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Shirlie Kemp (née Holliman; born 18 April 1962) is an English singer who found fame in the 1980s with Wham! and as part of the duo Pepsi & Shirlie along with Helen DeMacque.
During their Wham! career, Holliman and DeMacque decided to form their own act, named Pepsi & Shirlie. Created immediately after the Wembley concert with the aim of having an upbeat and more purely pop sound, they had two UK top 10 hits: "Heartache", which was produced by Phil Fearon and Tambi Fernando and reached No. 2 on the UK Singles Chart (behind the No. 1 hit of George Michael and Aretha Franklin's "I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me)"), and "Goodbye Stranger", produced by Tambi Fernando and Pete Hammond, which reached No. 9 – both of these being from the album All Right Now.
Pepsi & Shirlie went on hiatus in 1989, briefly returning twice: once in 1991 with an album, Change, which was widely ignored, then again in 2000 to record backing vocals on the UK number one Geri Halliwell hit "Bag It Up". The duo also reunited to perform for the 'Here and Now 10th Anniversary tour' which began on 24 June 2011.
On 29 November 2002, Holliman was a back-up vocalist in the Concert for George, a concert celebrating the music of the late George Harrison.
In November 2019, Holliman and her husband Martin Kemp released their first album together as Martin & Shirlie, titled In the Swing of It via Sony Music. The album contains duet covers of classic plus two original songs written by their daughter Harley Moon Kemp.
In January 2023, Holliman appeared alongside her husband on the fourth series of The Masked Singer as "Cat & Mouse".
After Holliman took time out from work to care for her husband through his illness with , she was declared bankrupt in September 1996, and the family moved from Hampstead Heath to Muswell Hill to allow Kemp to recover. Holliman then went to work managing Aegean Records, a business associated with music and entertainment production.
In October 2020, Holliman with her husband published Shirlie and Martin Kemp: It's a Love Story, an autobiography-cum-Couples therapy book. The Kemps said the book was published in response to "growing media interest" in the couple's long-lasting relationship.
In 2021, Holliman appeared with her son in the documentary Roman Kemp: Our Silent Emergency in which Kemp revealed that he came close to attempting suicide after battling with depression for 13 years.
As Shirlie Kemp, she gave a personal account of the wild times touring with Wham! in the joint autobiography, Pepsi & Shirlie: It's All Black and White, written with her friend, Pepsi DeMacque-Crockett, and published by Welbeck in 2021.
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