Kelly Johnson

Johnson died on Sunday 15 July 2007, aged 49, after a six-year battle against spinal cancer. That she had the disease was not widely known outside her close circle of friends and even closer family. At her memorial, her friend and former bandmate Tracey Lamb read the eulogy.

Girlschool performed a tribute gig on 20 August 2007 at the Soho Revue Bar in London, with many of Johnson’s friends and former band members.

In 1993, after almost ten years in the USA, she returned to the UK to resume her role as lead guitarist of Girlschool for a reunion tour. She remained with the band and toured incessantly until 1999, when she was diagnosed with cancer. After she left the band Johnson remained associated with Girlschool, playing the occasional gig, instructing her substitute Jackie Chambers and gathering photos and material for a band biography.

Johnson left England for the US, to start a new career and to live with Vicki Blue, former bassist of the American all-female band The Runaways, who was also her manager. In Los Angeles, she wrote her own music and recorded demos of mainstream rock with large use of synthesizers and electronic effects, but no label put her under contract. In 1987, she entered the rock band World’s Cutest Killers, which included on rhythm guitar and vocals former Painted Lady and The Go-Go's member Kathy Valentine. WCK changed their name to The Renegades and worked the local club circuit, but gained no record contract. Concluding her experience with this band after two years, she left music altogether to learn sign language and work with the deaf.

Girlschool had their best UK chart success in 1980 and 1981, with the EP St. Valentine's Day Massacre and the album Hit and Run, but their success soon declined and their approach to the US market with the album Play Dirty was not as successful as hoped. At the beginning of 1984, Johnson left the band. As Kim McAuliffe stated in 1997, "basically Kelly just got fed up with the whole thing (...) she wasn’t into heavy rock anymore".

During her first stint with Girlschool, Kelly Johnson used a 1980 Gibson Les Paul Gold Top guitar, modified with gold plated machine heads and DiMarzio pickups and an Ibanez Destroyer-II. She used Marshall 50 and 100 amplifiers and no pedals or effects. During her time staying in Los Angeles, she used instead a tiger striped Aria RS guitar, which she continued to use in the 1990s along with a Gibson SG.

Johnson started playing piano after her father when five years old and switched to guitar at twelve. She attended Edmonton County School in Edmonton, which is in North London, and part of the London Borough of Enfield, where she discovered rock music and played bass and piano in school bands. She went back to guitar and was already writing and playing her own material when she met her future bandmates at the age of 19. After her first encounter with Kim McAuliffe and Enid Williams in April 1978, she was immediately accepted in the ranks of the new band formed from the ashes of the group Painted Lady, which took the name of Girlschool.

Bernadette Jean "Kelly" Johnson (20 June 1958 – 15 July 2007) was an English guitarist, widely known in the UK in the early 1980s as the lead guitarist of the all-female British heavy metal band Girlschool.