Holly Johnson's Guide To The Music Industry

Music, and musicians, have a lot to be thankful to Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s Holly Johnson for - it was he who penned one of the most controversial songs ever, ‘Relax’, which angered middle England, opened minds and loosened broadcasters’ restrictions. He also took his label to court, and won, creating a legal precedent, over the ridiculous restrictions in his recording contract. Twenty-five years on from when ‘Relax’ was making some people uptight, Holly gives us his Rock And Rules…

You will lose control (not like that)
People tend to think that when you’re a famous artist, you’re autonomous and free to do what you will, but it isn’t quite like that. There are lots of people with lots of different opinions of what you should be doing. Very often the artist is the very last person to know stuff, like what single is going to be released next, or what the video will look like or who’s going to be remixing the track. The artist can actually be the very, very last person to know what’s going on about anything. They treat you like children in the industry - as if you’re a ten-year-old who’s incapable of making these decisions. Then when an artist says, ‘Hang on. Wait a minute’, they become dubbed as a ‘difficult artist’, and that spreads around really quickly about someone. Just because you’ve said that you don’t actually agree with something.

Get a really, really good lawyer to look at your contracts
Contracts that artists are required to sign are very different today, because of people like me who stuck their neck out and said that the old ones weren’t worth the paper they were written on because they were so restrictive. My career was held up with an injunction for several years and then I was the first person to break free from a recording agreement in the history of the world. Contracts have changed because of that and people like George Michael and The Stone Roses have used the legal precedent that my manager and I created. Now you have to watch out for the fact that they want to own you lock, stock and barrel. They have this thing called a 360 contract where not only do they want the rights to your recorded work, they want you to pay for it out of your advance and they want to own it when you’ve finished paying for it forever and ever. And then they want your touring revenue and merchandising revenue and publishing revenue, they want your website and they want your brand name. They want everything. I’d advise to get a really, really good lawyer!

Sometimes your song will become much bigger than you
I feel that I can’t really compete with ‘Relax’. I can write new material and make new albums, but it’s unlikely now that anyone could write a song that would have so much fuss made out of it because times have changed so much. People have become desensitised to what they call ‘parental guidance lyrics’. In fact if you don’t have them now, you almost don’t stand a chance with the youth culture. They’re only interested if it might offend. It will always be part of me and who I am and how I’m perceived. I’m never going to be able to change that or compete with that so I accept it and embrace it. I was twenty-four when I wrote it, and at that age you’re supremely confident and you think that everyone who doesn’t like your work is an idiot and not worth thinking about. Being twenty-four is all about feeling immortal and that the rest of the world has to catch up with you. I felt perfectly justified writing that song and singing it in that way and I felt that everyone else was small-minded who thought it was outrageous. I was upset that the BBC weren’t playing it - but that meant that everyone else just played it more.

Embrace being looked up to
The expression ‘role model’ wasn’t really bandied about in those days. The interesting thing about Frankie Goes To Hollywood was that it wasn’t “lock up your daughters, Frankie are in town.” It was “lock up your daughters and sons.” It was challenging people’s narrow-mindedness in terms of open homosexuality. That was quite an exciting thing to do. Without that element I think we might have appeared less exciting. It was important in the whole atmosphere of Frankie - people didn’t know who was straight or gay. No one else was really being so open about themselves in that way. Apart from maybe Jimmy Somerville from Bronski Beat. It was an exciting time for us.

The music industry doesn’t really care about you
There are many things that you don’t realise about the music industry, for instance, that limo that they sent round to take you to the airport - you’re paying for it. You’re paying for everything and you’re only useful for a certain amount of time to the record company. The people that you’re working with are not your friends, they’re there doing a job and will move on to the next set of naïve youngsters with dreams as soon as they’re bored with you. That’s something to be aware of. You see it time and time again on TV now with the X Factor; it’s like, ‘Next!’ The music industry is incredibly clinical, but you see these people just queuing up to be exploited for our amusement and then to be discarded. Your life is your own responsibility at the end of the day. The industry can exploit you and move on and it’s always important to be aware of that. Pop is a machine that will chew you up and spit you out.

Words by Josh Jones