Review: Holly Johnson at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

The Herald Scotland

19-06-2025

Backed by a tight band, including keyboardist and backing vocalist Daisy May Khan – at 21, quite possibly the youngest person in the room – and led by a guitarist in David D'Andrade who clearly saw himself as part of the spectacle (never has the slicking back of hair looked more performative), Johnson gave us what was in effect an extended Rewind Festival set; a run-through of the hits and the best-of-the-rest tunes from his band days and his solo career – stretching from the mid-1980s to the start of the 1990s – concentrating, inevitably, on that fierce hot moment in 1984 – a moment that stretched out through the whole year – when Frankie Goes to Hollywood were the biggest band in the country. (The band's debut single Relax remains the sixth-best-selling UK single of all time, despite the fact that it was banned on Radio 1. Or more likely because of it.)
Johnson came dressed for the party, in black leather jacket and black leather kilt which showed off his knobbly knees. Inevitably at one point he threatened to lift it up to show what was underneath.
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But then Johnson's personality has always been an endearing mixture of the sweet and the salty. This evening he reminded us of a story he has told before; that of his first visit to Glasgow when he 'shagged a postman'. Loucheness was always part of the appeal.
Nostalgia doesn't really do surprise and so there were no real departures in the set list. It stuck pretty rigidly to the Frankie era and Johnson's early solo records, though there was the odd Frankie deep cut, like Happy Hi!, the B side of Welcome to the Pleasuredome which probably should have been left there.
And it's fair to say that, ultimately, Johnson's songbook is a relatively slim one. There were a few longueurs between the sugar high of his more familiar songs.
It's also true that the accompanying visuals were pretty basic, pretty budget, and at times frankly rather twee. Maybe only the half-naked musclemen dancing along on the screen to Relax seemed of a piece with the music.
But in the end this show had two big advantages. The first was Johnson's voice. Back in 2019 Trevor Horn – Frankie Goes to Hollywood's producer and Johnson's bete noire – played the same venue with a crack cadre of session musicians and singers, singing some of the same songs. But when they did essay Frankie classics what was clearly, painfully, missing was the texture of Johnson's voice and his explosive vocalisations (that throaty 'huuh' at the, ahem, climax of Relax). Because, the truth is, Johnson was as essential to those Frankie records as the Fairlight sampler.
And, it has to be said, the big tunes played tonight – Pleasuredome, Relax, Two Tribes – are frankly indestructible; epic confections of pop, full of sex and horror and the perfume of youth. They remain so all these years on.
The evening inevitably ended with a performance of The Power of Love, Frankie's shot at a Christmas number one (seen off by Band Aid's Do They Know it's Christmas) and Johnson's favourite song. Certainly his best shot at posterity. 'We always say it's not for Christmas, it's for life,' Johnson, now wearing a crown and a sparkly jacket, reminded us.
Time for the glitterball and a few minutes revelling in the sweet sadness of time passing. In the end we are our memories. As Holly says, make love your goal.