Bronski Beat and the Ecstasy of Defiance: The Age of Consent at 40

There is, in the East London district of Hackney, a monthly club night called Beauty and the Beat, which takes place inside an old public bath house and attracts an eclectic, albeit broadly leftish, sort of crowd. The setting is lo-fi, shabby in a pleasant way, where, as in the rural community center I used to frequent as a small child, the wooden floors are visibly worn from years of use and a faint trace of disinfectant is perpetually on the air. The music selection, while always danceable, can be obscure, but the DJs are careful to avoid alienating their audience by spinning a hit or two when they’re needed.

I was alone the first time I visited, still finding my place in London after moving there a year or so beforehand, and the vibe I found was unpretentious, welcoming to anyone who isn’t outwardly a dick. For hours I danced happily alone on the floor, occasionally making small talk with similarly sweaty, flush-cheeked people at the bar, but fundamentally there to bop and drink without making the effort to chat. As the early morning set in and the dance floor thinned, there was time left for one last burst of energy from the crowd, one more moment of rippling ecstasy, so the DJ dropped the needle on a record which, upon its first whisper out the speakers, was recognized by all. Bodies, which had begun to wilt, bloomed once again. Energies were reconstituted. Hands were raised and smiles formed, as rusty larynxes strained to match the soaring falsetto as it began:

To your soul
To your soul
Cryyy-ah-ay

Big, booming snares; bass pulsing through bodies; and that wailing, anguished voice, compelling all us strangers to fall into sync. “Smalltown Boy” is just one of those songs, known by everyone on that dance floor, whether they were old enough to remember its release 40 or so years previous or young enough to have never lived a life without it. Bronski Beat’s first and greatest hit is a work of contrasts: pointedly of its time, but bearing the inarguable quality of timelessness; cold and electronic, but propelled by a story so devastatingly human; sad and painful, but uplifting and bearing within it a promise of hope.

The song was born in London, but not the version of the city I know today. It was a different place back in the early ‘80s, when Jimmy Somerville, the small-town boy with the inimitable falsetto, arrived from Glasgow as a fresh-faced 19-year-old, searching for a life in which he could be himself. Where today newly arrived creative types financially cripple themselves within the trap of London’s pyrexial rental market, the artists and weirdos of the early ‘80s often lived within the city’s squatting scene, which is where Somerville himself ended up. He quickly became part of London’s gay culture and its activist circles, while he also sold sex in the city’s West End. He eventually met and moved into a house with Steve Bronski, a fellow Glaswegian, and Larry Steinbachek, from Hackney, who were, at the time, beginning to play around with synthesizers. Steinbachek and Bronski soon overheard Somerville singing, and, given that Somerville’s is not a voice to ignore, they invited him into their burgeoning musical project.

The British pop scene the group was about to step into had taken on a decidedly queer bent of late. The previous decade had seen the rise of gender-bending glam rock stars, most notably David Bowie, who, caked in makeup and squeezed tight into leotards, began to challenge traditional British masculinity like never before. Disco and punk came later in the ‘70s, scenes which, ostensibly, may have seemed antithetical to each other but were nonetheless bound by a glam-inflected sense of the theatrical and a respective preoccupation with confronting the gender and sexual norms of the day. As the ‘80s set in, superstars like Freddie Mercury and Elton John, while not out yet, were at the height of their fame, as the New Romantics emerged on the scene, coated, as Bowie had been before them, in makeup and androgyny. Even the Smiths, working within the apparently heteronormative form of a white male rock band, produced work dripping in homoeroticism. The 1980s belonged to Morrissey, George Michael, Boy George, Pete Burns, Soft Cell, Pet Shop Boys and Bronski Beat, while even plenty of the straight acts were appropriating queer aesthetics, too. The British public, whether it was entirely aware of it or not, was dancing to a queer soundtrack.

The enormous contradiction of that period is that, as pop music was turning gay, everyday life for the U.K.’s actual queer people remained viciously cruel. This was Thatcher’s Britain, a place where homosexuality had been made legal only a decade and a half previous, but, even then, only for those aged 21 and over. Gay sex for anyone younger remained a crime, while the age of consent for straights was 16. The state, with Margaret Thatcher as its callous face, was profoundly hostile toward gay people, as was the tabloid news industry that backed it up. The onset of the AIDS crisis, which would come to annihilate so many within the gay community, allowed powerful homophobes in politics and media to dehumanize queers, characterizing the AIDS epidemic as a “gay plague” and ensuring a general atmosphere of hate and disgust prevailed. It is not for nothing that so many of the gay pop stars of the ‘80s only felt comfortable coming out later in their lives, when the febrile atmosphere had settled somewhat.

Bronski Beat, though, were out from the beginning, all three members, and they were entirely plain about it. The very title of their debut album, The Age of Consent, was a reference to Britain’s unequal age of consent for gay people, which was among the highest in Europe at the time. To emphasize the point, the sleeve of the record listed the various ages of consent in other European countries, while it also bore the telephone number of the London Gay Switchboard, a service which provided advice to LGBTQ people in the city. The album’s artwork included an inverted pink triangle, once a symbol of Nazi homophobia, after it had been used to mark the gay inmates of the concentration camps, but which had since been reappropriated as a positive symbol of protest. Bronski Beat were gay, and The Age of Consent was an unambiguous expression of that.

The three members of the group, in terms of the way they dressed, appeared entirely “normal,” which was radical in that they presented their queerness, not by becoming gender-bending, glitter-covered glam aliens, but by precisely doing the opposite. They arrived on the scene as they were: ordinary, working-class young men. If anything, it added to their power, as Jimmy Somerville, the boy with the tight haircut and drab dress sense, through the power of his voice and the clarity of his identity and his politics, became an unlikely and entirely new sort of pop star.

The Age of Consent opens with that falsetto wail: “Tell me why! Tell me why!” This opening track, “Why?” is a song born of violence, responding to the growth of police powers in Britain at the time, which allowed them to hassle anyone they deemed to be “suspect,” which, inevitably, meant they began abusing, with impunity, young Black men and gay people on the street. The song is clear, its meaning not obscured by code or allusion, as Somerville implores his audience to “Never feel guilty, never give in,” in the face of a Thatcherite state violence which sought to suppress gay love and crush minority power. It is bleak, but profoundly uplifting, and it reveals the ecstasy to be found in resistance. Defiance can feel good to dance to.

The album’s greatest moment is obviously “Smalltown Boy,” which, given the rudimentary synthesizers upon which it is built, should feel so dated today, but remains exquisite. Its marriage of blue-gray melancholy and high-energy danceability renders it timeless, perhaps uniquely so. No other dance song from any era can crack hearts like this one.

You leave in the morning with everything you own in a little black case
Alone on a platform, the wind and the rain on a sad and lonely face

Mother will never understand why you had to leave
But the answers you seek will never be found at home
The love that you need will never be found at home

In so few lines Somerville tells this story of a lonely boy, who, beaten and abused by the homophobia of his hometown, is forced to escape, to abandon the small town which revels so much in his suffering and to seek a better life far away, where he can live his life as he wants to. He abandons the rural for the urban, the claustrophobic for the expansive, a journey known well by other queer people, then as now. It is not a story I can specifically identify with, in so much as I am not queer, but I do rather view myself as strange, unable to fit in, so, amid the specificity of the lyrics, I do latch onto their universality, their aspect of alienation, the contours of which I know well.

Somerville once acknowledged, in a short documentary for Dutch television, that he intended the song to speak to more than just queer people. “In some ways,” he said, “the song was about me and my sexuality, me growing up. But I think also there’s a lot of people who feel that they don’t want to be trapped in the communities that they grew up in. They don’t want the people who’ve told them all their lives what to do and how to do it. They want to move away from that. It was supposed to be a story that was kind of universal, that could be related to anybody’s situation.”

The rest of the album never reaches the heights of “Why?” or “Smalltown Boy,” but, when those particular songs are the record’s best, that is hardly a criticism. The album, as a whole, is a strange thing, but where it might otherwise begin to droop, it tends to be elevated by Somerville’s remarkable voice. Steinbachek and Bronski were limited producers by this early stage of their careers, but they nonetheless fashioned a record imbued with a moody, oddly sexy, sort of feel, a bit like night-driving, where streaks of soft, street-lamp light bleed through the windscreen from the darkness. “Love and Money” is the best song beyond the two hits, the plainest example of this weird-sexy vibe, a seductive number that evokes the sordid spirit of a West End of London I know only as myth, but where Somerville, as a young man of the early ‘80s, literally sold sex for money.

Work for money, spend money
Spend for love, love for money

Pain and love, love and pain
Pain and lust, lust for money

Love and money
Love and money

In the tiny number of words Somerville uses to comprise the song, he draws little circles in which work, money, love, lust and pain are recycled, one leading to another, and money itself is presented as a drug and the pursuit of it as addiction, driven by a false promise that its accumulation might allow for love to be purchased as a commodity. The final refrain of the song, “Money is the root of all evil,” repeated, may be a little unimaginative in its wording, but it remains a truism of contemporary life and the ghastly politics that regulate it, and anything Somerville delivers in that falsetto becomes imbued with a distinct power no other singer can conjure.

The rest of the album sees critiques of banal consumer culture, as in “Junk,” where we hear Somerville actually sing in a lower register; personal reflections on queer sexuality and the alienation that comes with it, as in “Screaming”; and critiques of war, as in the prosaically titled “No More War.” There is even a Donna Summer cover which, far from being a straight-up tribute to a disco icon, was intended as a challenge to her reported denouncement of her gay fanbase, an attempt to wrestle the music back from the apparent homophobia of its creator. There are plenty of interesting moments on The Age of Consent, but it is “Why?” and “Smalltown Boy” which make it exquisite.

The album, released in the United Kingdom on October 15th, 1984, should have marked the introduction to a long and fascinating career for the original Bronski Beat, but, in actuality, it was just a flash of something beautiful. The following year Somerville left the group, going on to form the Communards and later establish himself as a solo artist, while Steinbachek and Bronski continued the band without him, without ever quite reaching those early heights.

It’s 40 years later now, and queer identities are more represented in our pop culture than at any other time. But, away from the pop charts and TV screens, reactionary politics are marching and, in too many cases, taking control. Trans people are scapegoated as less than human, women’s bodily autonomy is crushed, and people with dark shades of skin are abused and killed by military-like police. Be it on the basis of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, class or, simply, as inhabitants of a dying planet that can no longer sustain the avarice of our elites, ordinary people are under assault. There are reasons to be afraid, but, on the other hand, there is comfort in knowing that our oneness is not alienated. This is something all of us have to face and, when groups of people are compelled into synchronicity, a great deal of power can be generated.

I think that’s why it felt so good dancing to “Smalltown Boy” that night at Beauty and the Beat. To be surrounded by strangers, to feel bound to them by a song that acknowledges the cruelty but is never beaten by it, is an encouraging, joyful thing. It is a reminder that we’re not alone.

See where The Age of Consent ranked on our list of the 50 greatest synth-pop albums of all time list here.