COMMUNARDS
DANCE MUSIC WASN’T JUST ENTERTAINMENT, IT WAS THE SOUND OF LIBERATION“
AFTER MORE THAN A DECADE AS TV’S GO-TO VICAR, IT’S EASY TO FORGET HOW INFLUENTIAL REV RICHARD COLES WAS ALONGSIDE JIMMY SOMERVILLE IN POLITICAL POP MAVERICKS COMMUNARDS. IT SEEMS A LONG WAY FROM DON’T LEAVE ME THIS WAY TO THE PULPIT, VIA HEDONISTIC ABANDON IN IBIZA, NOT LEAST FOR THE MAN WHO LIVED THROUGH IT ALL. AS COMMUNARDS’ MUSIC IS REISSUED, THE VICAR OF FINEDON TELLS US: “IT FEELS LIKE I WAS A DIFFERENT PERSON THEN.”
JOHN EARLS
If my CV landed on my desk with a job application, I’d think it the work of fantasy. But it is what happened.” Trying to make sense of how he went from teenage runaway to Britain’s most famous vicar via Top Of The Pops – and being so off his nut on drugs that he tried buying an aeroplane while shirtless in Ibiza – Rev Richard Coles smiles gently at the rich life he’s led.
It’s a famous part of his story in becoming the vicar of the quiet Northants village of Finedon that Richard was once a pop star. What’s been obscured in the 33 years since Richard and Jimmy Somerville split is just how controversial and trailblazing Communards were.
In the fallout from Jimmy’s equally explosive previous band Bronski Beat, Communards were political from the outset, socialists who, in Richard’s words, “tried to bring down Margaret Thatcher with disco and supper-club jazz.” They didn’t quite succeed, but they smuggled left-wing politics into the mainstream via huge singles including Don’t Leave Me This Way and Never Can Say Goodbye, describing their ideologies in Smash Hits while also trying to cope with the ravages AIDS was having on the gay community. It seems another universe from Sunday sermons and appearing on QI.
“It’s weird to think Communards’ first album was 35 years ago,” ponders Richard. “Nothing in my life feels like it could have been so long ago as 35 years, but in other ways it feels I was a different person then.” Since Communards’ final single There’s More To Love in 1988 kept up an unbroken run of nine Top 30 hits, Richard almost immediately gave up pop music. “I did string arrangements and tried writing with a female singer,” Richard recalls. “But it didn’t work for me, because being a musician was a moment in my life that came and went. It was never something I’d particularly wanted to do. Being a musician was never the fulfilment of a dream. I got interested in other areas of life.”
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