Richard keeps Red flag flying
As The Communards reissue their second and final album, the band’s keyboardist – Reverend Richard Coles – discusses with ALEX GREEN the record’s legacy and his transition from pop stardom to priesthood
STRIKES, inflation and a looming Russian threat. The comparisons between today and the 1980s are difficult to ignore.
It seems fitting then that The Communards – Jimmy Somerville and the now Reverend Richard Coles – are reissuing their 1987 album Red, which documented the time through glistening synths, huge choruses and danceable beats.
“I started feeling nostalgic for the Thatcher cabinets of the 1980s,” Richard, 60, tells me from his home in Sussex where he moved after retiring as parish priest of Finedon in Northampstonshire in April after 11 years. “Which is ironic because I don’t think I could have despised a political class more than I did then. But there was a sort of competence about them as they smashed up people’s lives, and my sense is now that it’s sort of like a demolition derby.
“There doesn’t seem to be very much... I don’t know. It just seems a bit chaotic now and a bit irresponsible.”
We spoke before Liz Truss’s resignation as Prime Minister and Richard is irritated and exasperated, even angry, with the political state of the country.
“I started missing even the lecturing tones of Margaret Thatcher,” he says wryly. “Because she may not have agreed with me but at least she believed in things.”
After a pause, he adds: “Perhaps I am sentimentalising the past.”
We are discussing the 35th anniversary of Red, the second and final album by The Communards. Upon release in October 1987, it reached number four in the charts and spawned the hit single Never Can Say Goodbye.
Jimmy Somerville, on vocals, and Richard Coles, keyboard wizard and drum machine operator, had both recently departed Bronski Beat and were keen to explore a new sound.
“I jumped into Bronski Beat when Bronski Beat was already a global force.,” he explains. “And then Jimmy and I left and started The Communards, and then we had our first album and it was an immediate hit. So then you have the interesting problem that your first album is minted out of the raw experience of your life. And then your second album is minted out of the raw experience of basically being in an airport for a year.” What did they do?
“I suppose we were trying to hold on to what it was that gave us our identity and our distinctiveness as the world changed around us very quickly. It’s a very common story with pop bands.”
Indeed, at the time many may have seen The Communards simply as a pop band, but they were truly radical.
Their name, and the album title Red, referred to their left-wing leanings and they wrote about queer love, the Aids crisis and emancipation from bigotry.
“We were clear and unambiguous about where we stood in the political world and what we thought that meant.
“You bundle in behind the red flag a whole host of things, not just about economic inequality, but about equality for women and gay people and black people and so on. We thought that history was with us and that we were riding a wave which was changing the world.
“And in some ways that was true. And in other ways it wasn’t true at all. And that is an interesting thing to reflect on as you go through life.” The song For A Friend was written for gay rights activist Mark Ashton who died the same year Red was released, aged 26, as a result of Aids.
“We were absolutely walking through the valley of the shadow of death when that happened,” explains Richard. “And it’s only now, 30 years later, the people who I was walking with really talk about it. That’s because it was so awful, and you do what you have to do to survive awful experiences. A lot of us pushed it away so we could get through the day and keep going.”
Gloria Gaynor’s Never Can Say Goodbye, Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes’ Don’t Leave Me This Way – many of The Communards’ biggest hits were covers of black soul and Motown tracks.
What sparked their interest in this music?
“Oh, anthems of liberation,” says Richard. “For gay men of my generation the arena in which we fought our fight, the soundtrack was disco. But also, the sound of Motown is not only the sound of joy and delight, it’s also the sound of refusing to be cowed by those who would cow you. That was very resonant for us.
“For me also, of course, it’s got its roots in gospel and that’s my world.
“People always seem to think that going from being in synth pop in the 1980s to church music now is an unimaginably big step. But they’re much more closely related than people think.”
Red (35th Anniversary Edition) is out now