Scissor Sisters frontman Jake Shears sat down with the iconic Holly Johnson, front man of Frankie Goes To Hollywood, for a festive edition of Queer the Music to discuss the 1984 UK number one single and enduring Christmas song, The Power of Love, which celebrates its 40th anniversary this Christmas.
The Power of Love came out during a scary time of social and political turmoil in the UK with Thatcherism, the miners’ strike and an encroaching AIDS epidemic. Despite this, gay bars, clubs and saunas were thriving in the UK and amongst it all Frankie Goes to Hollywood were skyrocketing to success with their debut album Welcome to the Pleasuredome.
In the episode, Holly says: “I never thought of Christmas when I was writing the song. It was just this ode to love that I was writing about. All the things I’d heard about love and wished about love and desired that love would be. Because at the time I didn’t really have it in my life. The only passion I had was music.”
Talking about the AIDS epidemic, Holly said: “It was [initially] only people who went to America. So we thought we’d be OK, but we weren’t.”
Holly Johnson’s career is a leather-cladded tale of fearlessness, activism, and Liverpool pride. A pioneering LGBTQ+ icon, Holly was one of the first openly gay and openly HIV+ high profile artists.
Against the backdrop of the social and political unrest of the 1980s, Frankie Goes to Hollywood spearheaded the UK’s cultural revolution with synth-pop sounds, raunchy visuals and provocative lyrics. Nevertheless, the band reached No.1 in the UK with their first three singles – Relax, Two Tribes and The Power of Love.
