I Feel Love: Why Soft Cell’s Marc Almond joined Bronski Beat
Marc Almond enraged homophobes as he sang Soft Cell’s Tainted Love on TV in 1981, a frenzy of bangles and eyeliner.
He quickly became an iconic figure in outsider pop. But while Marc loved to camp it up, he hated the idea of publicly “coming out” as gay. “Everyone seemed to know what I am,” Marc explained. “Why do I need to say it?”
Enter Bronski Beat, a young synth trio led by fearless queer activist Jimmy Somerville. Having reflected gay reality on hits such as Smalltown Boy and album The Age of Consent, Bronski Beat invited Marc to join them, to cover Donna Summer’s disco anthem I Feel Love. To everyone’s surprise, Marc said yes.
I found a 12” of I Feel Love for £3 in Hackney charity shop Sense. Let me tell you all about this remarkable moment in pop:
Backstory
By late 1984, Bronski Beat were on a roll. Smalltown Boy had been a huge hit, swiftly followed by Why? and It Ain’t Necessarily So. The world heard Jimmy Somerville’s soaring vocals for the first time that summer, and had been swooning ever since.
With fellow Glaswegian Steve Bronski and Londoner Larry Steinbachek, Bronski Beat gave us a debut album as fresh as it was brave. The Age of Consent landed in the middle of the 80s, when the queer community faced ferocious hostility. AIDS had already taken dozens of lives in the UK and, while very little was understood about AIDS, right-wing tabloids blamed its gay victims for this “gay blood plague”.
Most queer popstars were forbidden by their record companies to talk about their sexuality in public, fearing a tabloid backlash and commercial suicide. So Freddie Mercury changed the subject, Boy George pretended to prefer a cup of tea, and George Michael didn’t even go there.
Bronski Beat decided not to hide, but to celebrate who they were as gay men. Their fierce honesty became a beacon of hope for so many queer people.
Meanwhile Marc Almond was at the beginning of his solo career, after he and bandmate Dave Ball put Soft Cell on hold.
Soft Cell were never conventional, but Marc admitted that he still felt pressure to keep his sexuality private. Marc explains in his autobiography Tainted Life that his record company Phonogram urged him to pretend that he was dating women.
“I must admit I was prepared to go along with some blurring of reality about my sexuality, because I was afraid of the alternatives. ‘If I didn’t, I would be destroyed; Soft Cell would be finished,’ I was reminded again and again.”
Marc Almond
Despite remaining coy, Marc was often the target of vicious homophobic gossip, spread by the tabloid press. Marc admitted: “I was coming up against prejudice already, and was looking for a closet to climb back into, not out of.”
Single
Bronski Beat’s Age of Consent album ends with a cover of 1977 disco classic I Feel Love by Donna Summer. Like many gay men, Jimmy Somerville loved the song, and the politics of disco.
“My whole teenage years were based around sex, clubs and general underage shenanigans — and I lived for disco music,” Jimmy told The Quietus. “While it is easy to dismiss disco as a throwaway genre — stuff like the Bee Gees and Saturday Night Fever — it is actually about a whole movement of emancipated people seeking liberation.”
Jimmy said Bronski Beat wanted “to take a song that was gay and iconic and make it even gayer”. He explained: “The idea was to do a much more off-the-wall version — the electronics were very intense — and then add Johnny Remember Me [a 1961 hit for John Leyton] to the track. I love the chorus and melody of Johnny Remember Me and by adding it, I was turning I Feel Love into a gay love song.”
Sung solo by Jimmy, Bronski Beat’s cover of the hypnotic I Feel Love was already pretty strong. But the band wanted to push it even further. Before releasing I Feel Love as a single, they invited Marc Almond to join them.
“I have a great deal of respect for Jimmy and his views, even though they differ greatly from mine,” Marc said in Tainted Life. “But I knew that doing the song would have both pluses and minuses. It would, for me, be certainly the gayest statement I had ever made — more than I felt comfortable with — and might be seen as some sort of ‘outing’. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted that, or if I could handle it.”
Get Tom Bishop’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
After much thought, Marc agreed. “It was the ‘in your face’ aspect that ultimately drew me in,” he explained. “It would be outrageous, brave, and a response to a thoughtless statement that Donna Summer had [allegedly] made about AIDS and God.”
Marc admitted there was one further factor in his decision: “Oh yes, and it was bound to be a massive hit.”
He first joined Bronski Beat as a special guest at their Hammersmith Palais gig in November 1984. Steve Bronski said: “Larry and I asked for it to be a secret surprise to be kept from Jimmy until Marc came onstage, as he was such a huge fan of all Marc’s projects.”
The live performance went well — Marc’s deep growl in glorious contrast to Jimmy’s transcendant falsetto — so they hit the studio. I Feel Love was re-recorded with Marc’s vocals and a new intro, taken from another Donna Summer hit: Love To Love You Baby.
“When we got Marc to do the song, we basically had two gay men singing this song in which suddenly a man called Johnny appears, and we are both wanting him to remember us,” Jimmy explained.
The song builds into a five-minute frenzy: a defiant celebration of gay male sexuality, soaked in poppers and dripping with sweat.
“It was so radical,” Jimmy admitted. “When I look back, we really did push the boat out with that.”
I Feel Love came with a fun music video by Constantine Giannaris, who went on to direct queer hustler movie From the Edge of the City. The video paired each band member with a different guy: a surfer for Jimmy, a biker for Larry and a slick 50s heartthrob for Steve.
“I balked at this, and insisted that I just perform the song with Jimmy,” Marc said. “No touching either! Afterwards a bullfighter twirling his cape was inserted into the video, and I assume he was meant to be my fantasy. I cringed.”
The I Feel Love 12” includes the extended Cake Mix, plus the Fruit Mix on the flipside: a drawn-out dub that slowly accelerates to nowhere special. The single closes with Puit D’Amour, a short and sweet Jimmy Somerville acappella that shares his vocals at their most angelic.
Despite any reservations, Marc carried out promotional duties for I Feel Love. “We performed the song on Top of the Pops, me singing uncomfortably while Jimmy camped it up, wanting full-on arms around each other to make a truly ‘gay statement,’” Marc said. “I tried to pretend I wasn’t there, as I saw what I had left of my image going down the pan.”
Impact
I Feel Love danced in the face of homophobia, and became a big hit in April 1985. It reached number 3 in the UK and the Republic of Ireland, cracked the Top 20 in Germany and the Netherlands, and went Top 40 in Switzerland and Australia.
“Of course the record became a hit,” Marc said. “I was grateful to Jimmy and the guys for that.”
But despite securing another smash hit, all was not well within Bronski Beat. Steve and Larry wanted to head deeper into the dancefloor, while Jimmy was keen to experiment musically and turn up the politics within the pop.
“I didn’t really know what I wanted to do,” Jimmy admitted in the sleeve notes of his Very Best Of compilation. “Being quite fickle, suddenly I would meet people and get really impatient.”
Shortly after I Feel Love charted, Jimmy told Steve and Larry that he was leaving Bronski Beat to form the Communards with his classically-trained musician mate Richard Coles, who had played clarinet on It Ain’t Necessarily So.
Having broken the news, Jimmy’s final performance with Bronski Beat was at the Montreux Pop Festival in Switzerland in May 1985. Marc joined them for I Feel Love and — yes — that’s Richard Coles you can see onstage with them, playing the oboe. Awkward.
“The atmosphere was extremely uncomfortable, and I found myself caught between two camps — so to speak,” Marc said. Despite this, the performance brought their time together to a spectacular climax.
Afterwards tabloids started the rumour that Marc would replace Jimmy in Bronski Beat. “I couldn’t think of a worse fate,” Marc said.
- Find out what happened next to Bronski Beat, Marc Almond and Jimmy Somerville in the full version of this story, on my site Hit Singles In Your Area
