In 1984, the pulsing electronics and soft vocals of ‘Smalltown Boy’ became an anthem uniting gay men. A month later, an aggressive virus, HIV, was identified and a climate of panic and fear spread across the nation, marginalising an already ostracised community. Yet, out of this terror would come tenderness and 30 years later, the long road to gay equality would peak with the passing of same sex marriage.
Paul Flynn charts this astonishing pop cultural and societal U-turn via the milestones that effected change – from Manchester’s self-selection as Britain’s gay capital to the real-time romance of Elton John and David Furnish. Including candid interviews from major protagonists like Kylie, Russell T Davies, Will Young, Holly Johnson and Lord Chris Smith, as well as the relative unknown individuals crucial to the gay community, we see how an unlikely group fought for equality both front of stage and in the wings.
This is the story of Britain’s brothers, cousins and sons. Sometimes it is the story of their fathers and husbands. It is one of public outrage and personal loss, (not always legal) highs and the desperate lows, and a final collective victory as gay men were to be finally recognised, Good As You.
Paul Flynn has worked as a journalist for the last 23 years. He began writing at City Life magazine in Manchester and is currently the Senior Contributing Editor at Love, Features Director at Man About Town and a columnist for Attitude and Grazia. He has previously been a contributing editor and writer at i-D, Pop, Dazed, Fantastic Man, The Gentlewoman and GQ Style and has written for the Guardian and Observer, Sunday Express and the Sunday Times newspapers. He lives in London.
For Dave
I was sitting in the basement of a coffee shop in Soho, London, waiting for a celebrated and garlanded rent boy from the parish. It was 2010, and Greek Pete had been the subject of a recent documentary film, following a year in his life. I was to interview him for the Dutch gay magazine BUTT. A Chinese man was slumped on the next table with a seeping paper cup of tea beside him, sleeping for the duration of what turned out to be a quietly riveting conversation.
I learned so much that afternoon, most alarmingly about how much it costs to have someone killed, a tale Pete told in relation to a friend of his in the same profession who was worried for his safety, as he had a famous MP as a client and his story looked like it was about to go public (it never did). Pete had not long since given up his life in prostitution and was thinking about returning to the education he’d abandoned when he started his career. He’d started reading philosophy again and was knee-deep in Plato’s Republic, prompting something of an early-life crisis about the meaning of what he’d been doing, why and how it had all happened and what the consequences might turn out to be. ‘Crisis’ is probably the wrong word, actually. It was more of an evaluation. Pete was a deeply wise fellow. Young men who’ve seen a lot of life often are. ‘Part of coming to terms with being gay,’ he suggested at one point, ‘is accepting that all your previous belief systems collapse. You are not accepted in normal, functioning society. So what is my function? I took that question and I ran with it.’
In the 45 years of my lifetime so far Britain has fluctuated between the wildest extremes of rejection and acceptance when it comes to gay men. We’ve fallen in and out of fashion like hemlines. One minute it was clobbering us over the head with truncheons in public lavatories, the next it was Nick Grimshaw waking up the nation on Radio 1, Gok Wan talking about frocks on Channel 4, national social-media mourning for Pete Burns, apologies to pensioners for putting them in prison and musicals about Alan Turing at the Royal Opera House. This being Britain, I suppose we were always going to take the wonky route.
I was having a drink with a straight couple I’m very fond of in 2014, the year it looked like the equal-marriage bill would pass through parliament, the last piece of statute to cement equality for gay men and women. One of them asked how I felt about it. Under a broad lens, of course, it felt brilliant. Why wouldn’t it? Who wants to be unequal? But under a more microscopic glare it took me deep into the realms of a truth Pete hit on, one that I hadn’t thought about for a while – that strange transition that happens in a gay man of my age’s life, from feeling like an enemy of the state to being its friend. The thought lodged and I couldn’t rid myself of it. How weird was it to have lived a short life with these odd parentheses wrapped around it? To have a life’s experience right up to the point of becoming unquestionably middle-aged pivoting on the acceptance of people you’re never likely to meet and the temperature they set toward your kind of folk in law?
Look, I’ve lived a pretty gay life. I went into the manic testosterone recesses of male post-pubescence in 1984, the same year ‘Smalltown Boy’ and ‘Relax’ came out, and I actually clocked the major acts of social significance in both songs. They’re records I can’t hear now without feeling like the boy I once was from the vantage point of being the man I never thought I’d properly be allowed to be.
I went to my first gay club at 16. I met the first gay man I knew dying of AIDS at 17. Not unrelatedly, that year was the last I ever said ‘no’ to the question ‘are you gay?’ I had my first boyfriend, not a secret, an actual one I told friends about, at 18. I read all six volumes of Tales of the City at 19, in between taking full advantage of the strange transition of my home city turning from Madchester to Gunchester to Gaychester. I had my first appropriate boyfriend at 20. I went on holiday with him to an eastern European capital city for the first time at 21. Because the sensation of being in love with someone of the same sex who I actually wanted to tell the world about felt so unequivocally ace and so completely alien, I behaved absolutely appallingly to him. I went to Trade for the first time at 23. At 24, I met an airline pilot in a club who took me to New York for the first time two weeks later. We danced at 4am in a dungeon close to the Chelsea Piers to Junior Vasquez playing an 18-minute, pots-and-pans remix of ‘Get Your Hands Off My Man’, just because we could.
By the age of 25 I had written my first feature for national gay magazine Attitude, about the filming of the first episode of Queer As Folk. I was 27 when the first gay man I knew to kill himself did so. I met my family’s big musical hero Elton John at 30. I went to my first civil-partnership ceremony at 33. I got my first mortgage with a boyfriend that year, too. I interviewed the first Oscar-winning actor to play a gay role at 34. (It was Heath Ledger and he was absolutely amazing. I was offered ten minutes on the phone with him during the publicity run for Brokeback Mountain and I replaced the receiver an hour-and-a-half later).
I met Dave, the love of my life, at 36, walking up Upper Street, the site of Britain’s first ever Gay Pride march. I met my first gay MP at 37, introduced to me by the gentlemanly Newport West Labour minister with whom I share a name, Paul Flynn, in a bar at the House of Commons. I went to my first gay bar in Beijing at 39. When I was 42, a really lovely vicar who was marrying our friend Polly offered his Wesleyan chapel for the purposes of gay marriage if Dave and I ever wanted to avail ourselves of his services.
Because life is life and you forget about all this business the minute it’s happened, I hadn’t realised what a shared and useful vantage point gay men had been sitting at to watch the changing perception of themselves by the establishment from the inside, on the right side of it all. I’d not realised how much I had actually felt that startling move from terror to tenderness. Feeling like the enemy, like you are feared for who you are, is almost as weird as the first time you hear ‘homophobe’ being shouted as a playground insult while walking past a schoolyard (Glasgow, 2006). You attune to so much small detail when you live with other people’s presumptions of what you are, and forever fight hard to correct those misgivings.
I was on a job in New York the year after that conversation with my two friends, reading a story over breakfast in the New York Times Arts section about a book that had charted the progress in politics towards legal equality for LGBT people in America. I thought, You couldn’t really do that in Britain. Because we are such a small, strange and marvellous place, successive governments tend to follow the lead of popular culture, not the other way round. I thought about the things that Britain is best at, our national obsessions – nightclubs, pop music, football, telly, magazines, even elevating rent boys to film stars – and started to see a tale of love and hate, pride and prejudice, a microcosmic and macrocosmic journey from ‘Smalltown Boy’ to same-sex marriage. All life (and death) looked like it was in there.
To keep Good As You a felt experience, I can only tell that story how I saw it unfold. There are as many different versions, timeframes and perspectives on the national run-around from fear to friendliness in our lives as there are LGBT people who’ve lived them. The British gay story is indivisible from the Great British gay culture. The more I look at it and the heroes it has produced, the greater that culture becomes to me. This monumental shift didn’t occur because someone from above decided it would. Quite the reverse. Until I was 27 years old and a Labour government started affecting some genuine legal change, the state, schools, the Church and, in many people’s cases, the family made being the person you are as wilfully difficult as they possibly could for no reason besides what the neighbours might say. Britain’s big gay rollover happened because all of us made it happen, so that a little lad like Greek Pete coming of age in 2017 wouldn’t have to think that accepting who he is would mean having to redraw his entire moral boundaries ever again. That’s just the way it should be.
On 10 August 1984 I turned into a teenager. The kind of teenager I turned into was one who, each Sunday, would write down the charts in a stolen lined schoolbook from St Paul’s, an all-boys Catholic high school in Manchester’s crumbling garden suburb Wythenshawe. I was the first boy at the newsagent’s two doors down from the chippy on the parade of shops on Wendover Road every alternate Wednesday, 45p in hand, ready for the new issue of Smash Hits. I told my mum I didn’t want to join the Boy Scouts that year, firstly because I didn’t want to join the Boy Scouts, and secondly – and most importantly – because the scouts clashed with the essential Thursday night double bill of Top of the Pops and Fame. We didn’t yet have a video recorder, the exciting new machine that could change time and space on telly. All of that stuff, pop music, TV and the attendant cultural doors they opened into nightlife, fashion and art – everything that suburbia wasn’t – seemed so monumentally important back then. It was not the sort of business you’d give up being in full knowledge of in order to learn how to tie knots, light fires or pitch tents with the added, unspoken potential undercurrent of being molested by a light-fingered Akela who hadn’t reconciled his past with the thrilling reverberations of the modern world.
I suppose it was just a temporal accident that the year I turned teenage two pivotal gay figureheads appeared on Top of the Pops and the front cover of Smash Hits. But to a mind spiralling with the possibility of what life had to offer outside a grey, rainy world that pivoted on Saturday afternoons spent leafing through the vinyl at Wythenshawe library’s record department, it felt exactly like magic. There was a point somewhere between the angry, sad falsetto of Jimmy Somerville and the mischievous sex of Holly Johnson that felt like a perfect distillation of a gay adult life. There were other figures seeming to support their contention in more clandestine terms, not yet ready to talk transparently about their differences. But the clues were all there. Because Holly and Jimmy were doing the talking for everyone, some amazing men acted as a fantastical supporting cast to the gay protagonists. There was Morrissey, the Smiths’ singer, who opened his career with a record sleeve depicting a bare man’s buttocks and a B-side called ‘Handsome Devil’. Pet Shop Boys, whose first number one ‘West End Girls’ hid its light in plain sight on another B-side, ‘A Man Could Get Arrested’, a song about the lively gay cruising ground at London’s Brompton Cemetery. There was Pete Burns, the gothic gob-on-a-stick who had turned the plaintive gender-bending prettiness of Boy George and Marilyn into something like a brilliant, brave nightmare and appeared all the more amazing for it. Here was Freddie Mercury doing the hoovering in a wig, moustache and patent leather miniskirt. Black Britain had the smooth posturing of Andy Polaris singing ‘Love Is just a Great Pretender’ and Imagination’s Leee John gliding across the floor in a lamé jock strap. George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley parleyed something between friendship, brotherhood and unrequited love in Wham! With his Lady Diana hairdo and leather jacket it wasn’t hard to figure out why George’s guilty feet had no rhythm or what exactly the different corner was that he might eventually turn. Marc Almond was trailblazing an idea of self-invention and queerness that could shift from fragility to brutality in a couplet. Billy MacKenzie sang in a transcendent croon that brought Italian-opera levels of heartbreak to Thursdays. These were not figures at the margins of British culture. They were its home-grown stars.
Amid songs of men’s pretence, desire, denial, corruption and complicity, ‘Smalltown Boy’ and ‘Relax’ rose straight to the top. Seeing first Holly Johnson batting a balloon back from his face and grinding his hips to ‘Relax’, then Jimmy Somerville’s engagingly shy shuffle to ‘Smalltown Boy’ did something direct to me. It stopped me feeling alone. The reading materials and pictures in magazines only backed up what was perfectly obvious from their art. These were men who talked about the details of gay life with candour. They were unlocking doors. Within the loose narratives of both songs was everything I needed to shove me through the tricky terrain of pubescence in the often faltering knowledge that everything would probably turn out OK. That is how heroic meaningful pop music can be when it chimes at the right time with the right person.
At 12 years old in 1984 in south Manchester, I was used to hearing gay men being the butt of the joke. We couldn’t have sex legally until 21. Homosexuality had become weirdly merged in the suburban mindset with the old bloke whose house you were told to stay away from and strangers opening doors and asking kids if they wanted a lift in a rusting Ford Cortina. The thought of marrying was unimaginable unless as a shoddy compromise to keep you in the closet. The advent of AIDS added a particularly crucifying new twist to the tale of homosexuality equalling a tragic end. The early choice from where I was sitting, before Jimmy Somerville and Holly Johnson offered a warm embrace from the TV screen, looked something like this: don’t act on being gay and be unhappy, or act on it and end up beaten up, slagged off, laughed at and almost certainly dead.
Sometimes gay men becoming the butt of the joke was just because, yes, men who look and sound different can be funny, and sometimes just because British pop culture was in such a state of stilted infancy no one had worked out that, while often it’s fun to be cruel, cruelty hurts. It has consequences. I grew up on the other side of the Arndale Centre from Bernard Manning’s Embassy Club, a place that now feels like a Situationist joke but was part of the social climate in Manchester then whereby anything that was not white, straight and male was fodder to be torn apart. An imaginary line was drawn up between them and us, straight and gay. It didn’t make any sense to me.
No one knew then that this predominant British culture was extinguishing itself and that a decisive move for gay men, from being enemies to friends of the state, was beginning at full pelt. Bronski Beat and Frankie Goes to Hollywood felt like its rallying cry. They were my first hints that men didn’t have to stand passively watching the status quo, that we could fight back with intelligence, provocation and sincerity. Top of the Pops was teaching me the lessons a Catholic education couldn’t.
When the idea of homosexuality is inherently ridiculous in culture, a dialogue forms in your little teenage brain. It says, OK, I get it: those older men that don’t marry, that talk and walk funny, can’t throw a ball properly and might do things that will send them straight to hell do seem to be a bit scared of life; those men like John Inman and Larry Grayson, even their executive predecessors, the Carry On elder statesmen Kenneth Williams and Charles Hawtrey, they’re funny because they’re different. But what if you feel a bit different, too? Do you just get used to the idea of being laughed at? Is that it?
To my 12-year-old mind Jimmy Somerville and Holly Johnson did not look queer at all. They didn’t look fairyish, nancyish or anything like the punchline to an untold joke. They didn’t seem punishable or there to be laughed at. Hitting the cranial hotspots scrambling at every identity issue in adolescence, they looked like the thing I least expected gay men to look like. They looked brave.
Telling the truth is a hard business. One of them would likely not have been enough. If these songs, three listens in and glistening already like national anthems, had occupied my brain space in isolation they might have represented an anchorless life raft. Perhaps if each one of Holly and Jimmy’s alumni that kept their sexualities to themselves on Top of the Pops and in Smash Hits had come to be seen in their honest context rather than in the half-light of a closet door, well, that might have helped. But good pop fortune meant Holly and Jimmy arrived as a twin attack. They opened a conversation others wilfully shied away from, delivering the next generation, my generation, the full and complete confidence to be as good as you.
At 10am on Saturday 25 October 2014, Holly Johnson ordered a full English breakfast at the Hole in the Wall café in Liverpool. The singer was in high spirits. He swapped lively chatter with the waiter, a young, camp man who had yet to take off his coat for service. They exchanged glances in the way two gay men have grown accustomed to in twenty-first century Britain: an arch of the eyebrow that doubles as acknowledgement; a look that says ‘I know what you got up to last night’. Likely, the young waiter didn’t. Friday night had been a triumph for the singer. He played his first solo live show on home turf. At the Echo Arena he capitalised on the career promise that had suggested itself 30 years previously without ever quite coming to fruition. In 1984 Holly was part of a second wave of localised Liverpool pop hysteria, a countrywide moment that felt as if his five-piece gang Frankie Goes to Hollywood were the heirs apparent to Beatlemania. Perhaps the most astonishing detail of their rise was that the first Frankie single – the throbbing, emblematic, no-nonsense, million-selling number one ‘Relax’, a song that pulsed around the globe – was the sound of gay sex.
‘For people of our generation, it was a big issue,’ Holly says. ‘For the first seven years of my life it was illegal to be gay. Now it’s kind of a non-issue.’ No single public figure stands up to the 30-year shift in British gay equality, from 1984 to 2014, with quite the poignant accuracy of Holly. It was as if, with ‘Relax’, he delivered British gay men their Big Bang theory or their Adam and Eve parable; in tandem with the old playground taunt, this time it really was the tale of Adam and Steve. Holly’s life and work have traced the contours of the gay male transition in statute to legal parity with perfect, hard precision. In those 30 years he touched the highest highs and the traumatic lows of gay culture. Here, in Liverpool, his significance to the British gay graph played out transparently. As the hometown crowd moved as one to his fail-safe curtain call, the man who brought gay sex into the national living room in 1984 felt like its prodigal son and homecoming queen. It was hard not to see it as some kind of canonisation.
Satiated after eating, Holly left the Hole in the Wall and took a wander around some old haunts in the city. He walked up and down Bold Street and was stopped frequently in jolly recognition. He took a pit stop outside a local hairdresser’s where the aproned owner wanted to share a special word about the previous night’s engagement. He moved on past the Beatles incubation unit the Cavern Club, by the site of the old Probe Records toward Stanley Street, the home of the city’s visible gay village. He delightedly pointed out the rainbow motif, the freedom flag for gay equality, etched into the street sign. ‘It’s the only one in Britain with it on, you know,’ he noted.
Perhaps it was just coincidence that Holly’s first solo date in Liverpool was in the year that Britain achieved complete legal equality for gay men. Perhaps higher powers were at work. He asked a cleaner coming out of a grand Victorian doorway whether this was the entrance to Jody’s, the gay club whose walls had watched over his early rites of social passage and whose sound had seeped into his consciousness, forming the propulsive throb of ‘Relax’. ‘No, next door,’ the silver-haired lady answered. She had a smile for the city’s most infamous gay apostle.
‘When I first came out onto the town in Liverpool,’ he says, ‘I came out as a gay person.’ When he first arrived in the public consciousness he did it as a gay person, too. ‘From 14 onwards I was going to gay places like the Lisbon and Jody’s, seeing people, like Pete Burns, who were that little bit older than me. They had jobs at this hairdressing salon called A Cut Above the Rest. Jayne was the receptionist and Lynne was a hairdresser there.’ Jayne Casey and Holly were in the band Big in Japan, which served as his punkier dress rehearsal for Frankie Goes to Hollywood. Lynne Burns was, astonishingly, Pete’s wife. ‘They were all employed and looked amazing. I looked up to them all because I was still a schoolboy.’ Holly turned 14 in 1974: ‘David Bowie was at the height of his fame. I went to see him at the Empire when he was Ziggy Stardust. I was wearing make-up and dying my hair and getting my head kicked in for doing it.’ In the 30 years between his first number one record and first solo show on home turf, Holly Johnson has played out a tale befitting of the shifting sands of British gay culture. When Frankie first instructed the country to ‘Relax’, it was ready to do anything but.
William Johnson was born in Wavertree, Liverpool, in 1960, the son of a Catholic mother and Protestant father at a time when the difference mattered. ‘My mother’s family wouldn’t go to her wedding at the Anglican church. It’s hard to grasp now, living in this century, what it was like in the last one.’ As an infant in the sixties he was schooled in a regimented religious doctrine that demonised homosexuality. ‘I was a choir boy at St Mary’s church. The American-style evangelists of Billy Graham would come to the local park and proselytise, and I went through the whole “a man may not lay with another man” idea of being gay. The torture of it, the guilt, growing up in Liverpool with a mixture of Catholic and Protestant religions, added to that macho guilt, football as religion, the whole spectrum of all of that. Religion pissed on its own chips, as far as I was concerned.’
Young William’s God was instead anointed in the form of Andy Warhol. With his classmate Peter, who bore a passing enough resemblance to Bowie to get them both into an adult cinema on the London Road, he had his Damascene moment aged 14 watching the Warhol film Trash, then the scourge of polite society, inflaming the pages of the Daily Mirror on his mother’s kitchen table. It ignited an intuitive spark in him for the power of meaningful outrage: ‘The idea of controversy had an impression on me from being a young kid. It was the queerness of it, in every sense of the word. It seemed so exotic.’
In an unmarked personal baptism William renamed himself Holly, after Warhol’s favourite transvestite Factory star, Holly Woodlawn. By the time he was in gainful employment with Frankie ten years later, Holly was sufficiently schooled in the high alchemy of the intellectual shock manoeuvre to practise as he preached. ‘Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars was a template for something that scared the horses. It shook people’s sensibilities up,’ he remembers of Bowie putting his arm around guitarist Mick Ronson on Top of the Pops. In the interim, a new watermark had been set. ‘It wasn’t so easy after the Sex Pistols.’
Bow Wow Wow was Malcolm McLaren’s second management charge, after the Sex Pistols, calculated to hit Middle England and produce outrage. Their tactical marketing gamble was sex, not anarchy, and singer Annabella Lwin, then under the age of consent, had appeared naked on Bow Wow Wow’s first album cover. So Holly set himself a personal challenge: ‘I had a vision in my head that Frankie had to be more than Bow Wow Wow. It had to be more than a young girl naked on a record cover. It had to be something even more extreme.’ It had to look and feel like gay sex, a last taboo. ‘That’s when I called in the S&M, Tom of Finland, Mad Max 2 look for Frankie.’ As a fledgling art student who had abandoned his studies for pop stardom, Holly understood the arresting power of potent visual imagery.
Not long into its lifespan, a secondary party lent ‘Relax’ its first significant marketing boost to help it become one of the two gay national anthems to appear as if from nowhere in 1984. Sensing the genesis of the song’s key depiction, Radio 1’s breakfast show anchor, Mike Read, banned it on the grounds of lewdness. Mission accomplished. ‘It’s hormonal,’ says Holly. ‘It is its own sort of ejaculation, “Relax”. Without actually saying anything. It was just the swagger of it. There’d been female orgasms on record before … ’ Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg scored a hit with ‘Je T’aime … Moi Non Plus’ in the sixties, while Donna Summer did so with ‘Love to Love You Baby’ in the seventies; both featured an oral climax from the respective female singers. The eighties was ripe for gender reversal. ‘There’d never been a male orgasm in the charts before that.’
The populist sound of 1984 was a simple, audacious stroke of unequivocal, unapologetic gayness. ‘It came without a political edge. It said: This is the way it is. And if you don’t like it, so what? It didn’t come saying we’re fighting for the right to be this way. It didn’t ask for permission. Political proselytising was not my style. “Relax” was one big fuck you.’ Handily, the muscular physicality of ‘Relax’ had a political ally. ‘Oh,’ says Holly, ‘I was hyper aware of it being the year of “Smalltown Boy”, too.’
In 1983 young music-business executive Colin Bell was handed the reins of the underperforming label London Records. Colin had earned himself talking-point status in the music industry during the tail end of the seventies as the only openly gay man in it. Everyone in the business knew about the personal and professional relationship between Elton John and his manager, John Reid, but its physical and emotional side was kept deftly from public view, a judicious decision made on the assumption that being out of the closet at that time would damage sales beyond commercial repair. Indeed, on Valentine’s Day 1984, Elton married his recording engineer Renate Blauel in a ceremony in Sydney, an event that in retrospect looks mostly informed by the copious clouds of cocaine showered over it.
Colin Bell’s tenure at the helm of London Records did not start well. ‘For the first six months I hadn’t a fucking clue what I was doing,’ he recalls. ‘I remember having a Christmas break and thinking, If I don’t learn how to do this fucking job very quickly I’m going to get sacked.’ One of his earliest signings was Seona Dancing, a late-doors new romantic outfit fronted by the young Ricky Gervais. The future comedy star was, he says, ‘very camp in those days’. The roster of artists Colin inherited included Bananarama, three young women in whom he instantly isolated the potential to exploit a natural allegiance to the gay market, and at least one man he knew to be gay, Blancmange keyboard-player Stephen Luscombe. ‘I never really talked to Stephen about sexuality. It was understood that you wouldn’t back then. He was very quiet. He had a boyfriend and a very settled relationship, but he would not have felt comfortable talking about it. Nobody did then. For those who wanted to be in the closet I was a little bit too open.’
That Christmas, an invitation landed on his desk to see a new band play at the festive celebrations for the gay publishers Brilliance Books. ‘There’d been a photograph of them in Capital Gay,’ he says. ‘I’d picked up the magazine and it was captioned “Bronski Beat, gay group”.’ He recognised the three members of Bronski Beat – Jimmy Somerville, Steve Bronski, Larry Steinbachek – from a meeting he’d attended at the Ovalhouse, south London, held by Ken Livingstone, who was leader of the Greater London Council, to help found a pink arts festival for London.
Unable to attend the Brilliance Books party, Colin sent down an envoy from London Records’ A&R department: ‘He came in the next day and said, “You have to see this group. They are incredible. And gay.” I was a bit shocked because I’d assumed they’d be lousy.’ Colin went to see Bronski Beat support Tina Turner at the Venue, a converted cinema opposite Victoria Station. Turner was starting to enjoy her mid-life renaissance, coaxed out of voluntary musical retirement by another British three-piece electronic outfit, Heaven 17. ‘We heard “Smalltown Boy” for the first time and said, “It’s an absolute smash.” I played the cassette of it on loop in the car on the way home. This was about as obvious as a pop hit could get. There was this extraordinary voice, this extraordinary lyric, extremely moving, a combination of high-energy music and a pop song. There is something about that simple riff when it starts; it’s wistful, sad and yet a big dance song. We just had to sign this group.’
Because it was his story, too, Colin connected to the words of the song, the ‘somewhere over the rainbow’ story of gay everymen coming to the capital to escape the constrictive judgement of suburbia. ‘Most other record companies would not get that,’ he says. ‘I understood the gay media. I understood the gay clubs. I was in it. Bronski Beat saw that. I saw that. I was the only person in the record industry who was steeped in it and could talk to them in that language. I felt that we could market them exactly as they were, without trying to change them, as three south London skinheads who were gay and had a political agenda, without any glamorisation, in contrast with anything and everything else that was around. And I was prepared to do that and to make a point of doing that. No other record company was.’
Colin Bell was born in Belfast and attended Manchester University as a drama student in the early seventies. Gay Manchester then was unrecognisable from the gay Manchester of now. ‘There was a pub called Napoleons. There was a club called the Rembrandt. There was a gay sauna, and that was it. There was a tiny gay society at the university and it was so small that you hardly dared to go to the meetings in case anybody saw you. You felt pretty lonely. So people gravitated to London.’ Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars had not had quite the effect on the young Colin Bell that it did on the teenage Holly Johnson. ‘The impact of David Bowie saying he was bisexual was explosive on the one hand. On the other, it wasn’t quite believable. You always had the sense that this was somebody exploiting the idea of bisexuality for commercial gain, which of course it was, because there was nothing gay about David Bowie and never had been.’
Colin Bell’s gay pop epiphany, in which he recognised truthfulness and soul over aesthetics and artifice, was Elton John. During his gap year, Colin worked as a stage-door keeper at Manchester University. ‘Elton John came and did some concerts, and I think that’s what turned me on to the music industry. I watched these concerts and my mind was blown. I thought, What the fuck is this? Genius talent. Of course, they were not publicly gay.’
It was a position he understood back then. ‘Conventional wisdom in the music industry until Bronski Beat and Frankie Goes to Hollywood was, really, you have to keep it a secret. You couldn’t be openly gay or it would damage your career forever. That wisdom lasted right through until 1984.’
Bronski Beat was not Colin Bell’s first experience of handling gay pop stars who were out; he had already had his dress rehearsal for how to take a song like ‘Smalltown Boy’ to market unadorned. In 1976, Colin was introduced to another young performer, Tom Robinson: ‘I had read an interview with the only openly gay musician I happened to have heard of, which was him, and I said, “You must be Tom Robinson in Café Society?” He was incredibly flattered because no one had ever recognised him before.’
Mutual friends of the pair assumed that Tom and Colin would become lovers. ‘We tried on the first night and it lasted about five seconds before we collapsed into giggles. We went to bed and neither of us could or wanted to do it. Immediately after, we sat up all night talking.’ At the time Colin Bell was living with Carolyn Eadie. Michael Portillo was then her boyfriend, not yet her husband. The future Tory Party leadership candidate was a trusted part of Colin’s seventies London circle, one that mostly revolved around the Villiers Street gay nightclub Heaven. ‘There were extraordinary people around. You wouldn’t get this in London now, but it was where everybody interesting and gay went, all the time. Michael had his dalliances too, but was never gay. I admired him for talking about them publicly. But yes, Caroline was in the flat at the time of Tom and me, probably in the next room.’
Rather than becoming lovers, Colin took on the role of Tom’s manager. Tom had experienced a similar awakening to Holly Johnson on seeing the Sex Pistols. Tom and Colin would argue into the small hours about the quality of the band, with Tom insisting that they would become as big as the Beatles and Bell stating that their songs were simply incomparable. Tom Robinson saw in the Pistols a door creaking open. ‘He left Café Society and wanted to put together a new group that would be a politically orientated, openly gay punk group.’ Colin became convinced of Tom’s star potential after hearing him play two songs, ‘2-4-6-8 Motorway’ and its more contentious cousin ‘Glad to Be Gay’.
‘Everyone leaves Tom Robinson out of the story,’ says Holly Johnson on the subject of the pop cultural road to British gay equality. For Colin Bell, the omission is impossible. ‘The thing about managing Tom was that he gave you no option about being open about your sexuality,’ he says. Ironically, it was the ‘Glad to Be Gay’ author’s homosexuality that was the thornier issue than his manager’s. ‘Tom was conflicted about his sexuality at that time and I think always was. It was part of the reason he was a little bit more extreme. It was almost to compensate. In his case, being gay was partly rebellion against a very conventional family background. I didn’t have any of that. I was absolutely gay. No question about it.’
Colin Bell tried to get Tom signed as a gay punk act to the sound of repeatedly closing doors. Then Janet Street-Porter booked him for a show. ‘We went on, did “Glad to Be Gay”, and the next day every record company in London wanted to sign us,’ says Colin. ‘Glad to Be Gay’ was never allowed to be an A-side. ‘It would have been unimaginable to hear it played on the radio at that time. But it was an incredibly exciting period because Tom was the only gay artist around.’
The Tom Robinson Band had fleeting international significance. They went to America, where they played ‘Glad to Be Gay’ at the march on Washington for Harvey Milk, the San Francisco mayor who did more to change gay politics on a transatlantic political stage than anyone prior or since. ‘We met Allen Ginsberg there. There were extraordinary experiences.’ Robinson was later booed off a Gay Pride stage in London by a militant wing of the Gay Liberation Front when it was revealed that he was dating the woman he would go on to marry.
If his whistle had been whetted for a gay pop act to break through to the mainstream, Colin Bell was circumspect enough to recognise the tension of the times Bronski Beat, his next assignees, found themselves in. As a press officer at Phonogram Records in the early eighties he was charged with the marketing of a young electronic pop duo by the name of Soft Cell. ‘Marc Almond was 500 per cent in the closet,’ he says of the brittle, compelling frontman that would go on to number among the greatest British pop performers and songwriters of his age. ‘It wasn’t even a conversation. You couldn’t say to him, Are you gay? Marc exemplified many of the artists of the eighties. Within themselves, I don’t think they were ready to come out, let alone take all the risks of being public about it.’
In early eighties pop-marketing terminology, being gay was still considered to be the love that dare not speak its name. ‘He would sometimes come in with a hunky boyfriend,’ Colin says of Marc Almond. ‘I was sitting in my office once, and there was a bag on the floor with a tube of KY Jelly at the top of it. I don’t know what I was supposed to think.’ He would try to persuade Marc to do interviews in the gay press, with Gay Times or Gay News: ‘Not a chance. There was terrible anger between Soft Cell and the record company. There was a famous incident where they came in and smashed up all the gold discs in one of the offices.’ Colin Bell’s association with Soft Cell reached a tragicomic peak when a senior executive called his office to task the press officer with a new job. ‘I was sent down to Top of the Pops to try to make Soft Cell look more butch. I remember the managing director saying you’re the only one that can do it. Because I’m gay? Right.’
The fractious nature of dealing with the public issue of sexuality was not going to rear its head with Bronski Beat. ‘If you felt like it was going to have an effect on your life, if you wanted to be a musician and an artist and being openly gay was going to stop you reaching your potential, I personally felt people had the right to make that decision for themselves. Bronski Beat nailed themselves to the mast from the start and you had to admire that. There were risks.’
‘Smalltown Boy’ was released in June 1984. Colin, Jimmy, Larry and Steve personally escorted a 12-inch disc to Heaven, the pulsating seat of London gay disco bacchanalia, to hear it played for the first time to its native audience. The Saturday night DJ Ian Levine spun the record twice, in succession. ‘It was maybe one of the most exciting nights we had, just hearing that record on a Saturday night in that place. Levine must have been aware of it and we must have set it up with him.’ Its first play on Radio 1 was by the DJ Peter Powell, who doubled his support of the group by airing the video on Oxford Road Show, the Friday night pop portal beamed out of the BBC studios on Oxford Road, Manchester.
The video for ‘Smalltown Boy’ was directed by Bernard Rose, who six months earlier had done the same on the video for ‘Relax’. He was effectively charged with visualising the outer and inner lives of British gay men in 1984. ‘The first video storyboard for “Smalltown Boy” was about somebody cottaging and being beaten up,’ says Colin. He took an aggregate of the power of an openly gay pop act in 1984 against how far the elasticity of public acceptance would stretch: ‘That, we couldn’t get away with. We had to do it another way. And we came up with the idea of replacing the toilet with a swimming pool. We implied the beating up but didn’t show it. So it could be a lonely boy who got beaten up in the big city by some rough types. There were his three mates, and what kind of relationship they had was all implied.’ He recognised a similar collusion and blurring of the lines in the way that ‘Relax’ was marketed. ‘We were aware that you had to be able to read music this transparent in two ways. You had to be able to see it for what it was, but you had to be able to explain it another way. It’s all about drawing people in and allowing them to ignore it if they want to. The thing about “Relax” was that, although we can say it was about gay sexuality, it also was just about male sexuality. You could read it two ways.’
‘Smalltown Boy’ gathered popularity momentum with a speed that came as a surprise even to Colin Bell: ‘The record just exploded. You couldn’t stop it. Straight up the charts, and worldwide, except for America where we nearly broke it but didn’t quite. We got it to number 40 in the charts there and then Madonna invited Bronski Beat to open for her on her Virgin tour. Jimmy wouldn’t do it. He didn’t like Madonna. That was the start of the break-up of the band because Larry and Steve, who were less political and wanted the music career, wanted to tour with her.’ In the event, ‘Smalltown Boy’ reached number three in the British charts. It was held off number one, in a sublime retrospective moment of British gay social history, by Wham!’s ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go’ and Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s ‘Two Tribes’. According to Colin, Jimmy Somerville’s primary opposition to Madonna was one thing: ‘Overt heterosexuality.’
For men of a certain age and persuasion in 1984, getting to open the door of your first Top of the Pops dressing room at the BBC’s Broadcasting House represented the pinnacle of suburban ambition. It was the golden carriage clock your parents had spent a lifetime toiling toward in factories, shipyards, hospitals, schools, mines, typing pools, shops, hotels and faceless office blocks. Pop was the other way: the great, glamorous working-class get-out clause. With certainty, purpose and vanity, the pouters, preeners and perverts claimed pop as their own that year.
George Orwell was wrong about 1984. Public surveillance was still in its infancy. The digital age felt like something even the popular technology programme Tomorrow’s World could not cook up. Big Brother wouldn’t steal the crown from Top of the Pops as TV’s definitive national youth portal for another 15 years. The realities of screen culture for at least half an hour every week would have made Orwell blush. Top of the Pops in 1984 was the church of the big gay pop dream. It was the place to show off and show out, a stage of totemic personal significance. For the aspiring pop star with something to say for himself, a wardrobe to wow with, a pose to strike, a gong to bang and a song to sing, being on Top of the Pops meant he’d made it.
Being introduced by a bloke off Radio 1 with a blond tint and pastel leisurewear while surrounded by screaming teenage girls under neon strip-lighting, miming to a backing track with your buddies, worrying about what to wear and going out to lap up the affirmation and adulation afterwards? This was it. For the generation that had sat in their living rooms in the drizzly back end of nowhere thrilling to the heroes that passed through their telly every Thursday at 7.30pm, stepping into the footsteps of their forebears was the first moment in turning from loser to legend.
For the gay wing of this thrilling postmodern cabal, both in and out of the closet, it was about divesting your evident otherness of its shame and turning it into a talking point. In the 17 years since the Sexual Offences Act was drafted, legalising male homosexuality in England and Wales, a generation had come boldly of age, refusing to be cowed by the conventional understanding of how the Great British angry young man dressed and spoke, at which angle his wrist pivoted and, more fundamentally, what he got up to in bed. These men had discovered the muscle and flounce of disco, heard Bowie flirt with bisexuality, lived through punk and steel-plated themselves to the first five years of Margaret Thatcher’s government.
‘Jimmy didn’t like us back then,’ says Holly Johnson about Jimmy Somerville. ‘But no one liked anyone. Boy George wrote to Sounds newspaper saying we gave gay people a bad name, while he was still saying that he’d rather have a cup of tea than sex. We’d be in the same green room at Tyne Tees Television in Newcastle to perform on The Tube: Bronski Beat on one side and us on the other. Getting daggers. I refused to engage with Morrissey when he hung around me at Top of the Pops with his hearing aid in, because we were it, I’m afraid.’
‘We were very aware of Boy George,’ says Colin Bell, ‘because George was having hits at the same time as Bronski Beat and they were eyeing each other warily. I think George was rather in awe of Jimmy, and Jimmy rather despised George. I remember going to the cinema with Bronski Beat one night to see some film, and Marilyn and George were two rows behind us and each group was almost yelling abuse at each other. It was most bizarre. There were jealousies involved.’
It may just have been serendipity that the two national anthems of the UK gay experience were released barely six months apart. Perhaps it was lucky timing that they got in the year before the Band Aid behemoth changed pop stars forever, turning them surreptitiously from heroes to role models and divesting them of the urge to fight one another for supremacy, and instead dumping them all in this together. But Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s ‘Relax’ and Bronski Beat’s ‘Smalltown Boy’ presented a satisfactory solution to rendering both the loins and emotions of gay men for full public display. Britain could not understand the interior and exterior life of a properly unprecedented generation before it had been shown it. One had the brains, the other the brawn. These simple three-minute pop songs flung a door wide open, without apology. Watching all of this play out from a south Manchester sofa at the age of 12 could not have been any more scintillating.
At London Records one of Colin Bell’s first jobs was to take the visiting San Francisco superstar and bellwether of American gay counterculture Sylvester on a promotional tour for his sensational new single, ‘Do You Wanna Funk’. Sylvester was ground zero for global gay culture, embodying every beautiful, soulful strand of otherness that would come to be explored by the eighties pop canon. There was something in the voice of the maestro that felt unleashed, unhinged and connected to the cerebral cortex of gayness. Sylvester had pounded through with his liberation anthem ‘(You Make Me Feel) Mighty Real’, but his canon was dotted with every shade on the disco, soul, electro and gospel spectrum and acted as a gateway drug into mythological avenues of the American gay experience. He connected to Harvey Milk’s citywide revolution and martyrdom in San Francisco, through his producer Patrick Cowley to the glorious hedonism going on at the EndUp nightclub, and to the old performance art troupe the Cockettes, who would come to cast a long shadow over the cabaret wing of Britain’s alternative gay culture.
‘There’s a very sad story about that trip, actually,’ Colin recalls now. ‘Sylvester came over to do some shows, and I got this terribly sad letter from some guy who had slept with one of Sylvester’s entourage in Newcastle. He had contracted HIV and was asking if I could put him in touch with him. Awful. Because, of course, it was all over San Francisco. I thought, Oh my God. I put him in touch directly and didn’t get involved. What could you do?’
Fabulous SylvesterFrancisco