Smalltown Boy: Bronski Beat and The Communards’ Jimmy Somerville

For gay men, listening to pop music is akin to the close reading of literary “texts.” Intentions, biography, defenses – the author is an intrusion on a private exchange between song and listener. We listen for narratives whose passing allusions to friendship become fraught, charged. Dr. Dre’s “Nothin’ But a G Thang” celebrates a Dre-Snoop bond based on shared verbal dexterity and hanging out using the same drugs (it’s a hip-hop “Two of Us”). In the way these songs are listened to, women are peripheral when they’re not threats. Suggestion – by musical cues and lyrical gaps – rules. Take George Michael’s “A Different Corner,” a lamentation about a man in love with, if you read the clues, a male best friend.

The small but considerable achievement of Jimmy Somerville was to fuck all that and use masculine pronouns. Addicted to a sartorial austerity that was a rebuke to the times, Somerville packed six hundred pounds of falsetto in a tiny frame. He looked like a punk but sang disco. In the electronic songs he, Steve Bronski and Larry Steinbachek wrote for Bronski Beat, Somerville wailed as if his life depended on it – which, if the scenarios drawn in “Smalltown Boy” and “Junk” are to be believed – it probably did. Forget the unintelligible romantic boilerplate with masculine pronouns and Bronski Beat’s music told the full story: rattling sequencers and synthesized polyrhythms. For ballad and thesis statement they chose George Gershwin’s “Ain’t Necessarily So,” recast as a mournful acceptance of the way things aren’t supposed to be.

In an England where the Thatcher government endorsed Section 28, Somerville’s out-ness served as a redress. Teens too young for the libertinage of the disco years memorized New Popsters’ mirror moves. To the British musical left, milder responses were suspect. For example, a chapter in John Gill’s 1994 Queer Noises excoriates the Pet Shop Boys’ cowardice. Frustrated by what he called the “extraordinary state of affairs” in which Neil Tennant could keep mum about his sexuality because he hadn’t – according to their gay publicist – come out to his mum, Gill dismissed what he himself implicitly praised as the complexity with which Tennant and Chris Lowe “made pop semiotics so much a part of their career.” Silence equals death.

Thanks to the historic wrinkle of which irony is made, American pop critic Barry Walters understood Pet Shop Boys’ game and how to decode those signals. Walters, reviewing 1986’s Please, wrote, “Maybe I want the Pet Shop Boys to be something they’re not. Yet after countless tales of woe and sleaze from smalltown boys not glad to be gay but still selling a walk on the wild side, I can’t help but get excited by a man who wants to settle down and get down too.” (Note the unsubtle Bronski Beat allusion.) Somerville was glad to be gay; being persecuted for it, though, sucked. Gill recalls Somerville marching into the Covent Garden offices of the magazine for which Gill worked and boasting about being fined after pleading guilty on charges of gross indecency in Hyde Park with another man.

Released in 1984, the same year Time Out ran a feature headlined “Gay is Good,” and the AIDS epidemic hit its crisis moment, The Age of Consent presented itself as a political document – the sleeve included the ages of consent for homosexual intercourse around the world as if to say “this is the real politics of dancing.” Disco covers of “I Feel Love,” mediated by the New Pop gaze represent an attempt to create a narrative in which disco didn’t disappear so much as mutate into benign forms.

The singles are remarkable, the album less so. Bronski and Steinbachek don’t impose ridiculous demands on their machines. Rueful midtempo ponderosities dominate. Somerville’s falsetto often vaporizes his thin melodies. 1984, after all, was also the year of Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Relax,” an absurd compendium of sampled orgasms, real grunts, and a nominal band somewhere in the dense mix; it sounded and acted like gay sex. Producer Trevor Horn did a better job creating his own queer “Love to Love You, Baby” than Bronski Beat did queering its cover of “I Feel Love,” recast as a duet with Marc Almond.

To understand why “Smalltown Boy,” praised by Gill as “the gay ‘She’s Leaving Home,’” packed enough resonance to woo the straight audience, look to its gayest element. What distinguished Somerville from George Michael and Marc Almond brought him closer to Alison Moyet and Annie Lennox: a marriage between facility and androgyny (when I was ten the “run away, turn away” refrain sounded like Eurythmics). “Smalltown Boy” resonates as a landmark of teenage sexual grappling in the same way as “Hand in Glove,” substituting sequencers for guitars. Producer Mike Thorne explained in an interview for the 2000 album re-issue how thinking in terms of 12-inch singles gave the track its symphonic power: “I proposed combining the ‘blues’ version, treating it to a shorter structure and without the new middle section, and adding it as an integrated prelude to the extended dance section at full speed…The main synthesizer sequencer section was arranged to come in just as the acceleration was starting, the drums to hit just where the maximum tempo arrived.”

On second single “Why,” lust and frustration fuel a track that’s often on the verge of consuming itself. Opening with a blast of falsetto followed by sampled shattered glass, it’s a web of DX-7 spangles and horns, spinning faster and faster. Somerville rarely again sounded this angry. “You and me together fighting for our love,” he repeats through clenched teeth, making good on communitarian principles at last, aiming straight at an unnamed enemy that stigmatizes their behavior as the bodies pile up in mounds. His shrieks resound like orgasms, which is precisely the point; this was highest-NRG.

Record company wrangles and Somerville’s peripatetic nature led him to classically trained keyboardist Richard Coles, with whom he formed the Communards in 1985. Commercially the project worked – the Communards were even bigger than Bronski Beat, and actually made American inroads. But Somerville-Cole never lived up to their spectacularly promising moniker’s source: the name given to Paris revolutionaries whose refusal to accept terms of surrender after the Franco-Prussian war led to Napoleon III’s abdication and a brief socialist government in 1871. If ever there was a time when gay radicalism was needed, it was 1985, when Rock Hudson’s death made heterosexuals realize AIDS could kill them too. Listening to the eponymous 1986 album and 1987’s Red, it’s clear that the duo meant images like this as iconography, not calls to arms.

Modest in ambition and overheads, the Communards limited the radicalism to…more disco covers, which in 1986 represented as bold a reclamation as David Bowie and Bryan Ferry’s ’70s covers albums. First, though, was “Disenchanted,” a Bronski-esque midtempo thumper in which Somerville declares that “prejudice and ignorance we will overcome.” Delineating the locus of empathy as a young man tired of being kicked around, Somerville rides the melody without resorting to the trademark octave leaps, the ascending/descending keyboard bass and wisps of sampled woodwinds summoning a ’60s fiction of classical songwriting whose restraint adduced its timelessness. That’s the way it was supposed to work, especially if the privilege of sexuality insulated artists and listeners alike.

A synth pop act covering a Giorgio Moroder-helmed electronic piece was one thing; keeping the spirit of Thelma Houston’s biggest hit with falsetto was another. It’s to Cole and Somerville’s credit that they wanted “Don’t Leave Me This Way” to sound as huge and campy as possible. In the era of Parting Glances and My Beautiful Laundrette – films whose virtues centered on unlisping gay men situated in working class homes and businesses, shot in unwavering democratizing medium shot – Somerville dared to sing as if he were waving a mauve feather boa.

The video teases out some of the ironies: an ideal of twentysomething community trudging in trench coats and geometric haircuts under grey English skies to a factory party, the star a bloke who could have stepped out of that Stephen Frears film (Somerville’s buzz cut is formidable enough to cut steel). The positing of a counter-canon – the musicians are women – compensates for the thorough whitewashing administered to this Gamble-Huff chestnut. Interwoven into the revels are scenes in which the blond hunk Jimmy’s been winking at is chased and confronted by unsmiling apparatchiks. When it cuts back to the pneumatic dancing the track stops cold, although it had already come close: belting the killer “Set me free!” bit Somerville sounds like the straitjacket squeezed a bit tighter.

But every star needs a scene-stealing supporting player, here played by Sarah Jane Morris, harmonizing with the gusto that Cole’s synth horn blasts can’t manage. An odd, abashed moment; like Culture Club and Helen Terry, Vince Clarke and Alison Moyet, the singer lets a woman run away with his song. This was “uncomplicated, manipulative party music,” in Tom Ewing’s words: 1986’s biggest selling single, a #1 dance record and Top 40 hit in America.

Memories of sleaze suppressed by marketplace considerations buoy “So Cold the Night,” a tale of a man “shaking with nervous unrest,” to the accompaniment of a sad oboe, watching his would-be lover undress. If this recalls the Soft Cell of Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret, it should: Mike Thorne also produced the Communards.

Again, there’s a sense in which Somerville is measuring himself, reluctant to commit to these proficient, unspectacular songs. The most outré post-Bronski performance of his career required casting himself as a Sarah Jane Morris in Fine Young Cannibals’ cover of Elvis Presley’s “Suspicious Minds.” While Roland Gift quivers, a bullfrog on a hot plate, Somervillle whoops and darts, lissome in his understanding of what the role demands, queering the text so definitively that Gift’s dancing starts to look suspicious indeed. A year before Pet Shop Boys’ “Always on My Mind,” Somerville and the Cannibals had painted campier lipstick on Elvis.

Logic dictated a move to house. Cole’s piano solo in “Don’t Leave Me This Way” suggested the Communards’ virtuosity could have produced exciting tracks. But the program-by-numbers Red coasts at an Erasure level of proficiency, and by 1987 Erasure recorded friskier music. Somerville’s subsequent career was sad: he scored top 10s with nattering disco covers while the original music enjoyed middling success, as if fans were checking in an old friend.

He summoned his ability to startle on the title track to 1995’s Dare to Love: lounge rock with guitars. In a lower register with soul inflections that echoes, I don’t know, Mick Hucknall or something, Somerville plays a boy who demands that society accept his sexual relationship with a man. Those are the statements missing from much of Somerville’s output. The cumulative averageness of Bronski Beat and Communards speaks to the problem of asking the wrong questions. To ask “why” in 1984 was easier than explaining how gay men meet a friend for a pint, chat up each other in bars, participate in the banality of living. Positing ideas of living in gay England, energized by the liberating qualities of the electrodisco Somerville loved – that would’ve been transgressive. Hence the story of the smalltown boy, resonant because listeners were living the middle and end that Somerville didn’t write.