BRIGHT LIGHT BRIGHT LIGHT

Bright Light Bright Light, aka Rod Thomas, explains why his new album is a love letter to the LGBTQ+ community

Rod Thomas lets it shine with an album for the LGBTQ+ community

Amosquito darts into view and Rod Thomas, aka the magnificently moustachioed front-person of oneman band Bright Light Bright Light, isn’t happy. “Eurgh, is that a fucking mosquito? Oh my God, 2020 is not the one,” he exclaims.

In his attempt to swat the pesky bloodsucker, Rod accidentally knocks the lid of his laptop, causing the camera to zoom in squarely on his crotch. “Oh, sorry,” he chuckles, while shifting the camera back to his face. “I mean, it is Attitude, I suppose…”

Growing up in a small town in the Welsh valleys, 37-year-old Rod relocated from London to New York seven years ago and he continues to shine as, well, a bright light on the LGBTQ+ music scene.

Having already toured and recorded with idols Sir Elton John, Scissor Sisters and Erasure, the singer-songwriter scored a new high last year when he hit the road with superstar Cher (he still can’t, ahem, Believe his luck.)

Next up for Rod is the release of his fourth album, Fun City – featuring collaborations with Jake Shears, alongside a constellation of rising queer stars – a pop-electro tour de force dedicated to the LGBTQ+ experience, from the loves to the heart-piercing losses.

While bonding over our mutual appreciation of Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman in 1992’s Batman Returns (greatest film performance ever, period), Rod reveals there is a track on the record inspired by our favourite kitty girl.

“I don’t know if you clocked it, but You Make It So Easy, Don’t You is the line she says when she meets the woman in the alley,” he smiles. “She is the ultimate gay icon.”

Litter-ally couldn’t agree more.

So, what prompted you to move to New York?

I moved there for three months to see how it was and it was just amazing. I was living with Del [Marquis] from Scissor Sisters and met all these people that were doing such different types of music to what I was used to and it was inspiring. In London, you’ve got the pop factories and writing teams and, at the time, they were all working on Marina and the Diamonds, Ellie Goulding and Sunday Girl, female-focused, really cool, but quite similar pop sounds, which I was also making myself. I thought it would be a good experiment to try something else and ended up staying.

What is the most New York thing that has happened to you?

Last Easter, me and my friend were going to buy a bottle of rosé in the West Village because we’re just fags [laughs]. We were choosing some wine and being a bit silly and flirting with the person behind the desk, then we turned around and Glenn Close is behind us in the line, “Oh my God!”. You kinda see [famous] people all the time, you know, I walked past Alicia Silverstone while I was buying a cauliflower. [Laughs] I saw this gorgeous woman smile at me and was like, wow, it’s Alicia Silverstone, what are you doing on my shitty block?!

During our recent Pride at Home event, you performed a cover of George Michael’s Spinning the Wheel – thanks again for that. Is he one of your idols?

He’s actually, I think, the only music idol that I never got to meet… He was also a role model because of the Outside music video. Coming back from that police incident is the coolest comeback I’ve ever seen a human being do, taking something that was a negative and turning it into a celebratory cultural moment. Absolute icon.

Your new album, Fun City, is out this month [September]. What story were you looking to tell with the record?

I wanted to make a record that had a purpose, like, a soul behind it. I didn’t want to just make a pop record because I am socially conscious, and I am aware that there is a lot that artists can do.

When we [myself and my queer dancers] were on tour with Cher last year, there was a moment on stage where I got really tongue-tied and just blurted out, “As you can see, we’re really gay” – because it was three men wearing sequins. The whole arena erupted with applause, it was crazy, I didn’t expect it at all. That night, I got tons of DMs and tags from lots of queer kids that were at the show being like, “Thank you for that, people don’t normally do that in that big a public space in our country.” That’s when I decided that the new album was going to be for and about the LGBTQ+ community and experience.

It is about how queer people through history have had to find ways to laugh, celebrate themselves, stay strong, stay creative and grow against the hurdles that life has put up for them, whether that is fighting for rights, or having rights taken away. People like Sylvester, Bronski Beat, George Michael and Hercules and Love Affair; numerous artists have shown us the power of music against adversity. Disco [for example] comes from dancing through pain. I wanted that to be the backbone of the record, to do something showing the joy and pain and struggle and success of the community.

I’d argue that music is more of a tonic for LGBTQ+ people than other sections of society. I mean, the relationship between the gays and their chosen pop diva is second to none!

I don’t know a gay person, say 28-plus, who didn’t run out every week and buy CD singles and go and look for their favourite pop artist, whether that was Gina G or Björk. I would buy those two in the same hand. Everybody had that experience of looking to music for joy, for distraction, for some kind of escape from whatever they were scared about at school, whether that was queer bullying or not having friends, or just seeing a world that was so much more colourful than what you were surrounded by. A lot of people grew up in towns or villages that were quite grey in terms of how they were built and populated with cultural events, so they really did use pop music as a way to connect with the world in a way they weren’t allowed to do on a day-to-day basis.

Speaking of pop music, what was it like to go on tour with the legendary Cher? Did you have much interaction with her?

We did meet her and she was lovely, but she’s been doing this for so long and the reality is with people of that level, they’re not in the venue all day, they come in for rehearsal, they do a show and then they go home. So yeah, the time with Cher was short, but she was really sweet, and it was amazing to even be able to get to say thanks or whatever.

You’ve also hit the road with Sir Elton, Scissor Sisters and Erasure. Do you have a favourite behind-the-scenes moment?

When I was on tour with Elton, we used to go record-shopping for each other. I’d be in a store and email him: Do you have this George Michael record? I bought him Faith on vinyl. Then he’d be in a store and be like, Do you have this Phil Spector Christmas record? We’d do little scavenger hunts for each other, which was awesome. With Erasure, I went into their dressing room afterwards to say hi, and Vince was just making Andy a piece of toast. [Vince said] “Do you want a piece of toast, mate?” and I was like, “I’m good, thanks.” The most fun things for me are when you get to see how fabulously normal everyone is, just getting joy from having a piece of toast or buying a record.

Exactly, it’s the appreciably banal details. Like imagine going on tour with Beyoncé and hearing that she’s struggling with an ingrowing toenail.

[Laughs] Everyone poops, everyone pays the bills, it just gets lost behind the stadium performances and the milliondollar videos.

As you mentioned earlier, the album pays homage to the LGBTQ+ community and our rise against adversity. Is there anything in particular you feel you’ve had to overcome?

Feeling like I belonged within the gay community I think has been a bit of a struggle. The LGBTQ+ community is such a vast umbrella; everyone is so different, and trying to work out where you belong within that is hard, because it kind of presumes that everybody queer gets on with each other, which they don’t, and that everyone is alike, which they’re not.

I’m one of these people that loves nightlife and dancing and making music, but I also don’t do drugs and I don’t go to a place that a lot of people do, and at some points nightlife was very drugheavy. People, often in London, called me “boring” on more than one occasion — on more than 10 occasions, probably. I would be DJing and I was looked at as the boring DJ, and it was really crushing. I felt like even at some of my own DJ sets at nights I was performing at, I wasn’t deemed “cool enough”.

There is body-shaming as well. I felt a lot of time that I’m not body-appropriate for people in these spaces. I don’t go to the gym in a way that a lot of people do, and I know I am invisible to a huge section of the LGBTQ+ community… It doesn’t matter because those people don’t matter, but I found that a huge struggle, feeling invisible or not welcomed in queer spaces, even more heart-breaking than not being welcome in heterosexual spaces, because these spaces are there for everybody that needs them.

That’s another reason why I wanted to make this album queer-focused. The message is: you should all be welcome in the place you choose as your home or your safe space, everybody deserves to be welcome there and everybody needs to check themselves to make sure that they’re not being exclusionary.

Tell us more about your YSKWN! initiative, which is all about lifting up queer artists.

I thought I’d set up a new label and use it as a community-led thing where I give more visibility to and amplify voices of queer creators, businesses, and organisations. So, while I don’t have the money to fund other

“THE LGBTQ+ COMMUNITY IS A VAST UMBRELLA; EVERYONE IS DIFFERENT, AND TRYING TO WORK OUT WHERE YOU BELONG IS HARD”

artists, I am trying to help them find a slightly bigger audience by including them on a song or commissioning a remix, or by sharing a fundraiser that people are doing, or shouting about the work people are making — just trying to engage conversation, really.

It’s like you’re paying it forward.

If you’ve got a platform where you can do that, why would you not? Elton does that with sharing other people’s work.

We are seeing more and more queer musicians stepping into the spotlight. Was your sexuality ever an issue? Were you ever encouraged not to be so ‘out’?

I don’t know if I would say I was encouraged not to, but I definitely felt nervous about being open about it when I first started making music, more so when I was releasing under my own name because it was all so personal. But as soon as I started with the Bright Light Bright Light moniker, I felt liberated in terms of being openly gay, and over the past few years, I’ve been much more confident about doing whatever I want to do and not really caring about how that reads — if it’s too gay or not gay enough, or whatever.

OK, let’s deep-dive into a few of your songs, starting off with Sensation, your collaboration with pal Jake Shears. I imagine that was a whole lot of fun?

He is one of my biggest inspirations. When I was at Warwick University and had a radio show every week, I remember finding Laura was on the playlist and being like, who is this band, this is so amazing. Then watching them take over the British charts was life-changing, seeing at that point in time that a queer band could have a number-one album, the biggest-selling album of the year, without having to tone themselves down. I think that changed the world for a lot of queer musicians and it made a little gay boy from the Valley feel like there was hope in the music industry. Having Jake on the record is really important to me and having him on a song about finding your people and realising that there’s joy in the world, it had to be him because he did give me that jump-start moment in real life as well. He is just a hilarious, lovely man. Obviously, he is a crazy sexual deviant and [has a] bonkers music pop-world persona, but he really is also the sweetest guy and we geek out about horror movies. Every side of him is a joy.

Moving onto Good at Goodbyes, featuring Erasure’s Andy Bell, which is about not being able to get over somebody. Am I right or wrong?

My mood board for the song was 1989’s Shirley Valentine, on a beach, drunk on one or two more Cosmos than you should have had, and you’re reminiscing about a lover who you know is really bad for you and you need to get them out of your life, but you just can’t fucking be bothered because you really love them and the sex was good, and you still have that gorgeous nostalgia about your time together. There are some people in your life you don’t quite want to close the door on.

Are you seeing someone at the moment? Is the song autobiographical?

It’s not, no. I was trying to think about the different sides of the gay experience, and part of my experience of gay life was delusion, overromanticising things…

This Was My House is inspired by a friend whose parents had voted for Donald Trump. Since Trump came to power, he has made it his mission to roll back Obama-era LGBTQ+ policies, particularly against trans people. Have you noticed a change in attitudes towards the LGBTQ+ community?

New York is a bit different, but even here I do feel like the rolling back of rights and [the] rise of anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric is palpable.

The most dangerous thing he is doing is enabling hate speech and hate crimes. The broad message he is giving the country is: fuck queer people, they don’t deserve to be seen as equal and they don’t deserve protection. Black trans women and trans women of colour, Latin women, are killed at such a disgusting rate and nobody is doing anything about it. I don’t understand, other than sheer spite, what this fucking man feels the need to do that for. It really is being spiteful because he can and because he is rich enough to do it, and to make people angry so that they still vote for him. He is just doing it to make people angry so that they will go up against liberal voting. It is so disgusting.

Trump’s language and fucking Boris Johnson and Michael Gove. Why do you want your country to be so full of hatred? What is the point? It is so shameful… I want them gone, like Michael Gove needs to fall down a cliff, I fucking hate that man so much, and I hate Boris and his posh, homophobic bullshit. The most depressing thing is you see the school bullies in positions of power still having locker-room jeers at people. How dare you? How dare we be fed this myth that as soon as we leave school and get our qualifications, we’re free from the school bullies. We’re fucking not, they’re everywhere and they’re running the country.

The closing track, Saying Goodbye is Exhausting, attempts to process the suicide of a friend. I was just listening to it on repeat while sat in a café and it really got me, especially the lyric, ‘Over the hill, there’s a place where none of this happened, over the bridge, you’re still looking up at the sky.’ If it’s not too difficult, what made you want to address your friend’s death in a song?

I’m gonna cry when I say this, [but] I don’t mind talking about it at all, I’m just very emotional at the moment… It’s about losing a friend who died way too young and trying to process that, but also linking it back to how, within the gay experience, there is always a goodbye, always a loss, always this worry that we’re not going to make it, you know, the life expectancy of trans people, the life expectancy of gay men and women across the world… I just thought it was an important thing to include. I wasn’t going to, because it was a bit too personal, but I hate the fact that there is such a sense of loss, especially with the Aids crisis and how an entire generation was just wiped off the face of the earth… The song is about how in spite of everything we do to stay afloat, in spite of everything we do to stay creative, you are still going to lose people you care about, you are still going to lose more than the heterosexual world does.

“WITHIN THE GAY EXPERIENCE, THERE IS ALWAYS A GOODBYE, ALWAYS A LOSS, ALWAYS THIS WORRY THAT WE’RE NOT GOING TO MAKE IT”