ZANG TUMMM TUMB ARTICLES “the first draft of history”

“Well,” he philosophises, “I suppose if nothing happens this year it’ll happen next year. Obviously I want it to be as soon as possible. I want to get something out to break the ice that has surrounded me over the past year, but the music business is a slow beast. It’s been extremely frustrating.”

And when that solo career does get underway, will Holly Johnson flourish without Frankie? Without ZTT? Without Trevor Horn? At this stage, before his material is recorded, it’s anyone’s guess, though Tony Powell, the newly appointed managing director of MCA, says he’s quite convinced of Johnson’s talent. He’d heard the demos which Johnson had recorded before the court case, and which were to form the basis of his new solo material. He and David Simone, MCA’s new chairman, were sure that Johnson was the fresh talent that the company needed.

“Someone he’d been involved with managed to get the demos to us,” says Powell, and we liked what we heard because we’d been fans of Frankie before. The situation was that Holly had this court case pending and that finance was going to be needed along the way. We made it very clear that we would be willing to support him in his court action, and at the end of that court action Holly decided to sign with us”.

Powell hopes to be unveiling Johnson’s first MCA single this September. In fact that seems unlikely, since at the time of the interview Holly was still casting around to find the right producer for the project. He admits he treads a lot more warily in these areas now. But though Johnson’s publicist is keen to play me demos of his new material as proof that there is something around the corner, Johnson himself is reluctant. “Oh no, I don’t know about that,” he says, “I don’t think so.”

So we’re going to have to wait a bit to discover whether Holly Johnson — solo — is a viable proposition.

His oldest friend, Jayne Casey, has no doubts: “I’ve heard all his new stuff and I think it’s great,” she says, “I think he’ll survive as a solo artist. I really believe he’s great. Because of the fact he worked with Trevor Horn, people underestimate his ability and his talent. But everything that Holly does is timed to perfection, like taking Trevor Horn to court. There’s a hundred thousand cases against record companies every year but Holly’s became the Mega Court Case.”

Years ago, Casey sang with Big In Japan while Johnson played bass. Then she moved on to front Pink Industry. These days, she’s director of performing arts at Liverpool’s Bluecoat Art Gallery.

“It must have been about 1974 when I first met Holly,” says Casey. “He was about 14, a schoolboy bunking school. I used to work in a hairdresser’s in Liverpool and there was a sort of group of us before punk started and it was a very expressive group. Burnsie (Pete Burns) and his wife Lynn worked there, and one day Holly turned up bunking school and we liked the way he looked. He was young. Very young and sensitive and lonely. He’d gone to a very tough working-class school, but though he was quite sensitive, he had this very strong tongue, he knew how to attack people. And he looked extraordinary. He resembled Judy Garland. I think she was his heroine of the moment…”

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William Johnson was born in 1960, the son of a taxi driver and a nurse. He adopted the name of Holly at the age of 14, apparently taking it from Holly Woodlawn, transvestite friend of Andy Warhol.

At the age of 14 he was going through a bit of a “difficult” phase. Inspired by his idols, Warhol, Bowie and Bolan, he dyed his hair, wore odd clothes and was generally a bit of an attention-seeker. His schoolmates threw bricks at him.

“Did you hear about the ballet tights and the hair painted green?” asks Johnson, laughing. “I was completely into self-expression. Looking different I suppose was the mark of an unbalanced person.”

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His father, so the story goes, was so upset that he sometimes refused to let his son leave the house for weeks at a time.

“You think that’s absolutely bizarre?” asks Johnson. “Well it’s not bizarre. If you knew the way I looked then, you would understand that my father didn’t want me out in the streets. You’d understand his viewpoint. I understand it now…”

“We were horrible,” says Casey. “Really horrible. We really enjoyed getting up people’s noses because they’d got up our noses. It was kind of revenge, really.”

In those early precocious teenage years, Johnson started writing poetry and getting interested in art. He bought his first guitar for 13,000 cigarette coupons, which he’d swapped for his collection of David Bowie photographs. He still writes poetry — last year he says he wrote a book called Howling Lust but he hasn’t tried to get it published — and he still paints a fair amount. He’s got one or two of his own paintings up in his flat and, when it looked like Frankie Goes To Hollywood were getting absolutely nowhere after a year together, Holly was all set in the summer of 1983 to go to art college, where he’d earned himself a place.

But instead Frankie Goes To Hollywood were offered a recording deal by the hot new independent label ZTT.

Signing that contract entangled Johnson in the mess of legal problems that led to this spring’s court case. The contract was an anachronism and ZTT now put that down to inexperience. “I’d never done a record contract before then,” said Jill Sinclair, the business end of ZTT and Trevor Horn’s wife, though subsequent contracts with Das Psych-Oh Rangers and Propaganda have also ended in legal difficulties.

As far as Frankie were concerned there were four important aspects of the deal. Firstly the contract set the group’s royalties at a low rate. For example, their royalty for LP sales in the UK was 8 percent, just over half the standard rate for a successful group. Secondly, ZTT were allowed the last word in the choice of recording studio, producer and how much would be spent on any recording session. Thirdly, the contract claimed that any member of the group who left Frankie would remain contracted to ZTT. Fourthly, alongside the record contract, Frankie signed a publishing deal with Perfect Songs, also owned by Trevor Horn and Jill Sinclair. Altogether, it would be argued later, the balance was tipped unfairly in favour of ZTT in so far as it constituted “unfavourable restraint of trade”.

There was another problem around the corner too. When Frankie became famous it would often turn out that ZTT were actually billed bigger than the group — sometimes by the company but especially by the press. The group found that part of their image was that they were semi-talented louts…

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1984. The golden year. Three consecutive Number Ones. ‘Two Tribes’ sales approached the two million mark and the group found themselves dashing around the planet promoting their success. Holly Johnson was famous and had all the attention anyone could ever want. But within a year the shine had already worn off. Divisions had appeared between Johnson, the group and the record company.

“Holly had been the centre of attention since he was 13 or 14,” says Jayne Casey. “There he was with these Liverpool lads who’d never had any attention in their lives. By the time Frankie Goes To Hollywood were famous he’d grown up to a degree. He thought it was silly.” And the growing image of the Frankie ‘Lads’ — Ped, Mark and Nasher — didn’t suit Johnson either.

“Holly’s gay. He hated all that mild sexist male mentality he was surrounded by,” Casey says, “and he does definitely react against it. Continue »

He’s a lot calmer now than he was, but the lads, who were so wild and crazy, just sat on their arses while Holly took ZTT to court and that’s what the difference between them is.”

Something else had changed too. By now Johnson had his own personal manager, Wolfgang Kuhle, and he was becoming aware of the pitfalls of his contract. Kuhle is also Johnson’s boyfriend, and though there are obvious drawbacks in mixing personal life and business, this particular relationship has resulted in a horrendous amount of flack. In court, ZTT’s barrister made frequent references to the relationship, and Jill Sinclair said later that she thought “Wolfgang was heavily instrumental in Holly leaving the band. Like Yoko Ono or whatever. Holly brought in Wolfgang as his personal manager after their relationship started. The first tour they ever did was awful because Holly took him on tour with him”. The tabloids caught a whiff of this and piled in with headlines like HOLLY’S SIX FOOT HUNK SPLITS FRANKIES. The stories were helped along by the fact that Kuhle is some twenty years older than Johnson.

As a consequence, Johnson is somewhat paranoid when it comes to discussing their relationship, business or otherwise. No, he says, it’s not difficult being managed by him. The court allegations about him and Kuhle? They were totally unkind and totally wrong. Why did he feel he needed a personal manager? Because he felt the whole business side of Frankie had got out of hand. “I don’t think I should discuss my private life and his private life,” he says when asked how he first met Kuhle. “It’s not only an infringement of my life, it’s an infringement of somebody else’s life too.”

Jayne Casey: “People assume that it was Wolfgang who was making Holly grow up, but Holly was growing up before. There is a lot of bad feeling about Wolfgang because he’s another man. There are a lot of homophobes around in the press and in record companies. They assume that one person is the dominant partner and the other is the passive partner, which is not necessarily so. There’s a lot of misunderstanding about it.”

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On July 23rd 1987, Holly Johnson told ZTT that he intended to leave the label. ZTT countered with an injunction to prevent him signing to MCA on the grounds that this constituted a breach of that original contract he’d signed four years before. Johnson and Kuhle had employed lawyer Tony Russell to act for Johnson. He was the man who had already acted for George Michael and Andrew Ridgley in their case against Innervision in 1983 — although the matter was eventually settled out of court. That case had been based on “unfair restraint of trade” and now the same phrase was being used against ZTT’s contract, coupled with an allegation that the company had overspent on recording costs. When it came to court, ZTT’s case involved a demonstration that Frankie Goes To Hollywood had been largely the product of ZTT’s marketing and musical skills, and the court was taken to the Sarm West studios to see the array of technology which had been responsible for the Frankie sound. Furthermore, it was implied that any difficulties that Johnson was encounterirg were of his own making. The court was told that he was sometimes “impossible to work with”, and that he “didn’t turn up for meetings”. What’s more, it was implied that, if there were problems with the second LP, it was because Johnson had affected the mood of the rest of the group with his aloofness. It was alleged that he only turned up for twenty-three days of the seven-month recording schedule, and had refused to work late at night like the rest of the group.

Johnson’s main line of attack was to detail the huge sums of money spent on Liverpool. “My complaint was that they were irresponsible with the amount of money they were spending. They were spending it willy nilly.”

And after all, this was not ZTT’s money that was being spent, it was Frankie’s potential future earnings. Continue »