My introduction to The Communards came via seeing them perform on the TV show The Tube, which went out on Friday evenings on Channel 4 between 5.30 and 7pm. This would have been November 1985, a few months just after I’d left university and moved to live in Edinburgh, where I’d started working in July 1985. It wasn’t a great paying job, and while the flat I was living in was shared with two others, the rent I was paying didn’t leave too much to live off, and I hadn’t bought the NME or any other music papers for a while. As such, I’d missed that Jimmy Somerville had now formed a new band, one in which he would be signing with the music coming from the classically trained Richard Coles.
The debut single, You Are My World, may well have been getting played on the radio, but I certainly never heard it any evening I had it switched on. The live performance on the telly was a helluva way to learn about the duo and the song.
I’ve always been a sucker for strings on pop songs, so this was right up my street. Jimmy’s falsetto has long been one of the wonders of the 80s pop scene, and to hear him hit, and maintain, many of those notes was joyous. If nothing else, got to 3:29 of the clip and watch the next ten seconds – the smile that breaks out over Jimmy’s face as he realises he’s nailed the performance is a fabulous TV moment.
I went out and bought the single the next day from HMV on Princes Street in Edinburgh, which is where I learned it was already in the charts, as the shop had the ‘top’ singles laid out in racks in accordance with the chart position in any particular week. Looking up the chart history, You Are My World would have been sitting at #30, which is where, criminally, it peaked.
mp3: The Communards – You Are My World
There were two tracks on the b-side. The first was a bitter-sweet ballad bemoaning what Thatcher and her cronies were doing to the country:-
mp3: The Communards – Breadline Britain
The other was a cover, a big band song from the 1940s on which Doris Day had first performed the lead vocal, while a version from Ella Fitzgerald would follow a couple of years later:-
mp3: The Communards – Sentimental Journey
The Communards would, in due course, become ridiculously successful for a short time, when their take on Don’t Leave Me This Way spent four weeks at #1 in September 1986.
THE NEW VINYL VILLAIN 