The Chart Show Top Ten (11th February 1989)

The Chart Show Top Ten in the 80's and a matter in fact including the 90's had the good, bad and the very very bad. The bad included Mike and the Mechanics, the very very bad included Yazz and the good included Morrissey. But amongst the surprising good tunes in this Top Ten was Holly Johnson's Love Train. When I told people, I thought the Love Train was a really great tune, peoples reacted as if I told them I was kidnapped by creatures from planet zog.

I am always open to different types of music and never prejudice pop music because its not alternative or extreme. In fact Love Train was the only few top ten hits of Holly Johnson in the 80's. In the 90's, he didn't fare that well, even a cover of his Power of Love from his Frankie days didn't bring any power of hitting the charts. There was also the re-release of Power of Love during one of the 90's Christmas season. The majority of his solo material were generally forgotten apart from Love Train and Americanos, which I thought was a disappointing tune.

The Frankie days had much more success than his solo materials. Relax and Two Tribes were one of the biggest selling singles of 1984. However after the mid 80's, the band's music were going downhill and the group decided to split up. Frankie Goes to Hollywood had the image of an all gay band, although in fact, only 2 members out of 6 were openly gay (Holly Johnson and Paul Rutherford). The rest of the members just melted away, although they did had some couple of reunions. However it didn't really last that long anyway.

Holly Johnson at the moment is a painter and I've seen his art of work on his website. Its quite good, not exactly Leonardo da Vinci, but its certainly beats David Bowie's paintings, which are quite grim. I guess he must have had a bad day at his record company to produce some pretty grim paintings. His 1995 painting of Present Future Accepted looked like the bottom half was done by a chimpanzee and the top half painted by a psycho killer. It wouldn't look out of place in a mental hospital, although I do worry what was David Bowie's mind like when he painted this awful piece of trash !!!