“I didn’t set out to be a pop star,” singer Jimmy Somerville wrote in a rare public statement in 2018. “I set out to be a troublemaker. My purpose was truth. My emotions, my desires, my hopes, my sexuality, my life. I was given the ultimate platform for dissent.”
That platform was Bronski Beat, the synth-pop trio Somerville formed in 1983 with his flatmate musicians Steve Bronski and Larry Steinbachek. Somerville fulfilled his brief. The band’s 1984 debut album, The Age of Consent, released amid a hostile environment and devastating period for the country’s queer community, was both a protest and a rallying cry to a group under siege from Margaret Thatcher’s regressive government, the era’s prevalent homophobic attitudes and the developing Aids crisis.
With emotional, resonant songs about young queer life in 80s Britain, Bronski Beat carried a strong political message: the album artwork listed the age of consent for homosexuality in countries across Europe – often 16 compared to 21 in the UK – to highlight the inequality. The Age of Consent sold over a million copies worldwide. “It had a social impact for lots and lots of young gay people around the world,” says Colin Bell, who signed the band to London Records. “It has opened doors. I think it’s hard to underestimate the fact that it was the first record that did that.”
It was launched in May 1984 by one the greatest debut singles in British pop history. “Smalltown Boy” was not just synth-pop excellence – at once pulsing and yearning, elevated by Somerville’s searching falsetto – but a statement song. Somerville’s keenly detailed kitchen sink drama about a young gay man leaving his insular town to find his tribe in the big city held universal appeal, especially for an ostensibly autobiographical story: Somerville had moved to London from working-class northern Glasgow with the scars of homophobic abuse.
The members of Bronski Beat were originally flatmates (Photo: David Corio/Redferns)“There was such a universality to the theme of ‘Smalltown Boy,’” says Barney Ashton-Bullock, poet, author and Bronski Beat archivist. “Because every human being at some point has to leave its nest and go off and be whoever they’re meant to be.”
The song has echoed down the generations: it has become a go-to for film and TV producers wanting to soundtrack queer life and evoke 80s gay clubland, and has enjoyed a resurgence with Gen Z after it went viral on TikTok. “It is a sacred text for queer people who are involved in some way in politics or believe in a better world,” says singer and activist Tom Rasmussen, who discovered the track as a teen in the mid-90s. “It is in the fabric of my culture.”
On 24 May, Rasmussen takes part in a special live reimagining of The Age of Consent at London’s Southbank Centre, alongside Beth Ditto, David McAlmont, Bishi and The Pink Singers, Europe’s longest-running LGBTQ+ choir who sang on the original album. The show celebrates the men who made it: Bronski and Steinbachek both died in 2021, while Somerville no longer performs live or takes part in interviews.
Part of a scene that had roots at The Bell, a famous King’s Cross pub that became a hub of firebrand gay and left-wing political activism, Bronski Beat became a band almost by accident. Somerville had helped edit and soundtrack Framed Youth: The Revenge of the Teenage Perverts, a film funded by the Greater London Council to combat homophobia on the streets; his work on that, “Screaming”, was later fleshed out by Bronski and Steinbachek and morphed into a full musical project. Somerville stepped up as reluctant singer despite his incredible voice. “It was a means to propagate the politics,” Bell says. The first Bronski Beat gig at the London venue Heaven, as part of the September in the Pink gay and lesbian arts festival, set off an instant industry scramble to sign them, won by Bell and London Records.
The Age Of Consent – the album has sold over a million copies worldwide“We were the first [to show interest] but we were also the only record company that were prepared to promote the politics,” Bell says. Bell had previous experience managing The Tom Robinson Band, whose 1978 hit “(Sing if You’re) Glad to Be Gay” became the first outwardly queer anthem. “I knew that you could sell gay records to straight people.” Bell says they did tone down some aspects of the message. The classic video to “Smalltown Boy” sees Somerville watching a young man in Speedos dive into the local swimming pool; he is later beaten up after making a pass in the changing room before a policeman outs him to his parents. “Jimmy was originally caught in a men’s toilet and beaten up,” Bell says. “And we thought, ‘We’ll leave that one to George Michael.’ But nevertheless, the point was made.”
This was a totally different approach to queer identity in pop music. In 1984, most stars, such as George Michael and Elton John, remained closeted: Frankie Goes to Hollywood, led by the openly gay Holly Johnson, took an outlandish approach with an S&M-style and the controversial “Relax”. By contrast, Bronski Beat, Bell says, “brought a greater level of sophistication, talking about the actual problems of young gay people”.
“It’s important to note that although they weren’t the first gay pop stars, they certainly were the first gay band,” Ashton-Bullock says. “And one of their lasting legacies was to be the first band that made being homosexual men very ordinary and very mundane. There was no shock value of them singing about giving head or cruising. It was simply about men loving men. It was about emotion.”
Part of this was their style, or perhaps more accurately anti-style: a decidedly dressed-down, regular look of Doc Martens, Levi’s and bomber jackets. “Their clothing style was very chain store,” Ashton-Bullock says. “It was like what your gay uncle or your gay brother might be wearing. And that was their subversion. The subversiveness was in the ordinariness.”
Jimmy Somerville in 2016. He left Bronski Beat in 1985 (Photo: Lorne Thomson/Redferns)And yet, the politics – both queer and socialist – burned fiercely through the band’s every act. As well as comparing ages of consent, the album’s artwork featured the phone number to a gay helpline and a small pink triangle, a tribute to all the queer people killed by the Nazis. It was very much led by Somerville – “Steve and Larry were not so involved in the politics at all – they just went along with it,” Bell says – who supported groups like the CND and the striking miners. He was best friends with Mark Ashton, the gay activist and co-founder of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, portrayed in the 2014 film Pride.
“Jimmy was pretty hard-line politically,” Bell says. “He wasn’t dogmatic. He was a very funny guy. But you knew where he stood.” The track “Love and Money” – about Somerville’s experiences as a sex worker when he was homeless after first moving to London – declared that “money is the root of all evil”; “Junk” was a socialist takedown of consumerism – or, as Rasmussen puts it, “the corrosive nature of late-stage capitalism, and what it does to the brain and people’s desires and habits. The whole record is so bound up with anti-capitalism and the idea that our hard capitalist society can never, will never, be able to contain or hold or accept a queer person.”
Ashton-Bullock puts forward a theory that a trilogy of songs on The Age of Consent sum up the foundations of the album, and Somerville’s personal journey. The first is “Screaming”, actually the first track Somerville ever made as part of the Framed Youth soundtrack. “He put one of his own poems to not even music, to a beat box,” Ashton-Bullock says. “He’s always said [that song] ‘was just me, my beat box and my angst.’” The second is “Smalltown Boy” – “that the cure is leaving home”. And the third is the album’s other big single “Why?”, a Hi-NRG electro-disco classic.
“It’s a story about when the smalltown boys moved to the city,” explains Ashton-Bullock. “There’s danger everywhere.” The track was dedicated to playwright and activist Drew Griffiths, who was brutally murdered in a homophobic attack in London in 1984. “It’s asking the question, ‘Why are we having to suffer all this humiliation and animosity, even when we’ve come to the place of our dreams, the city where we can be with communities? Why?’”
A screenshot from ‘The Smalltown Boy’ video (Photo: Bronski Beat/YouTube)The original incarnation of Bronski Beat was short-lived; Somerville left in 1985 to form The Communards with the now Reverend Richard Coles. Cracks had appeared after Somerville declined an invitation to support Madonna on tour in America. “Jimmy thought it was a gimmick,” Bell says. “None of us necessarily understood her advocacy of gay rights.” Plus, Sommerville was always a homebody and not chasing financial gain. “He’s a singular pop star in that respect,” Ashton-Bullock says. “He had absolutely no motivation by money whatsoever.” Bronski and Steinbachek had also wanted to tone down the politics. “They were less committed to the socialist cause, and that was the ley line that caused the rupture,” Ashton-Bullock says.
Rasmussen sees the Southbank show as a means to continue and update the album’s messaging: they say solidarity should be extended to the trans community, who are seeing rights stripped back in the UK and beyond. “It’s political scapegoating. And it’s beyond tragic. It’s agonising for so many trans people, the inhumanity. Jimmy was so active back then when things were so bad, and that album reminds me that art can create unbelievable communities and resistance.”
Sommerville won’t take part at the Southbank: he has essentially retired from music and leads a private life, known for his aid work with homeless charities and soup kitchens. “That’s no surprise to me,” Bell says. “Jimmy never liked the limelight. I don’t think it’s an obligation to go out and sing and perform. I admire him for doing it, actually. I think he’s probably very happy.”
But The Age of Consent’s impact lives on more than 40 years later. “It’s an album of great integrity,” Bell says. “It provides a blueprint of acceptance,” Ashton-Bullock says. “And I think it behoves us to remember them as the brazen gay provocateurs that they were, and that pop music can serve that dual purpose of being politically radical and commercially successful.”
‘The Age of Consent’ live at the Southbank Centre is on Sunday
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