As a teenager, Paul Burston remembers going to Crossways, his local nightclub in Bridgend, South Wales. ‘It’s long gone now,’ he says. ‘You had to cross the motorway to get to it. Hence the name.’ One night he heard two records in quick succession, moulded from the exciting gay disco sub-genre, ‘high energy’. Bronski Beat’s ‘Why?’ opens with Jimmy Somerville singing the unequivocal line, ‘Contempt in your eyes /As I turn to kiss his lips’. In Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s ‘Two Tribes’, Holly Johnson poses a learned question: ‘Are we living in a world where sex and horror are the new gods?’
It was 1984. Maybe we were. Something celestial and elemental stirred in the young Burston. ‘I remember distinctly feeling that there was more to this music than the life I was living.’ Like many working-class gay boys growing up in the regions, he had a natural tenderness toward disco, at a time when suburban mums might worry about these things in their adolescent sons. ‘This music was like that, but with added testosterone. It came from the groin.’
