Last Saturday night, Ian Wade was playing records at the storied London gay night, Duckie. “I thought, I’ll play Smalltown Boy, which I’d never played there before,” he says. “It’s Pride month, it’s a gay club, you know? Sod it, let’s go for it.”
The reaction was at first familiar to Wade, who is about to publish his first book, 1984: The Year Pop Went Queer, a loving compendium of what happened during the pinkest 12-month patch of pop history. A group of bearded fiftysomethings, men of an age to have had their lives upended by Bronski Beat’s evergreen classic, began singing along, edging their way towards the centre of the dancefloor. A warming result.
Smalltown Boy documents in empathetic, kitchen-sink detail the feelings of rejecting one archaic value system and moving to the big gay city to find your own. The choirboy falsetto of singer Jimmy Somerville, set against the chiming electronics of the musical moment, have resisted fossilisation. A special chord is always struck, a notable heartstring plucked by Smalltown Boy.
This year, Smalltown Boy turned 40. In the decades since its release, the song has become as indivisible from the story of British gay equality as the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde, the murder of Joe Orton, the work of Derek Jarman or the agit-prop politics of Peter Tatchell. Smalltown Boy can still make reasonable claims to being the British national anthem of gay. “It’s an extraordinary record,” says Colin Bell, the former music industry executive who signed Bronski Beat to London Records. “It has a sense of joyous melancholy. It’s so haunting. The lyrics are rather beautiful, poetic almost, encapsulating the sadness of leaving home with hopes for your future. I can’t think of another record I signed across my entire career that I’m as proud of.”
As the record found sure footing on the Duckie dancefloor, Wade noticed a demographic shift. “Suddenly, there’s this whole younger generation up there, really living it, going for it,” he says. “I suppose it’s a folk song in a way, how it gets passed through the years. It’s endured. However free, however seen you might feel [in 2024], there are still some kids who are terrified in their own homes. For the teenager wondering whether they’ll get fucked or stabbed by the person they chose to look at across the classroom, Smalltown Boy still means something.”
On the occasion of its 40th birthday, Smalltown Boy has become the unlikely beneficiary of TikTok virality, a popularity spike nobody saw coming. The song’s inclusion on film and TV soundtracks is screen shorthand for being in a gay club, but a dance challenge across suburban America on socials, with parents showing their kids how they used to dance in the 1980s, was never on the bingo card for Smalltown Boy’s incredible tenacity and resilience.
Capitalising on its renaissance, a fresh brace of remixes have been issued. A poster campaign of the lyrics has spread across London, forming a touching citywide backcloth to the cheap rainbow tat flogged at supermarkets this Pride weekend. Even in a mostly liberated age, “the love that you need will never be found at home” looks as potent written down in black and white as it did back in 1984, a bluff rebuke to the “family values” deployed to demonise homosexuality when it was first released.
“Our history can be glossed over, reduced to soundbites,” says Wade, “but groundbreaking things happened. The sound of pop music in the 80s was part of that. We were so lucky to have those songs at exactly the right point.”
As Bell points out, at one point in 1984, the top three British singles were by George Michael (then closeted), Frankie Goes to Hollywood (fronted by two brilliant, sexy gay provocateurs to whom the closet was personal anathema) and Bronski Beat, three politically driven performers dressed in civvies, catalysing a moment in British gay sociology with a steady, metronomic and meaningful pulse. Their thoughts and movements were documented with frank alacrity on the pages of Smash Hits.
Wade says that during the research for his book, he came across features in the magazine on Hi-NRG, the music of gay clubs, a “what’s in your pocket” question to Holly Johnson, to which the Frankie singer replied “a receipt from [London gay sex shop] Expectations”, and a slanging match between Marilyn, Boy George, Pete Burns and Tasty Tim, titled “May the best man win”. “Holly Johnson was wearing a yellow hankie out of his back pocket on Top Of The Pops,” Wade notes. San Francisco gay dress code for golden showers. “You can put together a world from this stuff that will see you through the rest of your life. You’re thrown out of the expectation of heterosexuality.” The writer turned 15 in 1984. “Why am I friends with girls? Why don’t I play football? Oh.”
Bell says he had no issue with marketing Smalltown Boy as a gay record, even against the uniform establishment hostility of 1984. “That was the point of the record,” he says, “and the point of Bronski Beat. I knew a rock star being gay did not have to be an issue.”
Despite this, he says it was his idea to tone down some of the original ideas for Bronski Beat’s public presentation: “I take full responsibility for that. That was the tension between me and Jimmy. The video was originally supposed to be based around a cottaging scene. I’m afraid I said ‘no’ to that.” In the event, the video was filmed at St George’s leisure centre, a municipal swimming baths on the road to Shadwell, east London. Somerville stares longingly at a man in his Speedos, Thatcher’s Britain’s pre-emptive Tom Daley moment.
“That video is still incredible,” saysWade. “It’s like a Mike Leigh or Ken Loach film.” It would take another 14 years, until George Michael’s Outside, for gay public toilet cruising to find its noble expression in the British pop video. Even longer for another titan of 80s British pop with a specialty for the nuances of gay repression, Pet Shop Boys, to include a cottaging scene in the video for their recent single, Loneliness. “None of that could’ve happened if we hadn’t done this before,” says Bell. “Somebody had to be first.” It doesn’t come as a surprise to Bell that Smalltown Boy has once again found an exponentially diffused audience on TikTok in 2024. It is the song that refuses to take root as a relic of its era. “Smalltown Boy captures your soul, gives you a three-minute experience that is ...life enhancing,” he says. “The thing that’s been so moving, for Jimmy particularly, is the number of people out there who saw that video and told him it changed their lives.”
Bell was present the first time Smalltown Boy was played in a gay nightclub. “We’d been in the studio,” he explains, “and I had two acetates of the 12-inch mix and we decided to go down to Heaven and play it. We were very nervous. I gave it to [Heaven’s resident DJ] Ian Levine and he played it. Nobody had ever heard it before. At first, the audience slowed down a little. You could hear them listening to what the record said. The response was extraordinary. So he played it again.” A gay cultural avalanche had launched. “It is a little bit of history, isn’t it?”
