The Age of Consent (Bonus Tracks) [1996 Remaster]

To watch Britain’s music program “Top of the Pops” in 1984 was to witness masculinity wipe off the last of the spit and sawdust. You had blond, black-gloved geeks like Nik Kershaw and Howard Jones, bouffy matriarchs Queen and Ozzy Osbourne, white-teethed go-go boys Wham!, leathered-up imps Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and slinky queen Boy George—not a donkey jacket between them. When Bronski Beat made their “TOTP” debut on June 7, 1984, they were radical because they looked so normal—behold 22-year-old singer Jimmy Somerville’s green polo shirt and severe army-issue haircut. The last thing anyone would have expected from Somerville’s cartoon good-boy face was a diva-strength lament for runaway gay youth. Add in Steve Bronski and Larry Steinbachek’s HI-NRG rhythms and desperately forlorn keyboard motif, and their debut single “Smalltown Boy” was kissed with the melancholy transcendence of its disco forebears: Sylvester in suburbia. It was perfect.

Somerville looked awkward on that “TOTP” appearance, singing live and holding his arms stiff until a tentative boogie during the reprise. But when Bronski returned to perform their second single “Why?” that September, they knew what to do. Most acts still lip-synched on “TOTP,” so this time Somerville focused on performing, rather than sustaining his fierce cri de coeur about pride in the face of a hate crime. With the camera at crotch height, he seduced viewers at home and pointed saucily down the lens, perhaps emboldened by the band’s discovery of the BBC’s alleged basement glory hole toilets, which Bronski claimed to have visited whenever they played “TOTP.” The moment hasn’t been memorialized the same way as Bowie’s iconic visit on the show 12 years earlier, but it had to be a “Starman” revelation for at least a few hundred closeted British kids who couldn’t relate to the more outlandish subversions of masculinity rampaging elsewhere on the show.

British pop had never been queerer. In January 1984, Frankie’s “Relax” had been yanked off air by a BBC Radio 1 DJ who suddenly realized what it was about. Receptive fans yearning for signals in the dark were wise to the implications of the Smiths’ “Hand in Glove,” released a year earlier. But there had never been a band as plainspoken about their sexuality and its political ramifications as Bronski Beat, which SPIN deemed “perhaps the first real gay group in the history of pop.”

By age 23, Jimmy Somerville had been born three times: In Ruchill, Glasgow, to parents who were actually quite understanding about their son’s sexuality, given the era; in a local club called Shuffles, dancing alone to Donna Summer’s A Love Trilogy as a 15-year-old, a pilgrimage that made him so nervous he vomited on the bus there, and in 1979, when, fed up of Scotland’s limited gay scene, he bought a one-way ticket to London. He sold sex around Piccadilly Station and joined LGBTQ advocacy groups where he met fellow Glaswegian Steve Bronski and Hackney’s Larry Steinbachek, all working-class gay men. In 1982, they participated in the London Lesbian and Gay Youth Video Project’s documentary about Londoners’ perceptions of homosexuality. Framed Youth: Revenge of the Teenage Perverts needed a soundtrack, but as the group couldn’t afford licensing fees, Somerville recorded a short piece about how society’s judgement, his desire, and confusion made him want to scream. He never actually screams on the raw, mumbled track—which sounds almost like a Gavin Bryars piece—but it unlocked something inside him, and his new friends suggested that they should give this music thing a go.

Named as a riff on Roxy Music, Bronski Beat played their first gig at the gay benefit September in the Pink in fall 1983, and performed just eight more times before being signed by London Records in 1984. Producer Trevor Horn and journalist Paul Morley’s Zang Tuum Tumb had also offered them the treatment that Frankie Goes to Hollywood got when Bronski said no. “Morley’s idea was to have us wear and market t-shirts that basically said that we were gay, because they’d have words like ‘QUEER’ or ‘POOF’ printed on them,” said Somerville, who was uninterested in controversy or reductiveness. For Bronski Beat, singing candidly about their sexuality wasn’t a means of provocation, but drawing attention to the still-very-real oppression that pervaded public life under Margaret Thatcher’s government. They valued activism over agitprop, and knew that the personal was political, qualities that made their first two singles their most urgent and enduring.

”Smalltown Boy” remains a perfect song. It is nimble and crushing, forlorn and relieved, frail yet determined. In just a few lines, Somerville sketches the plight of the young queer kid in suburbia, beaten up by bullies but refusing to cry in front of them; concerned about how his mother will respond to his disappearance, but certain that he has to save himself first. Steinbachek and Bronski briefly slow the tempo, trapping the listener in the sense of purgatory that Somerville distills, but then add a hand-slapped congo that hits like a rush of adrenaline as a new life comes into view. Although Somerville’s liberation is palpable, he’s not interested in happy endings: The song ends with him repeating the line about leaving in the morning “with everything you own in a little black case,” acknowledging the thousands of young people who would make the very same journey. The inner groove of the 12-inch was etched with the number of the London Gay Switchboard.

If “Smalltown Boy” is about running away, then “Why?” is about firmly standing your ground. It’s Bronski Beat’s response to the proposed Police and Criminal Evidence Bill of 1984, the “sus law” that would give police enhanced powers to apprehend anyone they deemed to be disturbing the peace. Young black men were arrested simply for driving cars (to name just one absurd example), and gay men for embracing in public. Somerville casts the gaze that he would later wield on “TOTP” in two directions, at the perpetrators of hate crimes and criminalization and his lover and brothers in arms. The two sides meet, for a second, in a single glorious line: “Never feel guilty, never give in,” he purrs, a lustful celebration of defiance and desire. Bold horns mirror his raunchy delivery, a whirlwind of ricocheting marimba channeling his exhilaration. But nothing in Steinbachek and Bronski’s arsenal is any match for Somerville’s piercing scream, which demands “WHY?” as if sheer force could elicit the answer. Although he was a natural falsetto, you can hear every nerve clenched in the service of his protest.

According to the Police and Criminal Evidence Bill, Britain’s outdated consent laws, and the impending Section 28 legislation (which forbid the so-called “promotion” of homosexuality in schools), the simple act of loving in public made gay men into potential aggressors. So Somerville turned his voice into a weapon, a weedy Scottish boy’s superpower that made him seem 100-feet tall. He’s said that his only vocal training was singing along to Donna Summer and Sylvester records. Apparently, this was strong enough to turn a short redhead from Glasgow into a bona fide diva, who recognized the transgressive potential of reclaiming this style from the female singers who made gay culture unthreatening to the mainstream. Not that it stopped Bronski Beat from crashing it, too: “Why?” peaked at Number 6 in the UK, and “Smalltown Boy” at Number 3.

Given Somerville’s vocal distinction, it’s strange that Bronski Beat’s subsequent debut, The Age of Consent, lacks more of their trailblazing belters. It’s a strange, small record, its curious choice of covers and influences, and sledgehammer politics, speaking to either an unrealized concept that lingers just out of reach, or a hasty race to capitalize on their singles. There’s nothing else like “Smalltown Boy” or “Why?” here; the closest to their personal tumult is “Screaming,” a finished version of Somerville’s song for Revenge of the Teenage Perverts. It’s gloomy and art-damaged, primal therapy rather than pop statement, and stretches the limits of Bronski and Steinbachek’s innovation as producers.

Britain’s queer activists of the 1980s recognized that their fight had to be intersectional, understanding the common oppression between their community and people of color under the sus laws, and Thatcher’s determination to villainize LGBTQ people and striking miners alike. Bronski Beat were standard-bearers for these causes, speaking out in interviews, performing at benefits, and listing international ages of consent in their record’s liner notes to show how backwards Britain was. But they were far less successful at putting them into song on the rest of the album, where they seemed to forget the personal intimacy that gave their singles such insurrectionist stake, opting instead for some surprisingly bland sloganeering.

The shadowy, muted “No More War” lacks all the defiance of “Why?” and meekly requests an end to conflict—which one is unclear—by asking “please,” a word that has no place in a protest song. The production of “Junk” is overly dramatic compared to its obvious message linking drugs, television, and processed food, and sounds sillier still when a sample of an American dog food commercial pipes in, promising “beefy bits and bits of egg.” There’s more aggression in “Love and Money,” assets that Somerville ties directly to pain and exploitation. Again, it’s fiercely simple, but Steinbachek and Bronski’s sultry backing makes the allure of these toxic quantities plain, and Somerville’s experiences with sex as currency for survival darken its hue.

More subversive are Bronski Beat’s songs about desire, each delivered in a distinct feminine mode. “Ain’t Necessarily So” is a cover of the Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess song about doubting the bible—the implication here obviously being its statements on homosexuality—reinterpreted as a slice of sophisticated percolation more akin to fellow 1984 breakout star Sade than gritty British synth-pop. “Heatwave” finds Somerville playing at being Peggy Lee (another of his childhood obsessions), updating “Fever” as a steamy come-on fit for the beaches of Fire Island or Venice. It sounds a million miles from London’s dank clubs and Glasgow’s damp streets, a sheer fantasy that makes Somerville an agent of lust, rejecting yearning diva worship with its nose pressed up against the glass.

The Age of Consent ends with Somerville’s ultimate act of centering gay desire, with covers of Donna Summer’s “Need a Man Blues” and “I Feel Love.” A year earlier, Summer, a born-again Christian, had allegedly denounced her mammoth gay fanbase at a gig in Atlantic City. She would dispute this, but the damage was already done, and gay fans rejected her right back. Bronski Beat got flack for doing these songs, but described their covers as an act of reclamation, a two-fingers-up at a star who seemed to think she could sanitize her own legacy. The symbolism, however, is stronger than the covers themselves.

Two copper-bottomed bangers aside, perhaps that’s also true of Bronski Beat. The Age of Consent was released in the UK on October 15, 1984, and would be their only album to feature the original line-up. An unexplained fallout led Somerville to leave the band in early 1985 and form the Communards with Richard Coles. We can lament the missed opportunity for them to develop their sound together: Steinbachek and Bronski becoming more sophisticated producers, Somerville coming into his power as a vocalist and spokesman alongside his formative allies. But despite the roughness of their debut, they more than fulfilled their function. Bronski Beat formed to play a benefit, raising money for LGBTQ charities’ defense costs. Over the original trio’s year in the public eye, they gave queer kids who were alienated by society and extroverts alike their own subtle form of armor.