HOLLY JOHNSON

• It is tempting to think of the pop life of William ‘Holly’ Johnson as divisible by a series of pointed before and after’s… before and after Relax… B&A Pleasuredome… B&A Frankie… B&A Blast… B&A illness… B&A a court case… B&A biography. The timeline has added up to maximise the whole; a series of theatrical operations that collude to build the bigger picture at the heart of the artist. Or ‘The Bigger Bang’, as might once been posited.
• Yet through it all there have remained unique consistencies. In an unlikely twist on the lascivious pop narrative, Holly’s relationship with his manager and partner Wolfgang Kuhle has continued un-swerved for almost thirty years. His flair for working class escape through lyricism and humour still scintillates. He is unchanged in the respect of being noticeably, unequivocally and even surprisingly Scouse. His sense of personal provocation is undimmed. His impeccable, shopaholic taste for presentation is gilded by the master couturiers Vivienne Westwood and Comme des Garcons’ Rei Kawakubo, even Leigh Bowery : same as it ever was.

Choosing his stage-wear for summer 2011’s headlining turn at a Henley on Thames Festival, he leafed through the racks at Dover Street Market and found a Comme blazer in black leather, with panels cut out, representing a vibrant sartorial ribcage. After three decades on stage, Holly Johnson is still taking wilful perversity and abject high taste to the mainstream. He is still his own, special creation. His special gift to the pop climate was always to lend it a bit of artful thunder and lightning.

His riveting pop tale – harnessed most effectively in the autobiography A Bone in My Flute, a required reading textbook for any PHD study in the golden age of mass market pop music – may have included incommensurate lows to counterbalance the giddy highs. But the intent has remained stoically the same.

Holly Johnson is evangelical about the Warholian idyll of the superstar. He named himself in honour of it, after first witnessing the louche Factory transvestite Holly Woodlawn as a fourteen year old schoolboy in a spit and sawdust Liverpool picturehouse, accompanied by his thrilled best friend (the best friend remains another consistency, fyi). Warhol’s tract was for a stardom that wasn’t measured in facts and figures but rather by cause and effect. By the calculation of whatever those intangible fabulosities that conspire to creat