![]() ![]() "It was like Talking Heads, it was Simple Minds, it was anything but disco. But, above this bar, there was an organisation called Icebreakers, which was a kind of a support group for young gay men and lesbians, and everyone would go to this bar, but it wasn't disco that was being played," Somerville told RN's The Music Show in 2006. "About 1982 I was still listening to disco. The desperation and defiance in Somerville's voice echoes the hard won resilience of the many female vocalists he grew up idolising blended with his growing political ideals which found fertile ground in London's LGBT advocacy networks. ' Contempt in your eyes when I turn to kiss his lips, broken I lie, all my feelings denied, blood on your fist, can you tell me why?' 'Why?', dedicated to murdered gay playwright Drew Griffiths, is fuelled by outrage at homophobic prejudice, yet also a plea for compassion, plainly heard in lyrics like It was only through working on a low budget video project for a gay arts festival that Steinbachek heard Somerville singing and suggested they work on music together with Glaswegian keyboardist Steve Bronski (Steve Forrest). Plus, he loved synthesisers and beats too! More would come later but at the time it was pretty mind blowing."Įqually mind blowing is that Somerville, who grew up on a steady diet of 60s women singers and disco divas, never had any ambitions of being a singer himself. He was the first visibly gay pop artist singing about gay stuff I was really aware of. But, fuck it, he gets on that train and moves to the city and lives his honest life." It's obviously a difficult choice and you can hear the mournful tone in the singer's falsetto. "Then comes along a song that captures and beautifully expresses the feelings of a gay small town boy, honest and out, but aware of the struggles he was going to face. It would take a long time to deal with those feelings of shame, guilt and fear. AIDS had arrived and, to me, gay sex equalled death. "As a closeted gay at an all boys Catholic high school, I did my best to bloke it up and try to fit in," Mac tells Double J. It was a massively important moment for a young Paul Mac. We felt the boldness of that conviction instantly in singer Jimmy Somerville's pensive eyes and anguished cry that opens the debut album's mammoth hit single and its video for 'Smalltown Boy', a song that became a rallying call globally for anyone coming to terms with their sexual identities. "What else can we say? We don't want to hide anything because to hide something implies it's wrong. "We've always been the kind of people who are very honest about our sexuality," the band's Larry Steinbachek told Countdown in 1984. What these boys next door had in spades was a fiery spirit of rebellion, thorough sincerity as LGBT advocates, and their own proudly, openly homosexuality identities. ![]() There wasn't a bouffed hairdo, handlebar mo or even the faintest hint of eyeliner amongst these three fresh faced lads. Politics may have been staunchly conservative in the early-'80s, but there were huge social and cultural shifts happening in the UK.įrom the dolled up, sly winking Boy George, to the in-your-face debauchery of Frankie Goes to Hollywood, there was no shortage of acts flirting with gender lines and sexuality.īut if you were a kid from the suburbs and looking for something more relatable, you couldn't go past Bronski Beat. ![]()
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