Bernadette Jean "Kelly" Johnson (20 June 1958 – 15 July 2007) was an English guitarist and singer, widely known in the UK in the early 1980s as the lead guitarist of the all-female rock band Girlschool. Biography Johnson started playing piano after her father when she was five years old, switching to guitar at age twelve. She attended Edmonton County School in Edmonton, London, 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. Girlschool's full-on raucous guitar playing, tousled, leather-clad looks (and what one reviewer described as "stiletto in the groin" attitude) soon won the band a cult following, giving them prominence in the emerging new wave of British heavy metal, thanks also to their strong relationship with contemporaries Motörhead. Johnson's and McAuliffe's drinking bouts were otherwise memorable as much as their fast ascension to headliner band. Johnson was a songwriter, playing lead guitar and singing both lead and backing vocals on the group's first four albums. She provided both a strong visual focus for the band with her tall figure and blonde hair and an excellent musical contribution with her trenchant guitar playing. On hearing Johnson's riffs on "Race With the Devil" guitarist Jeff Beck was quoted "There's no way that's a girl playing" a remark described by the DJ John Peel as the most sexist comment he had ever heard. Whilst Lemmy of Motörhead declared "I thought they were fucking great. I got them on the tour in the first place and everybody else went like, 'Ugh, girls,' and I said, 'Fuck you, they're as good as you.' Kelly Johnson, on a good day, is as good as Jeff Beck in his rock & roll days. She's a fucking brilliant guitar player." Girlschool did not take feminist positions, but as an all-female band in a genre dominated by male musicians and often by machismo and sexist attitudes, their existence was a statement in itself. Moreover, Johnson professed from the beginning of her career a strong sensibility to environmental themes, which