The Frankie Goes to Hollywood singer survived being gay in 1970s Liverpool, a BBC ban and an HIV diagnosis. Now, 40 years after he first told us to Relax, his life is being made into a film.
Holly Johnson was told he was HIV positive just weeks before Freddie Mercury died. It was October 1991 and Johnson, the singer in Frankie Goes to Hollywood — brash, extrovert, full of life — was terrified. He had bumps, lesions. He had a fungal toenail infection. His friends had been dying and for months he was too afraid to take the test. After his diagnosis his phone stopped ringing. “Like having a bell round my neck going ‘Unclean!’ " he recalls. Pancreatitis hit hard. He was dangerously ill. He took a cocktail of largely experimental anti-Aids drugs: AZT, ddI, ddC, interferon.
Then he got better. “In 1996,” he explains, “a drug called a protease inhibitor came out and my health improved. I thought I was living on borrowed time, but here I am.” He grins. Still, HIV changed him. How does that fear of death make someone feel? “You do what you think is important in an urgent manner,” he states calmly. “Forget useless small stuff.” Does the fear still linger? “Definitely, because of the deaths of my contemporaries. I realise how lucky I am.”
We meet in west London, in a quiet café. He sips tea and is dressed in long cream shorts and a matching jacket. His hair is cropped and his distinctive voice sounds exactly as it did in Frankie’s heyday, if perhaps a little shakier. A seesaw, high-pitched Scouse lilt in which all sentences end as if he is asking a question.
At 63 he looks fantastic and strong. A picture of health, so confident in his own body that he is about to go on tour for the first time in nearly a decade. He has done festivals, where he enjoys bumping into Tony Hadley (“amazing lungs”) and Bonnie Tyler (“always a pleasure”), but this will be his first solo jaunt since 2014. “I do the hits, never B-sides,” he says, smiling. So that will include tracks from his No 1 debut solo album, Blast, but, above all, Relax, The Power of Love and Two Tribes from the band’s 1984 debut album, Welcome to the Pleasuredome, which sold more than two million copies.
I ask how easy it is for him to stay healthy on tour. “Quite easily,” he replies. “One pill a day. Over the years certain side-effects occurred. I became diabetic, so have drugs for that. But I’m so well that it’s hard to remember I’m not and must look after myself. I gave up drinking and smoking 30 years ago and live a nun’s life now. It is quite run of the mill. People imagine glamour, luxury and lots of money — but it’s so not like that.”
His phone rings. He answers with an earpiece that is for the “industrial damage” of hearing loss. “Hello, Wolfgang,” he says. “I am being interviewed. I’ll see you later? Bye-bye!” He hangs up. “So that’s my partner of 40 years, Wolfgang, asking where I am.” He laughs. I get the sense, in the nicest way possible, that they don’t get out much. Wolfgang Kuhle, an art collector, who is older, met Johnson in 1984. “There are a lot of fortieths coming up,” Johnson says wistfully. “It’s 40 years since Relax was released. Proper forties all around.”
Johnson was just 23 when that single came out. The song must mean something different now to what it did back then? “Well, it was the anthem of a young, dumb and full-of-come man in the prime of youth!” he exclaims. “But I’m not that person any more, so it just becomes a bit more arch, if you know what I mean?”
He grins and it is hard to tally this quiet, thoughtful man in front of me with that irreverent leather-clad scourge of various moral guardians, including the BBC, which famously banned Relax. Yes, this change is age, but he really seems entirely removed from the younger man he tells stories about, like someone who is reading his own autobiography for the first time.
Soon Frankie nostalgia will be unavoidable, as Johnson — hot on the heels of the rather more celebrated Freddie Mercury, Elton John and Elvis Presley — is getting a big-screen biopic, based on his 1994 memoir, Bone in My Flute. “Bohemian Rhapsody had just made a billion dollars!” he says, laughing. The film will be directed by Bernard Rose, who made the Relax video, with Johnson’s role played by 24-year-old Callum Scott Howells, who starred as Colin, the tragic Welshman in It’s a Sin, Russell T Davies’s poignant 1980s Aids drama. “He is the right age to play me as young and cute, which I suppose I was,” he says.
William Johnson was born in Liverpool in 1960, the third of four children to Eric, a taxi driver, and Pat, who worked at a children’s hospital. His father is dead, but his mother and sister still live there and he has stayed close to the city. In 1997 he sang a spine-tingling cover of Ferry Cross the Mersey at a benefit gig for Hillsborough. He says the city has changed hugely since he left for London — like thousands did because, as he puts it, “Margaret Thatcher was trying to strangle the Labour council”. He last lived there in 1983, in Toxteth. “It’s the Georgian Quarter now,” he scoffs. In his day it was all “kerb crawlers, streetwalkers, caravans of police”.
He describes his school years, at the all-boys Liverpool Collegiate School, simply as “hell”. “If you were a Bowie fan, obviously gay and not averse to wearing mascara with your hair bright red it was hell,” he elaborates. “It was scary — I got spat at, kicked, beaten up, abused verbally on a daily basis. I had one friend, Peter, and we clung together and played truant. But we also believed we were right and should be able to express ourselves. Teachers would say we were asking for it. It was difficult.”
What did those teachers say when he said he wanted a job in the arts? “Get a proper job! Learn a trade!” He giggles. “And I did and it has kept me alive all these years. I’ve never had another job. I was a pizza chef for three months and worked on a building site for a while, but that’s it. I’m doing the thing I wanted to do as a teenager.”
His first shot at success was with Big in Japan, a band that could have made it but fell short. Johnson played bass. “I was biding my time,” he admits. “I wanted to be a solo artist. Frankie was my Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.” Frankie Goes to Hollywood arrived at its classic line-up in 1983: Johnson, Paul Rutherford (backing vocals, dancing), Mark O’Toole (bass), Brian Nash (guitar) and Peter Gill (drums). Did their singer crave validation? “There was an element of that, yes, to show those who abused you at school. But my inspirations were Marc Bolan, David Bowie and Lou Reed. There are not many who are interesting in pop now. Taylor Swift? Ed Sheeran? Adele? Much blander than those exotic creatures I was inspired by.”
My Father took this photo of me in the backyard of 206 Rathbone Road Liverpool, opposite The Rathbone Pub. I was born close to the famous Meccano Factory in Binns Road, Liverpool 13 (my lucky number) I think he had one frame left on the roll of film and needed to use it up. pic.twitter.com/iFqWzMiN62
— Holly Johnson (@TheHollyJohnson) February 9, 2023
In bands in Liverpool since he was 16, he saw his local contemporaries Echo and the Bunnymen and Teardrop Explodes get deals. “I felt left behind,” he says. “So I thought, with Frankie, I’ve got to grab this by the balls.” He was so dedicated that he even gave up drugs. “Well, someone had to!”
It is hard to overstate how huge Frankie were. Their name came from a poster on the wall of a rehearsal room that read “Frankie Goes Hollywood”, referring to Frank Sinatra’s move into an acting career. The vibrant, controversial music soundtracked the mid-Eighties. And what a furore Relax caused. It is a terrific pop song. The verse pummels, the chorus rushes. It is now played on Radio 2 to the grans, but 40 years ago it was the devil. One lyric simply goes “I’m coming!” but nobody much seemed to mind until the Radio 1 DJ Mike Read refused to play the song.
“The BBC played it 91 times before they banned it,” Johnson says. “And they only banned it because they got a whiff of gayness from the video.” To be fair, said whiff was a reproduction of a gay S&M den with a scene where Johnson rides Rutherford like a horse just after being hosed with a cream liquid. Yet Johnson has a point. “The song is neither gay or anything,” he argues. “It’s just male.”
Years later he bumped into Read in Soho. The DJ thought the incident had been “marvellous” for both men but Johnson does not agree, despite the ban propelling the single to a five-week stay at No 1. Surely notoriety was the point? “No,” Johnson says. “It was disappointing. It made us look like the Sex Pistols, but with actual sex. It took away that Top of the Pops moment of being No 1 on TV with a first single.”
He must have known that the video would shock? “It reflected the milieu I was in,” he says. “I used to go to a nightclub, Heaven [in London], in its heyday. It had a super glamorous disco with amazing lights and laser beams and gay men with their shirts off wearing leather. The video was like that.”
They kept on pushing against the norm. The video for Two Tribes was banned because it featured a bloody fight between President Reagan and the Soviet leader Konstantin Chernenko. It made the band even more notorious — their music and videos becoming ever more popular in youth clubs and discos. They were forward-thinking with their merchandise: their T-shirts with FRANKIE SAY RELAX in large black type were so ubiquitous that Ross would later wear one in an episode of Friends. There was even a computer game in 1985 in which players were popped into Liverpool and had to find the Pleasuredome.
“We had fun,” Johnson continues. “We were young kids, but then we signed this terrible record contract.” His voice wobbles. There has been a 40-year rift between Johnson and the producer Trevor Horn, who signed Frankie to his ZTT label. “It was hard work,” he says. “And weird. We were the bad boys of pop. Not Duran Duran, who were well brought up. Or Spandau Ballet. We were edgy. The record company line was ‘we’ve plucked these idiots out of Liverpool and created success’. Most fun came before we had a deal but then it became trying to maintain momentum and dealing with companies. Nobody wants that at 24. You just want to go out dancing and cop off.
“They worked us like dogs,” he yells. “We were in a different country every day miming to Relax on TV. The label would collect the payment and wouldn’t pay us for the job. We were on a wage of 40 quid a week, but the payment for the actual TV gig was taken by the record company.”
The band split in 1987 after too many fallings-out and a less successful second album. “None of us got rich from Frankie,” Johnson sighs, who says royalties from his songwriting and the occasional performance in German nightclubs enabled him to “scrape along” for years. “We’ve all had financial difficulties. I still live in the same house I bought when I was 25. I once took the gold disc of Relax into the bank because I wanted an overdraft, but they said, ‘Oh, that was banned, wasn’t it?’ "
Still, the good times were better than most can dream of. Johnson beams as he recalls jetting round the globe and meeting Derek Jarman, Quentin Crisp, Andy Warhol. “I asked Warhol how I could get on the cover of Interview magazine,” he says. “He said, ‘Well, hun, you could sleep with the publisher?’ And I said, ‘Who’s the publisher, Andy?’ And he said, ‘I am.’ " Johnson did not end up on the cover of Interview magazine.
In the journalist Simon Garfield’s masterful history of Aids in Britain, The End of Innocence, Johnson is portrayed at the centre of the party. There was a club called Subway, in Leicester Square, about which Garfield writes: “There was a real treat — a back room, a f*** room they called it, quite rare, an experience you could never forget.” Johnson tells Garfield that he and his friends first heard of Aids in 1983. There was a notorious air steward who went to New York a lot. Then he got ill and died within months.
This was the world of Channel 4′s It’s a Sin. Did Johnson watch it? “I did, but it was very hard,” he says softly. “Wolfgang lasted one episode. It was torture, but it’s important it got made.” Why? “It’s important that people know. Food was left outside of rooms and people were treated abominably by their families. That pain was real.”
In 1984, I had the opportunity to meet Andy Warhol for this photo set up by Spencer Bright for The Evening Standard.#FlashbackFriday pic.twitter.com/tTK10lWzJe
— Holly Johnson (@TheHollyJohnson) February 3, 2023
I ask Johnson if it is true he was told by his US label to go back in the closet? “That was definitely a conversation,” he admits. “They did research and found people didn’t like it when I talked about being gay. I said, ‘What do you want me to do? Pretend I’m not gay? It’s a bit late now!’ Even then George Michael wasn’t out the closet and other artists weren’t either, and all doing swimmingly in the US. If you wanted to make it in America you had to not be gay.”
What about the UK? “It didn’t seem to matter. But in the 1990s it did. Gay people weren’t pop stars any longer.” Was that a reaction to HIV? “Well, of course. People were afraid. There was a palpable fear, as there should have been, but it shouldn’t have discriminated against those unfortunate enough to be infected.”
“But times have changed so much now,” he continues. “You see boys in full make-up, or cross-dressing boys and girls. They are still running a risk, but seem to pass without a huge amount of problems.”
In the past few months there have been attacks on gay men, including a stabbing outside a pub in south London. Is it really safer? “Those things are frightening,” he says. “During hard times people become hostile to others and need something to rail against. People take out their frustrations on somebody else, another sector. It’s usually people who have doubts about their own sexuality who attack gay men.”
To some, though, focus has shifted away from gay rights to trans rights. Does he see those battles as comparable? “It is very different, actually,” he says. “There was a fever pitch when HIV was raging and no medical intervention was available — and that is similar. But the trans debate is so high-pitched now, a frenzy with two sides attacking each other. I sympathise with trans people and don’t understand what the problem is, but then I’m not a woman who feels threatened. If I was, I might have a different opinion.”
He pauses. “It’s hard to say anything without putting your foot in it and being attacked by either side, but then I took my name from a trans person, Holly Woodlawn [an actress from the 1970s]. She decided not to have body modifications but buy a dress instead and I admired her approach to being trans. But I can only have sympathy for what they’re all going through now.”
In May Frankie re-formed for the first time in 36 years to play at Eurovision in — where else? — Liverpool. They performed Welcome to the Pleasuredome. “It felt cathartic,” Johnson says. “Forgetting the past dynamics. We went to the Bridewell after, where we used to rehearse. It’s a bar now and the Leather Pets turned up, two girls from Kirby we used to drag on stage and tie with chains to the drum kit. It was great to see them.” Will there be more Frankie gigs? “We’ve had offers since Eurovision and haven’t bit the hands off people who made them. I was exhausted, but it was lovely. It was like being a pop star for weekend.”
Surely he still gets recognised? “Occasionally a taxi driver recognises my voice, but it’s not my everyday life,” he says, not sadly at all. “There is a part of me that thinks all of that happened to somebody else. My vocals were aggressive and confident, but I’m quite a mild-mannered person. Maybe Frankie was a person I wanted to be, on the wild side. And when I do look back, I think, ‘God, I looked great, didn’t I?’ "
Written by: Jonathan Dean
© The Times of London