Creativity Quote by Holly Johnson

There’s a quiet act of self-defense in the phrase “I always saw myself,” and Holly Johnson knows it. It’s less a boast than a preemptive correction: don’t reduce me to “frontman,” “pop star,” or the neatly boxed nostalgia slot that the ’80s often becomes. Calling himself a “multi media artist” is a way of widening the frame around a career that audiences and industry gatekeepers tend to flatten into hits, hair, and a moment in time.

The wording matters. “Always” rewrites the timeline so experimentation isn’t a midlife pivot but the original premise. It signals intent: he didn’t “branch out” from music; music was one channel among several. “Multi media” also carries a particular generational charge. For an artist coming up alongside MTV’s visual dictatorship, the job wasn’t just making songs, it was building an image-language: videos, graphics, fashion, performance, persona. Johnson’s era turned musicians into full-stack storytellers before anyone used that term, and the smartest ones treated the camera as an instrument.

There’s subtext, too, about control and authorship. A “multi media artist” implies agency over the whole package, pushing back against the machinery that markets performers as products shaped by producers, labels, and stylists. For a queer artist who’s had to navigate public perception and private reality, that insistence on being the architect of his own presentation isn’t just aesthetic. It’s political.