Your support helps us to tell the story
Musician Holly Johnson has revealed that the late David Bowie was one of the few friends who reached out after he was diagnosed with HIV.
The Frankie Goes to Hollywood frontman made his health condition public during an interview in 1993, after which he said he was “sort of cancelled” by the music industry.
In an interview with The Guardian, he spoke about how stigma around HIV and Aids led to him being abandoned by many of the people he viewed as friends.
“It felt like being cancelled,” he said. “For quite a number of years no one rang except a couple of friends like [Radio 1 DJ] Janice Long and Kirsty MacColl.”
There was another exception, he said: “I got a phone call from David Bowie, which was like getting a phone call from God. We ended up chatting for over an hour on a Saturday night.
“We spoke a lot about art – the Vorticists and Keith Vaughan – and he said, ‘I’ve got a tour coming up; what songs shall I sing?’ So I just reeled off a load of songs that I loved.”
Bowie, who was known for his acts of generosity, died on 10 January 2016, aged 69.
Johnson’s colourful life is the subject of a new exhibition opening this weekend at the Museum of Liverpool.
Among the exhibited items are his paintings from the Eighties and Nineties, the Vivienne Westwood suit he wore in his 1989 single “Love Train”, and fetish wear: “But none that I actually wore, because rubber tends to disintegrate and leather knickers get lost along the way.”
“The opportunity to mount this exhibition is actually like winning the National Lottery for me. As a teenager Music and Art were my passion,” he told the BBC.
"Everything I was ever drawn to, through a lens of queerness and controversy, I brought with me into the future we live in now.”
Johnson is also embarking on a 40th anniversary tour of Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s debut album, Welcome to the Pleasuredome, which will see him perform six dates in venues including the Royal Albert Hall in London.
Last year, the band surprised fans with a brief reunion at the Eurovision opening concert, as the 2023 song contest was hosted in their home city of Liverpool.
All five members of the group’s original line-up – Holly Johnson, Brian Nash, Paul Rutherford, Mark O’Toole and Peter Gill – performed at St George’s Plateau, at a concert attended by 25,000 people.
Yet Johnson appeared to write off any chance of a full reunion tour: “Fans ask me about us reforming on social media but I’ve given up replying,” he told The Guardian. “It just seems so unlikely.”
