Somerville’s songs of summer
While a skilled songwriter in his own right, Scottish singer and gay pop icon Jimmy Somerville has made a name for himself as someone who knows his way around a great cover version.
In his ’80s heyday, Somerville’s trademark falsetto graced new interpretations of disco classics Don’t Leave Me This Way, Never Can Say Goodbye and You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real), with all three becoming bigger hits in his hands than the originals had.
Somerville’s latest album, Suddenly Last Summer, continues the covers theme. But instead of soundtracking the dance floor, Summer is a stripped back collection of songs made famous by singers like Patsy Cline and Nina Simone.
For a whole album, it is a bit of a change of pace, he told the Star.
It’s been more about vocal freedom with this album. My career has been my singing lesson, and now I feel I’ve mastered my voice. I know how to use it and how to control it, and this album’s been a great way for me to show that.
The album is appropriately named, having been recorded on the New South Wales coast in the summer of 2006.
I’d just done shows in Melbourne and in Sydney at Mardi Gras. After that one of the musicians I worked with called and said he had a studio I could use for six days at Mangrove Mountain [north of Sydney].
Suddenly I thought, gosh, I could do something here. I pooled all the songs I really like on my iPod, narrowed them down, and within six days the album was recorded. It wasn’t planned, I just jumped in at the deep end.
Given that the album was recorded in Australia, does he have any plans to come back out for a tour?
I’d love so much to come, he said.
But every time I visit Australia, it’s a bit of a nightmare because I hate the heat and the sun -” I am a ginger, after all. I spend my time indoors hiding from the sun, and then I end up thinking, -˜Why have I travelled halfway around the bloody world just to sit indoors? I could’ve stayed home!’
I get frustrated, because I love the wildlife, I love Sydney and Melbourne, but it’s just tooooo hot.
Perhaps fans should expect a winter visit from Somerville, rather than another Mardi Gras performance.
It’s hard not to notice when listening to Suddenly Last Summer that most songs on the album were made famous by women. Somerville admits that, like many gay men, he finds himself more drawn towards the female voice.
I do listen to male vocalists, but I’d lie if I said I listened to them a lot. It sounds like a stereotype that gay men prefer female singers, but it’s understandable.
I don’t know if it’s the same for younger gay men, but for my generation, women were traditionally portrayed as quite submissive. In the end though, the female singers we look up to are quite powerful divas in their own right.
Also there’s that thing about growing up gay. When you’re very aware of your homosexuality at a young age -” which I was -” you don’t really connect with male bonding, you kind of feel more comfortable around women.
Somerville also tasted fame at a young age when his first group, Bronski Beat, entered the mainstream with a splash -” 1984’s Smalltown Boy, which remains one of his most enduring hits. The tale of a young gay man facing up to homophobia and isolation, it was accompanied by an upfront video dealing with, amongst other things, gay desire in the change rooms of a public pool.
When it was first released, the video was shown everywhere. There wasn’t much of an issue with any of it. Then, suddenly, about 10 years later, MTV took it off rotation and other music channels no longer played it. It seemed like suddenly it had become too in-your-face.
He laments the fact that too many of today’s -˜openly gay’ pop stars would prefer no one made an issue of their sexuality.
All through my career, I’ve been very gender-specific -” using -˜he’ in love songs -” and I know there are gay artists nowadays who are out, but with a lot of them, you never hear it in their music. That’s kind of sad really.
It’s about affirming who you are in your music, and to deny yourself that is a bit of a shame really. I sometimes hate the idea that I get lumped in with that lot. You just want to shake them or slap them… both actually!
It’s hard to comprehend just how unashamedly gay Bronski Beat were when they arrived on the scene -” their 1983 debut album, Age Of Consent (itself a reference to the age of consent for gay sex) even came with the phone number of the London Gay Switchboard etched into the LP.
Surely the group must’ve faced opposition from record company bigwigs who wanted the band to shut up and sing?
Strangely enough, we didn’t. All of the record companies wanted to sign us, and we were trying to lay down some ground rules. The biggest one was no one could interfere with who we were and what we wanted to do.
Somerville’s time in the Bronski Beat was brief, and by 1985, he’d moved on to a new group, The Communards, and scoring the biggest hit of his career. Don’t Leave Me This Way spent a month atop the UK charts and became the country’s biggest-selling single of 1986. Twenty years since the dissolution of The Communards, he’s reluctant to compare life in a group versus life as a solo artist.
Where I am now is where I am. The experiences I had in those groups were great. It’s all part of my journey, he said, before adding:
Oh God, I hate saying things like that, I sound so hippy-dippy!
Since his 1989 debut solo album Read my Lips, Somerville’s been a prolific solo artist, but while the music’s been of a uniformly high calibre (YouTube his 1995 single Heartbeat to see one fantastic hit that never was), he never quite recaptured the commercial success of his earlier work.
It’s a shame, suddenly the commercial success waned. But I know there is still an audience out there. It may be a smaller audience, but that’s not really the issue for me -” it’s more about me being happy with what I’m putting out there, he insisted.
I like the idea that I can use albums as a chronicle of my life, showing people every three or four years where I am in my life as a gay man.
info: Suddenly Last Summer is available now through iTunes.
