Day 138: Bronski Beat – The Age of Consent
I’m featuring more of my fellow Glaswegians today. More specifically, a group with two Glaswegians and an Englishman – still counts. Today’s album is The Age of Consent by the seminal ‘80s synth pop trio, Bronski Beat.
Album cover courtesy of London Recordings
Formed in Brixton in 1983, Bronski Beat consisted of vocalist Jimmy Somerville, keyboard player and percussionist Steve Bronski and keyboard player and percussionist Larry Steinbachek, with the first two men hailing from Glasgow and Steinbachek being from Essex. They’ve had a variety of line-ups throughout the years, but the only consistent member has been Steve Bronski.
The name of the album refers to the UK’s higher age of consent for gay men, which at the time was 21. It was 16 for the rest of the population. In the liner notes, they printed the age of consent for homosexual relationships in each country, although these were censored from the copies sold in America.
I’d never heard anything other than “Smalltown Boy” from Bronski Beat, so I was interested in knowing what the rest of their material is like. Sometimes when a band only has one enduring hit, you sort of expect the rest of the songs on the album to be variations on a theme, but I was surprised by The Age of Consent. It’s a lot more far-reaching and varied than I expected. It’s also very, very outspokenly political, from a group of three gay working class men in Thatcher-era Britain – hearing it, you end up missing that sort of bravery today.
I can’t really talk about the rest of the record before I talk about this one song: genuinely, “Smalltown Boy” is in my currently not real but possible future list of 100 best pop songs of all time. It’s about escaping your small town for the big city as a bullied young gay man and it captures the feeling of being an outsider and needing to escape the environment you were raised in so well that to me, it’s unparalleled. And at the time, it was a risky release, especially with the music video the released with it, but honestly it would probably be a risky release today too, to some extent. Not to mention that they were reclaiming the pink triangle in their imagery, which was the symbol used by Nazis to identify gay people.
The songwriting is fearless and outspoken, the falsetto is instantly recognisable, it has one of my favourite pop songs of all time – I can’t really fault this album. It’s political, outspoken synth pop with disco influences about topics like homophobia, war and the evils of capitalism. Is it a sign of societal regression or exceptional bravery that something released in 1984 still feels a bit subversive today? Probably a bit of both. The Age of Consent is a 8.5/10.
Fun fact: Somerville left the band to become the vocalist of a duo called the Communards with a man called Richard Coles. They had a hit song with their cover of “Don't Leave Me This Way”. Today, Coles might be better known as the very pleasant priest who’s frequently on panel shows.