Category: Communards

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.

JC

I wasn’t sure whether to include Communards in this series – but using the same logic as I did with Bronski Beat then I’m more than happy to do so.

They formed in 1985 after Jimmy Somerville left his band behind to team up with classically trained musician Richard Coles who was best known as a pianist although he was already familiar to Bronski Beat fans thanks his clarinet solo on the hit single It Ain’t Necessarily So.

Pursuing a left-wing political agenda in their lyrics while making hi-energy dance music proved to be a successful formula. The duo gradually expanded, incorporating, among others, Sarah Jane Morris on vocals and June Miles Kingston on drums, and would go onto enjoy nine hit singles, including a #1 with a cover of Don’t Leave Me This Way and two Top 10 albums.

There was an acrimonious split in 1988, sparked seemingly by the instrumentalist lying to the singer that he had contracted HIV/AIDS.

Jimmy Somerville would subsequently embark on a solo career which has been sporadically successful while  Richard Coles firstly pursued a career as a journalist before training as a priest, eventually being ordained in 2005, all the while maintaining a writing career combined with an increasing number of radio and television appearances, often in the area of light entertainment but increasingly on religious issues.  He’s actually better known and more famous these days than his former sidekick.

This was on the b-side of their debut single back in 1985.  It’s sadly still as relevant and poignant more than three decades on.

mp3 : Communards – Breadline Britain

Enjoy