusiasm for this phase in his career.

I was very disappointed, he burbles, because all my friends had hit records with their singles. I just assumed that Kiss Me would get into the charts.

Duffy claims to have been something of an innocent at the time, easily led and unprepared for what would have happened if the records had been hits. Now after a few years of being under contract, hes more cynical about the whole thing.

The whole business is full of fools, but just because everyone else is stupid doesnt mean you have to join in. Because thats what I was doing. I was very stupid, and I didnt think about what I was doing.

So you count yourself lucky not to have been an overnight sensation?

Oh, I think so. Id have been another dickhead, another wally. But then here we are four years on, and at the record companys suggestion hes putting out a new version of Kiss Me, produced by J.J. Jeczalik of the Art of Noise, and packaged in an elaborate gatefold sleeve which Stephen designed. The production and the romantic subject matter must make it his strongest chart contender yet. Duffy doesnt really see it that way. The song, he explains, contains references to Dorothy Parker, James Joyce, and the Song of Solomon. Its more to do with oral sex than romance, even if its release seems to have been scheduled to coincide with Valentines day: Thats just some crap cobbled together by the press department! he claims.

Perhaps hes wiser than he was four years ago, but he still flounders between his talents as a writer of pop songs, his desire to be an artist, and the role that record companies would like to see him play. The cartoon name that he once thought up for a joke still lingers inbetween Stephen and Duffy on the single sleeve. Stephen TinTin Duffy.

Nobody, he says ruefully, is going to take someone called TinTin seriously.

But doesnt it fit in with the image of your singles?

I dont know. It sounds like a What the hells going on? image to me.

Perhaps itll all become clear when he gets that hit single.

If I was very popular, he agrees, it might have some rhyme or reason to it.

But what if he isnt?

Well, he says, it has all been terrifically interesting.

Listen carefully and you can hear the sound of press officers tearing their hair out in handfuls.

WILLIAM SHAW

Article: Changing dollars

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 22:07:50 GMT +1
First published: Fri, 01 Feb 1985
CHANGING DOLLARS

Since the demise of Dollar, hailed in their time in some unlikely quarters, Thereza Bazar has not been idle. Shes been recording an album with Arif Mardin and is about to be launched upon an unsuspecting world. Interview by Dave McCullough.

IN COMPARISON with ZTT everything else in the music scene looks, feels and, for all intents and purposes, is from the Stone Age. There, somebody had to say it and it might as well be me.

Elsewhere in the music scene we can only look to the likes of Wham! or the odd Nik Kershaw to reveal signs of (surprising) goodness. They are doing what Thereza Bazar and her erstwhile Dollarmate David Van Day did around five years ago - debunk the serious hip of the likes of the Smiths, Bunnymen, Bragg et al. They are gifted with the stance of the true outsider (they make good records too, astonishingly).

Ironically, now with ZTT well and truly founded, Thereza Bazar should be moving up a category with them. In brief, she almost signed to ZTT, didnt in the end and is now, after almost a three year gap since silly-marvellous Dollar, about to Launch Her Solo Career with MCA.

MCA have improved as a label but they are no ZTT. One worries slightly.

Launching Her Solo Career is taking Thereza ages. I interviewed her last summer! Arif Abandoned Luncheonette Mardin is producing in place of Horn. Reliable rumours say the material is high-class, a fistful of hits. In a backstreet studio somewhere Godawful in East London Thereza looks, as she must look, stunning.

OH DAVE, I didnt know it was going to be you!

The journalist goes bright pink; eavesdroppers gnash their teeth in envy; Thereza, all four foot and an inch of her, looks smashing.

She is very showbiz by nature, very 1950s British actressy. Not really belonging to the pop world at all, which obviously in part contributed to Dollars brilliant muddling of what pop should be. They were so wrong they got it right. Every pop songstress should be a Thereza Bazar and NOT have spent all their teenage years listening to Leonard Cohen or Siouxsie Sioux. Therezas, and Dollars, stiltedness used to look great in a medium that, in after-punk times, was becoming dangerously flexible and all-encompassing.

Now, though, I suspect shes changed. I think shes aiming either at becoming a serious hipster, which would be awful, or at being big in America - she talks significantly of her fondness for Cyndi Lauper. One worries: its like George Michael suddenly saying he likes the Bunnymen and Redskins.

How do you look back on Dollar?, I ask.

Oh we didnt take it seriously. We sent ourselves up terribly, didnt we? I mean, you couldnt have taken that seriously now could you!

I keep quiet.

A LITTLE BIRD told me you have four hits on the upcoming album

Really? Well, it was six last week, so obviously its gone down! No, its going really, really great. Its just a little strange, thats all. Its taken so long making sure, not just diving into a solo career, going out and making an album and putting it out just to see how it does.

I just decided that if I was going to continue with my career it had to be done properly and on a worldwide scale. Otherwise, whats the point? I might as well go and do production full-time or host a TV show anything but dabble

Did you ever consider quitting the pop scene?

Oh never! Im more obsessive now about music than Ive ever been. I think thats partly due to the writing side - its always been very important, but you have to be very courageous to seriously become a writer because youre leaving yourself open to all sorts of things, the most of which is failure, I suppose. It can be a real let down if someone says your songs arent good enough.

How much did you write in Dollar?

Really very little. It was never encouraged particularly And the whole process of promotion is so time-consuming I never really had a chance. It was a very soul-searching moment when I decided to write and perform on my own. Because if I didnt come up to scratch Id be really disappointed in myself.

I just got really very lucky when a friend introduced me to Phil Pickett, who wrote Karma Chameleon and plays keyboards for Culture Club. He started to co-write with me and Ive never looked back since. The whole co-writing thing then sort of snowballed into me writing with Terry Briton who did Tina Turner, with Graham Lyle and several others who really make up the cream of British song writing talent. In all theres six different co-writers on the album. But I think it has my own personal style over every track

Why did you need co-writers

Well, Im not learned enough in songwriting - which is a real creative art. I can plonk on a piano or put ideas down on an eight track but thats about it. Im the sort of person who gets melodies in her head when shes in the supermarket - that sort of thing!

What does the new material sound like? (At time of going to press pre-release cassettes were still not available from MCA.)

I think its probably the perfect extension of where Videotheque left off, which is where Dollar stopped functioning, really. Theres nothing cynical or calculating about the direction Im taking. This is a real representation of me and some of the music I like.

Its very, very melodic, very contemporary. Its not schmaltzy, theres a lot of edge in the music. Because my voice is so soft really there has to be a lot of toughness in the backing track

Will you be credible this time?

Im very serious about this project. I mean, its taken over two years to get it together so its been no picnic or as glamorous as Dollar used to be...

Do you regret not signing to ZTT?

I spent a lot of time talking with Trevor and Paul. I was going to do a whole album with them, it was supposed to be their first release. And then Trevor did first Yes and then Frankie and I was left waiting. It would have been lovely, of course it would have been. But what Im doing now sounds like pop but theres a sophistication to it. I think weve got a really adult feel with Arifs involvement. He has this quality that brings out the best in people. Hes not over-technical or anything, he just brings out little nuances that you would never have noticed otherwise

But hes no Horn

I didnt want to work with anyone else except Trevor!

That seems a genuine loss to the music scene. It could have had great results, maybe better than the limited Frankie

I waited nine months, Dave! It was very sad and I think Trevor was upset too. The contracts were drawn up and everything. It was very disappointing.

Mind you, Trevor was delighted when he heard Arif was doing it, and Arif had been into Dollar all along because of the work Trevor had done there

Theres two sides to every story and the other side of this particular tale relates that Therezas new manager, a Yank named Budd, was requesting rather a lot from our ZTT pals. Thereza, though, still says shes a Trevor Horn disciple and hints at working with him again some day. One worries slightly for the present (the lesser talented Kim Wildes MCA launch was scarcely inspiring).

What about a new image? Whats it to be?

No idea. Ill know when Ive completely finished mixing the tracks. Really, its gonna have to be Me As I Am.

What were ZTT going to do with you?

It would have to have been Me As I Am there too. Theres no real need for big pretentious images. That could only be trying to say theres something lacking in the music, which there isnt this time. I mean, lyrically Dollar were pretty lightweight, werent they? It wont be like that this time around

Will you be a Serious Artiste now?

Well, Ive a kind of dual personality. Theres one side of me that does take things very seriously but theres also the side that likes to have a giggle.

I just want to be stunning: I want to be stunning in every possible way

Are you being honed in any way for an American market?

Not really, its just that Ive grown really disillusioned with the Durans and Whams in general and Im listening to more American chart music than I am to British. I like Toto, Hall and Oates, Cyndi Lauper - I think shes great, Was Not Was. English bands have got a bit boring.

One good thing is that MCA are an American company. As well as that, my managers American, my producer is American - so, you know, ZTT doesnt have everything!

It would be a shame if MCA couldnt make you as modern as ZTT could have done, thats all Im saying.

Yes, it would be. I suppose Im going to be terribly headstrong. I cant see myself smiling nicely into Joe Bangays camera for a piccy for the Sunday Mirror

And she smiles a significant smile. I hope she wins through, against the odds.

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