‘We’ve never said anything about our sex lives to the newspapers or to magazines, and we don’t intend to’
Neil Tennant1
After getting sacked from his job looking after the cloakroom at the Blitz Club, things were looking pretty dire for George Alan O’Dowd. His band, In Praise of Lemmings, was going nowhere and neither was he – until, that is, the former supermarket shelf-stacker came to the attention of former Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren. McLaren was in the process of forming a new band, Bow Wow Wow, which consisted mainly of an Adam-less Adam and the Ants. McLaren had visualised a new pop character by the name of Lieutenant Lush being part of that set up, and it was as Lush that George joined the former Ants and their 14-year-old singer Annabella Lwin for a short while.
But George (born in London on 14 June 1961) was never cut out to be someone’s backing singer: from his earliest days, lip-synching along to his mother’s Shirley Bassey records, he knew that he was going to be a star. Through friends he met first bassist Mikey Craig and then drummer Jon Moss, and the idea of forming a band of his own started to take shape. Moss had been in punk group London (managed by Simon Napier-Bell) before becoming sticksman in the Damned for a few months in late 1977 and early 1978, after original drummer Rat Scabies walked out following sessions for their second album Music For Pleasure. After the Damned he had briefly played in Adam and the Ants – before they were poached by McLaren to become the backline of Bow Wow Wow.
Choosing the name Culture Club as it reflected the different ethnic backgrounds of the four members, although their first two 45s barely touched the UK singles chart the third, ‘Do You Really Want to Hurt Me’ went to Number One in most European territories and Number Two in the US, New Zealand and several others. The song’s success was propelled by an appearance on Top of the Pops equally as incendiary as Bowie’s infamous ‘Starman’ performance had been a decade earlier. Although the group’s debut was as an eleventh-hour replacement for Shakin’ Stevens, Culture Club would quickly achieve international superstar status, and Boy George himself would become a cultural icon. The band’s Top of the Pops performance generated tabloid headlines that focused on George’s androgynous look and his sexual ambiguity. No one then knew that George and Jon were involved in their own tempestuous relationship.
The timing was perfect. Not only was Britain ready for a new breed of pop star after the glamour-less punk and new wave years, but in America a new station, Music Television, or MTV, had recently started broadcasting and was desperate for film clips to fill its 24/7 music policy. British bands were old hands at making music videos; these short film clips had been a staple since the mid-1960s, and soon a second British Invasion took a grip, with Culture Club, Duran Duran, Adam Ant, Eurythmics, Ultravox and many more clogging up the US charts. Referred to as a ‘gender-bender’ in the press on both sides of the pond, George’s refusal to discuss his sexuality made him seem more a delightful eccentric than a threat to the nation’s youth. When he famously revealed that he would ‘rather have a cup of tea than go to bed with someone,’2 there was little reason to disbelieve him. Soon shops were filled with Boy George rag dolls, his face was on a thousand magazine covers and his records were hits everywhere. George’s fame was at its zenith when, in February 1986, he appeared as a guest star on the hit US action-drama The A-Team. There was no stopping him. He was, as Rolling Stone put it, ‘the harmless, lovable windup doll of pop, a cartoon-like fantasy figure who could sing like a white Smokey Robinson and trade glib one-liners with Joan Rivers and Johnny Carson. He was the pop star whom everyone from your grandmother to your little sister could like.’3
The 1980s were all about success and excess. Acquisition and avarice, it was all good and nowhere was the glamour and the greed celebrated more than on high-camp television blockbusters Dallas, Dynasty and Falcon Crest. But the early 1980s were also terrifying: gay men were dying from AIDS and no one outside of the LGBT community seemed to care. It wasn’t until Hollywood A-lister Rock Hudson became ill that the rest of the world began to show an interest. By the start of 1985, more than 5,500 people had died from the disease in the US but the government had done nothing to try to tackle the crisis. When Hudson, in Paris seeking treatment, collapsed at the Ritz Hotel, his publicist turned to Rock’s old friend Nancy Reagan, then America’s First Lady, for help in getting the ailing star admitted to a military hospital. She refused. Her husband, whose economic policy had virtually crippled the country, put the blame squarely on sexual promiscuity, telling Philadelphia’s College of Physicians that ‘all the vaccines and medications in the world won’t change one basic truth: that prevention is better than cure. Let’s be honest with ourselves. AIDS information cannot be what some call “value neutral” After all, when it comes to preventing AIDS, don’t medicine and morality teach the same lessons?’4
Hudson’s predicament was compounded on 31 July, when Channel 7 News reporter Harold Greene suggested that it was ‘possible that Rock Hudson transmitted AIDS to actress Linda Evans during love scenes’ on Dynasty. The show’s producer, Aaron Spelling, was incandescent. ‘All that can be said about Rock Hudson has been said, yet they go on and on. We’re just not going to become part of this witch-hunt. It’s taken all this time for gays to come out of the closet. And now this is driving them back into the closet.’5
The ignorance was, perhaps, understandable – and Hudson’s star status made him fair game for the media, yet his death in October that year shocked America and finally focused attention on HIV and AIDS. ‘All at once the disease was linked with someone everybody knew and accepted as practically a member of the family,’ People magazine wrote two months after his death:
Almost overnight, stimulated by massive media coverage, the US came to a consensus: AIDS was a grave danger to the national health, and something had to be done about it — fast. Since Hudson made his announcement, more than $1.8 million in private contributions (more than double the amount collected in 1984) has been raised to support AIDS research and to care for AIDS victims (5,523 reported in 1985 alone). A few days after Hudson died, at 59, on Oct. 2, 1985, Congress set aside $221 million to develop a cure for AIDS.6
Although the pop charts were reflecting a shift in attitude towards LGBT performers, the world of entertainment had not changed that much, and AIDS was now becoming an issue in the UK too. The government would finally take action in 1987 with its ‘Don’t Die of Ignorance’ campaign, but as late as 1985 it was still acceptable for British comedians to demand that gay performers be ‘banned from the entertainment business’ and for AIDS to be the stick that the establishment beat us with. In an outspoken interview with the Sunday People, Bernard Manning described Rock Hudson as ‘evil’ for passing the disease on to ‘his pansy partners like he was distributing death pills’ and made disparaging comments about performers including John Inman, Larry Grayson, Leonard Sachs, Kenny Everett, Peter Wyngarde and Boy George.7
Not only was the HIV/AIDS propaganda being spread by the government incredibly homophobic, but in 1986, reacting to a Daily Mail story about the book Jenny Lives With Eric And Martin, available in a school library run by the Labour-controlled Inner London Education Authority, the powers that be claimed that ‘there is no place in any school in any circumstances for teaching which advocates homosexual behaviour, which presents it as the “norm”, or which encourages homosexual experimentation by pupils’.8 During the 1987 election campaign, the Conservative Party distributed posters claiming that the Labour Party wanted similar books to be read in schools (according to Jill Knight of the Conservative pressure group The Monday Club) ‘to little children as young as five and six,’ which contained ‘brightly coloured pictures’ that ‘showed all about homosexuality and how it was done,’ and ‘explicitly described homosexual intercourse and, indeed, glorified it, encouraging youngsters to believe that it was better than any other sexual way of life’.9 A year later the government enacted Section 28 (also known as Clause 28), stating that a local authority ‘shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality’ nor could it ‘promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship’. The knives were out.
The introduction of Section 28 galvanised the disparate gay rights movement in the UK into action, with groups including Stonewall, OutRage! and Schools Out (originally The Gay Teachers Association) campaigning against the act, and pop stars recording songs in protest. Agitprop band Chumbawamba, keen supporters of LGBT rights, released the single ‘Smash Clause 28!’, and Boy George’s solo single ‘No Clause 28’ was a damning indictment of the government’s plans put to a thumping dance beat. If anyone in Britain was still questioning George’s sexuality, they were in for a rather rude awakening. In June, at the behest of Stonewall co-founder Ian McKellen, the Pet Shop Boys appeared at the anti-Clause 28 benefit Before The Act at London’s Piccadilly Theatre, performing their recent Number One hit ‘It’s A Sin’.
Formed in London in 1981 by Smash Hits staff writer Neil Tennant and Blackpool-born architecture student Chris Lowe, the pair had been making music together for a couple of years before Tennant was sent to New York to interview The Police: as luck would have it, he and Sting had been to the same school. Neil took advantage of the situation, taking a demo tape the pair had worked up to Hi-NRG producer Bobby Orlando (aka Bobby O), who had already achieved some success producing Divine. Tennant was a huge fan: ‘Meeting Bobby O was an even bigger thrill than meeting Sting. I have admired his production techniques with people like Divine as well as on his own records for a long time.’10
Bobby O would produce their first single, a prototype of their giant hit ‘West End Girls’. In all they would record 11 tracks with him – including early versions of hits ‘Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots of Money)’, ‘Rent’ and ‘It’s a Sin’. Released by Epic in the UK, this early version of ‘West End Girls’ failed to chart. The duo extracted themselves from their deal with Bobby O (Bobby had apparently turned down working with Dead or Alive in favour of the Pet Shop Boys)11 and signed to Parlophone in Britain, formerly home to the Beatles and part of the giant EMI corporation. Their second single for the company, a re-recorded ‘West End Girls’, quickly shot to the top of the singles charts. Leaving Bobby O behind cost them $1 million,12 but EMI had a monster hit-making machine on its hands.
Strange as it may seem now, in the 1980s the majority of Britain’s (resolutely closeted) LGBT pop stars were unmoved, at least publicly, by the crisis in our hospitals, our schools and in our daily lives. At a time when people could still be sacked from their job for being gay or lesbian, and when pubs, clubs and other businesses could refuse to serve you simply for being gay, the community needed a figurehead, someone that could appeal to both the gay and straight communities – yet very few people wanted to stick their head above the parapet. Not Freddie Mercury, not Elton John and not George Michael. It was up to Tom Robinson, Jimmy Somerville, Boy George and the Pet Shop Boys to educate people. In America, the situation was worse, with a capella act the Flirtations, fronted by gay activist Michael Callen, one of the very few groups brave enough to put the fight against HIV and AIDS at the very heart of their set: the group also appeared in the film Philadelphia, performing an a cappella version of ‘Mr. Sandman’.
When Elton and George Michael did decide to record together, the end product was the resolutely straight (and sexist) ‘Wrap Her Up’: neither of these two future gay icons was ready to risk harming their respective fan bases. Elton, who in 1984 married German recording engineer Renate Blauel, had ‘come out’ as bisexual to Rolling Stone in 1976, an act that was perceived to have damaged his career in the States, with letters calling John a pervert being sent to the magazine and many so-called fans refusing to buy his albums. It’s no wonder that he felt he had to conform. Besides, he was also dealing with an onslaught of lies peddled by British tabloid The Sun, which splashed everything from a supposed predilection for rent boys to animal cruelty (in the September 1987 ‘story’, ‘The Mystery of Elton’s Silent Dogs’) across its front page: Elton sued, was offered £1 million in damages and roughly half as much again in costs by The Sun before the case (just one of a total of 17 lawsuits Elton filed against the paper around that time), got to court and received a full apology. Editor Kelvin Mackenzie and owner Rupert Murdoch lost not only a considerable amount of money and face: the paper also suffered a substantial slump in sales. The British public were becoming sick of the relentless bullying.
‘Elton was out,’ Tom Robinson, who worked with John on the albums 21 at 33 and The Fox, insists. ‘He came out as bisexual and he subsequently fell in love with Renate and married her. That wasn’t him going back in to the closet, he genuinely was sexually attracted to her.’ Four years after marrying, the couple split and John came out as gay. ‘I honestly didn’t think it would hurt my career,’ John revealed to The Today Show host Matt Lauer in 2012. ‘It did a little bit. In America, people burned my records and radio stations didn’t play me’. Yet after his marriage failed and The Sun coughed up it became increasingly obvious that the public were ready to accept him for what he was.
Bernard Manning and his outdated cohorts would have had a fit had they met Sleazy Christopherson and Neil Andrew Megson, aka Genesis P-Orridge, two men who made art from uncompromising sexual imagery and unsettling industrial sounds. The genderfluid Genesis (they prefer ‘third gender’) was once vilified by the British media as ‘the most evil man in Britain’ for their fixation with death cults, fascist iconography and occultism. The two (with Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti) would form Throbbing Gristle, invent industrial rock music and spawn first Psychic TV and then Coil, the first out-band to be based around a gay couple: Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson and his boyfriend (and former member of Psychic TV) John Balance. Coil were at the forefront of British avant-garde music and were resolutely, unapologetically, in-your-face gay with a capital G. The front cover of the band’s debut album featured a male backside framed by an upturned crucifix; they provided the soundtrack to two Derek Jarman films and contributed the music to the documentary Gay Man’s Guide to Safer Sex. As well as working with P-Orridge in both Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, Christopherson was a designer and photographer, and one of the three partners of the album cover design group Hipgnosis, who produced iconic artwork for albums by Pink Floyd, Genesis, XTC and many others. For all of their chutzpah, Coil were only ever going to appeal to a fringe audience – unlike their sometime collaborator Marc Almond.
‘Soft Cell came from punk,’ says Almond (born Peter Mark Sinclair Almond in Southport on 7 July 1957: he changed his name to Marc in tribute to his idol Marc Bolan), ‘Punk made me realise that I didn’t need to be brilliant at playing instruments or making art – I could just create. It was about free expression.’13 After meeting keyboard player David Ball whilst they were both studying at Leeds Polytechnic, he formed Soft Cell in 1977. A self-described ‘garage band that used electronic instruments instead of guitars,’ their initial, self-funded EP release Mutant Moments garnered interest from several record companies and the pair signed to Some Bizzare, the record label set up by Billy’s DJ Stevo Pearce, issuing the single ‘Memorabilia’ and a track, ‘The Girl with the Patent Leather Face’ on the compilation Some Bizzare Album, which also featured future hit-makers Blancmange, The The and Depeche Mode – the group that would beget Erasure. ‘Memorabilia’ wasn’t a hit, but their follow-up, ‘Tainted Love’ (originally recorded by Bolan’s girlfriend Gloria Jones), proved to be a massive international success. ‘Tainted Love’ was the biggest-selling record of 1981 in the UK and was quickly followed by their debut album, Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret.
Almond has gone on record to say that, as Soft Cell were climbing the charts, he was being encouraged by his PR team to play the straight card: ‘I was informed by my press department that they had come up with “girlfriends” for me,’14 yet Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret was easily the most outlandish album to grace the British charts at that point. It’s resolutely seedy and dark, and with its S&M overtones and colourful lyrics, the record is fiercely, defiantly queer. If Marc’s TV debut, dressed from head to toe in black, festooned with bangles and wearing more eyeliner than any of the female artists on that week’s episode of Top of the Pops hadn’t been enough of a clue, then you’d have had to have been blind and deaf to ignore the gayness of Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret. Marc’s look and obvious feyness were quickly lampooned (on hit British comedy series Not the Nine O’Clock News in 1982): taking the piss out of homos was still a-OK by the BBC.
Also signed to Some Bizzare, Coil covered ‘Tainted Love’ to raise funds for HIV/AIDS charity the Terrence Higgins Trust in 1985, issuing what would be the earliest fundraising record for AIDS awareness in the UK. Almond appeared in the video and would collaborate with Coil on their first two full-length albums, Scatology and Horse Rotorvator. Balance died on 13 November 2004, after he fell from a second-floor landing at the home he shared with Christopherson near Weston-Super-Mare. Christopherson relocated to Thailand, and died there in his sleep just over six years after his partner, on 24 November 2010.
Having already acted as the lynchpin to two major chart acts in the space of three years – Depeche Mode (who, like Coil and Soft Cell, had started their recording career at Some Bizzare) and Yazoo (with Alison Moyet), in 1983 keyboard player Vince Clarke was working on one-off collaborations with singers including former Undertone Feargal Sharkey and Paul Quinn. Andy Bell had long been a fan of Clarke’s work, and answered an ad he placed in Melody Maker looking for new vocalists. ‘We’d auditioned about 40 people and Andy was the 43rd,’ Clarke told Paul Strange of Melody Maker. ‘He was like a breath of fresh air’.15 ‘Electronic music just seemed to flow in my blood, especially Dare by The Human League,’ Andy says. ‘I had always loved “soft” punk, ska, electro and Motown … the weirder the better sometimes: Nina Hagen, Lene Lovich, Siouxsie, X-ray Spex, Japan, Donna Summer and of course the Pretenders and Blondie – my favourite band.’ Unlike Vince, Andy had no previous experience in the music industry, his singing experience having been limited to a church choir in his native Peterborough and fronting local band The Void before recording a one-off single (‘Air of Mystery’) with friend Pierre Cope as Dinger (the name taken from Andy’s nickname: “Dinger” Bell). ‘It was pretty nerve-wracking, auditioning for Mr. Clarke but he was very much a hero of mine. I felt his music was so left field and unique, and I somehow felt that we belonged together. It took me quite a while to overcome being overly enamoured with him. I wasn’t surprised I was chosen but I think I was a bit taken aback by how naïve I was to the whole business.’
His association with Clarke wasn’t instantly successful: Erasure’s first three singles all flopped in the UK, however their fourth – ‘Sometimes’ – peaked at Number Two in 1986 and began a string of major hits for the duo. It would take another couple of years before the band saw any kind of success in America, but they quickly became major stars in Europe and Asia. Bell was open about his sexuality from the off: ‘There was no difficult decision. I remember having “discussions” with my then-partner/manager who thought it was a bad idea to come out! I was like “no way! It’s important and I’m doing it anyway”!’
Dressed in feathers, plastered in glitter or wearing ABBA-esque pantsuits, Bell brought a camp sensibility to Erasure that was at odds with the more strait-laced Depeche Mode or Yazoo (who, renamed Yaz in the States, scored four Number Ones in the US dance charts) and, unlike those other acts the relationship has endured. Erasure have now been together for more than three decades, although Bell’s brand of campery hasn’t always been to everybody’s taste: ‘One gay San Francisco paper voted that I should go back in [the closet],’ he once laughed.16 Bell has continued to talk openly about being a gay performer, telling Billboard that ‘my real obligation to the world is to show people that I am a happy person who happens to be gay. To me, it comes down to how you feel deep down inside. You can’t change the world if you feel miserable and hate yourself.’17 As he says today: ‘You often felt there was a correlation between the media catching on that you were gay and radio airplay going down. Especially in the US. You knew about all the others who were getting away with it but hey, I’m glad I did it in an honest way. Our shows in North and South America were like Gay Pride parades!’
AIDS had decimated the disco scene, and the disease would have far-reaching effects on all forms of entertainment, with movie stars, painters, photographers, dancers and TV personalities felled by the scourge. Like Soft Cell, Department S had their roots in the punk scene and, like them, were also influenced by the emergent Blitz Kids. Lead singer Vaughn Toulouse (born Vaughn Cotillard in July 1959) was, like Marc Almond, also a huge Bolan fan: the band’s early live set featured a cover of the T. Rex hit ‘Solid Gold Easy Action’. Toulouse was openly gay and he named his band after the camp cult TV series of the late 1960s starring out-gay actor Peter Wyngarde. The group, which evolved from an earlier punk band Guns for Hire (who issued on 45 on Korova), released their first single, ‘Is Vic There?’ in December 1980, first on Demon and then – in March 1981 – via RCA. It became their biggest hit, reaching Number 22: the follow-up, ‘Going Left Right’, peaked at 55.
Department S called it quits in 1982. Toulouse went to work as a DJ under the name Main T and was signed to Paul Weller’s Respond label, enjoying a minor hit with the Weller-composed ‘Fickle Public Speaking’. Vaughn became part of Weller’s extended Council Collective, writing sleeve notes for the Style Council (as The Cappuccino Kid) and appearing on their miners’ benefit release ‘Soul Deep’. Toulouse died in 1991 from complications of AIDS. AIDS proved to be no respecter of international borders, either. Federico Moura, leader of hit Argentinean pop band Virus, died from AIDS in 1988, just a year after he had come out. Brazilian songwriter Cazuza (Agenor de Miranda Araújo Neto), whose band Barão Vermelho (Red Baron) played the inaugural Rock In Rio festival in January 1985 with Queen, the B-52s and others, died on 7 July 1990. Cazuza, who was openly bisexual, gained a huge amount of media coverage as someone living with and fighting against AIDS, and his openness helped to change public perceptions and attitudes about HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment in South America.18
Klaus Nomi had drawn some attention already, performing as dancer and backing vocalist for Bowie’s perverse appearance on the American late-night live television sketch show Saturday Night Live in December 1979. Bowie, naturally, got all of the press for the oddball performance that saw him perform ‘TVC15’ in a skirt and climaxed with a puppet Bowie whipping his puppet penis out. For one song, ‘The Man Who Sold The World’, Bowie wore an immobile costume inspired by Tristan Tzara’s 1921 Dada play The Gas Heart – which would, in turn, inspire the costume worn on stage by his acolyte Nomi.
Or was Bowie the acolyte of this opera singer from outer space? Certainly it was Nomi that Bowie was keen to work with, spotting him and performance artist Joey Arias in New York’s Mudd Club where, as Arias recalled, ‘David exclaimed “Oh my God, Klaus! I just got back from Berlin and everyone is talking about you. We have to get together”.’19 Whichever way it worked, Nomi was so impressed with Bowie’s Dada costume that he adapted it for the huge plastic tuxedo that he would wear on the cover of his first album, in videos and on stage.
Born in Bavaria in 1944 (as Klaus Sperber), Nomi gave his first performances in Berlin, singing operatic arias in the city’s gay discos before moving to New York in 1972 and settling in the artistic, bohemian East Village. He acted, sang, appeared at the alternative cabaret New Wave Vaudeville and earned money by working as a pastry chef at the World Trade Center. His startling, mime-like make-up and his unique sound brought together elements of pre-war Berlin cabaret, Bowie’s showmanship and the world of opera. He was truly extraordinary; one reviewer claimed he sounded ‘like Pinocchio on helium’. When he first sang opera at the New Wave Vaudeville, the audience did not believe that he was not miming to a recording. It is no surprise that Bowie loved him, nor that Morrissey would also fall under his spell. Klaus Nomi seemed to have come from another world. ‘Some people think I’m not human,’ he once revealed20. ‘My mother visited me two years ago … she was so shocked. I had black fingernails and black lipstick, and she said: “You look like the Devil – I can’t believe it.” I said “Mother, I AM the Devil!” That was enough for her.’
Signed to Bowie’s record company, RCA, Nomi’s eponymous debut album appeared in 1981 and included a mix of original songs, operatic arias and contrary covers of Chubby Checker hits; ‘I always loved rock n’ roll,’ he told the Soho Weekly News. ‘I bought an Elvis Presley EP, King Creole. I hid it in the basement, but my mother found it. She went to the record store where I bought it and exchanged it for Maria Callas’ operatic arias. Well I was very agreeable to that too. I like each as well as the other’. It was an intriguing mix, but something that was almost impossible to market successfully. A second album, Simple Man, was simply odd: the standout track (and lead single) was an insane electropop version of ‘Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead’ from The Wizard of Oz. Nomi’s musical career, which showed so much promise, was cut short when he was diagnosed with the still virtually unheard-of AIDS. Though his health was fading fast, his handlers kept him on the road, milking their cash cow even as his body failed him. He died in New York on 6 August 1983, at the age of 39, just three days after Jobriath had succumbed to the same disease; one of his last performances was as backing vocalist on his friend Man Parrish’s ‘Six Simple Synthesisers’. In 2007 the remnants of an opera that Klaus had worked on for a number of years appeared, reworked, as Za Bakdaz. Andrew Horn’s excellent documentary film about the Klaus Nomi phenomenon, The Nomi Song, appeared in 2004.
Klaus Nomi in concert, 1981
Klaus Nomi had caused a small sensation when he appeared on the British TV show The Old Grey Whistle Test in 1982, but by that time audiences were becoming used to seeing the bizarre on their TV screens; Bowie’s ‘Ashes To Ashes’ had introduced people to Steve Strange and the Blitz Kids, Soft Cell had already racked up a Number One single, and in Liverpool – undergoing a musical renaissance with New Wave acts Echo and the Bunnymen, the Teardrop Explodes and others – a new band with an very unusual name had recently formed. That band, which took its name from a headline about Frank Sinatra making movies, would cause shockwaves in the music industry that are still being felt today.
‘Relax’, by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, was the first single by a band with openly gay members to top the UK charts; Soft Cell’s ‘Tainted Love’ had hit the Number One spot in 1981, but at the time of release singer Marc Almond had not come out (even though he would do so later). Both lead vocalist Holly Johnson and backing singer Paul Rutherford were out and proud, and the song’s video – set at a Bacchanalian orgy inside a gay nightclub where the band were surrounded by S&M acts, water sports and cross-dressers – left little to the imagination. Shocking, offensive and gloriously hedonistic, ‘Relax’ was famously banned from the BBC by Radio One DJ Mike Read, an act that propelled the single to the Number One spot where it stayed for five weeks. ‘I don’t regret what I did,’ Read told Jamming! magazine in May 1984. ‘From the outset, the band were very open about what they were about and the simulated sex scenes on their video made it clear that “Relax” was about gay sex’. ‘It’s only dirty if you have a dirty mind,’ Johnson told Judy Cantor of the Associated Press. ‘You really have to have a mind like a sewer’.21
During its run as the nation’s biggest-selling song, the nation’s broadcaster refused to play it: Top of the Pops, the most-watched music show of the day finally relented in time for their Christmas edition, but while ‘Relax’ was Number One it would not be shown. Within a few months ‘Relax’ had sold six million copies. The single would stay in the British charts for a year.
It was not the first song to be banned from the airwaves, nor would it be the last, but the ban helped Frankie become a massive, menacing, multi-platform phenomenon. In 1984, you couldn’t move without bumping in to someone wearing a FGTH t-shirt (everything from the straightforward Frankie Say Relax to the incendiary Frankie Say Arm the Unemployed) or go to a club without hearing the latest remix of ‘Relax’, ‘Two Tribes’ or their cover of the Edwin Starr hit ‘War’. The newspapers may have been shocked, but the kids dancing in the discos and queuing outside the doors of the record stores to buy their debut album Welcome to the Pleasuredome didn’t care a jot about Holly’s homosexuality. It was all about the music – and if that music happened to upset your parents, or a bore like Mike Read, then all the better. Johnson and Rutherford were part of a new generation of LGBT performers who were not going to apologise for being ‘different’.
The first band since fellow Liverpudlians Gerry and the Pacemakers to score a Number One hit with each of their first three singles (‘Relax’ also stole the top spot from fellow Liverpudlian Paul McCartney), Frankie broke records and broke rules. ‘The word “gay”, at least in the record biz, is no longer pop poison. In fact gay has cachet – witness the success of the Smiths and Bronski Beat’.22 Frankie were different: Johnson and Rutherford being so outrageously open about their sexuality should have limited their appeal, but it had entirely the opposite effect. Frankie Goes to Hollywood records were bought by New Wave fans, by indie kids, by rockers and by the people who bought dance records. The group appealed to both gay and straight audiences. They courted controversy in a way no act had done since the Sex Pistols eight years earlier. Breaking big in a vacuum caused by novelty acts like Black Lace and Renee & Renato (in exactly the same way that punk filled the void created by Brotherhood of Man and the Bay City Rollers), Frankie were all kinds of dangerous.
It may have appeared that Frankie were the post-punk Monkees, a group manufactured by studio wizard Trevor Horn and PR man Paul Morley, but Johnson and the rest of the band had been around for a number of years before hitting the big time: Johnson had been a member of Liverpool punk band Big In Japan and had issued a pair of solo 45s; Rutherford had been a member of local synth band Hambi and the Dance and, before that, the Spitfire Boys with future Banshees drummer Budgie. ‘You don’t start thinking you’re going to be famous; it’s just a bit of fun,’ says Rutherford. ‘It’s not born out of a hunger to be famous, it’s born out of a love of music – I don’t think anyone imagined that they’d have a record deal when they were 17 – it was quite amazing. I was too young to sign the record deal, my mum and dad had to sign the contract!’ The Spitfire Boys released one single, the Sex Pistols-inspired ‘British Refugee’/‘Mein Kampf’ in 1977.
Frankie had been together for a few years and had already recorded a spot for Channel 4’s hit pop show The Tube and two sessions for Radio One DJ John Peel before Horn and Morley (and their label, ZTT) signed them. ‘Morley had his strategy all worked out,’ Paul Rutherford confides. ‘He wanted us to be like the Sex Pistols – all the outrage, controversy, but this time with all the sex.’ Johnson and the others had been in a band called Sons of Egypt. When Rutherford returned from America, he sat in on their rehearsals and started to sing with them. ‘I thought I’d see if I could help them get a gig, which I did. Hambi and the Dance had signed a really big deal with Virgin; they had a tour lined up around England and Europe, and it was like “do you fancy doing BVs [backing vocals] for us?” The punk thing had died a little bit really and it was something to do so I said “yeah”! So I went off on tour with them and that’s how I got Frankie the support.’
*
1984 was a watershed year for LGBT acts in the UK. In the list of the 100 best-selling singles of the year, ‘Relax’ and ‘Two Tribes’ take first and second place respectively, and advance orders for Frankie’s debut album Welcome to the Pleasuredome, topped 1.1 million.23 The previous year had seen Culture Club top the list (with ‘Karma Chameleon’), but the only other LGBT acts represented were Kajagoogoo (led by gay singer Limahl) with ‘Too Shy’, Marilyn (‘Calling Your Name’), Wham! (although George Michael had yet to come out), Elton John and Tom Robinson. In the Top 100 for 1982, just three LGBT acts – Culture Club, Soft Cell and Wham! – made the cut, although at the time not one of them was out. Besides Frankie, 1984 saw both Wham! and George Michael as a solo act, Queen, Bronski Beat, Limahl (solo with ‘Never Ending Story’), the Weather Girls, Hazel Dean, Elton John and Culture Club score huge hits, plus Evelyn Thomas chart with Ian Levine’s gay disco anthem ‘High Energy’. Unemployment was out of control, with more than three million on the dole and a quarter of under 25-year-olds unable to find work. Thatcher’s Britain was failing the young. What they needed was escapism, and what they craved was glamour.
Suddenly, everyone was wearing make-up, and trying to work out who was who (or who was what) was becoming harder. The Cure’s Robert Smith and Human League’s Phil Oakey could be seen on Britain’s TV screens in lipstick and lace; camp had gone mainstream, with Boy George and fellow Blitz Kid Marilyn appearing on the front cover of every magazine and on everything from Saturday morning kids’ TV shows through to prime-time chat shows. Marilyn, born Peter Robinson in Kingston, Jamaica in 1962, was dubbed ‘the unacceptable face of pop’ by Britain’s tabloids, viewed as the sexy counterpart to the cute and cuddly Boy George. The two had shared a squat together prior to George finding fame, but it had taken an appearance in the video for the Eurythmics’ single ‘Who’s that Girl’ for Marilyn to be discovered. His biggest hit, ‘Calling Your Name’, was written about his friend/nemesis. Soon others would try and jump on the gender bender bandwagon: singer Peter Helliwell, of the band Wide Boy Awake (who, naturally, featured ex-Ant Kevin Mooney in their line-up), reinvented himself as the androgynous Damian Grey. Damian may have felt that ‘Boy George has as much sex appeal as a fish dinner,’24 but any hope he had of being the Jobriath of the 1980s fell at the first hurdle.
In Frankie’s wake, another Liverpudlian act, Dead or Alive, would reach Number One with ‘You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)’, bringing an infectious collision of Hi-NRG beats, Blitz Kids glamour and high camp to teatime TV. The British singles chart had never been so gay. Dead or Alive’s singer was Paul Rutherford’s friend Pete Burns, the former record shop assistant whose fierce look and uncompromising ‘screw you’ attitude had singled him out as one to watch long before he was seen performing ‘You Spin Me Round’ on Top of the Pops, as Boy George recalled: ‘In the 70s I really wanted to go to Liverpool because I’d heard that this club, Eric’s, was the place to be. He walked up to me and said: “you’ve copied my look”!’25
Paul Rutherford explains:
Me and Holly and Pete were just being who we were. You’d walk down the street in Liverpool dressed to the nines and didn’t actually care about it. I’d been bullied at school so I’d got quite used to that – that stuff used to go way over my head … we wanted to be noticed and we were going to be as outrageous as we wanted to be. It’s a very defiant, Liverpool act. People used to come in to Probe [the record store where Pete Burns worked] to throw beer cans at us and call us queens and we’d fight back. We weren’t scared; we were determined. I think that’s why that whole thing happened in Liverpool, people became very defiant and it became this really great scene with people dressing up. The gay thing and the punk thing were always very close anyway, even in London with the Banshees hanging around the gay clubs. It was the gay clubs where you could find these people wearing make-up, just hanging out there.’
Originally formed in 1979 as Nightmares in Wax (their first single, ‘Birth of a Nation’ was issued in 1980), the band’s debut album, Sophisticated Boom Boom, featured their first proper chart hit, a cover of the KC and the Sunshine Band disco floor-filler ‘That’s the Way (I Like it)’, but it was ‘You Spin Me Round’ (included on their sophomore effort, Youthquake) that made him a star, spending almost a year in the charts. Ironically, when the band was signed to Epic, the company went into overdrive to market their bisexual frontman as the next Boy George. ‘Everywhere I went, people were asking me to sign autographs as George,’ Burns admitted in his 2007 autobiography Freak Unique.26 A media-manufactured feud followed, and ‘gender bender’ became part of the English language, but the hits soon dried up. Unperturbed, Burns and Dead or Alive concentrated their efforts on Japan, where the band enjoyed superstar status.
But for Pete Burns the price of fame was too great. Flamboyant and outrageous on stage, in private he found it hard coping with notoriety, and his obsession with his looks saw him spend any money he made on plastic surgery.
Burns died suddenly, of a massive heart attack caused by a pulmonary embolism, on 23 October 2016, sadly in the week that he was due to release a career-spanning 10-CD box set. His old adversary Boy George described him as ‘one of our great true eccentrics’. Marc Almond added, ‘we’ve had some mad times with Pete but he was a one-off creation, a fabulous, fantastic, brilliant creature and always sweet to me.’ A few days after Burns’ death, in a last act of largesse towards his old sparring partner, Boy George offered to cover the cost of the funeral.27
Despite what seemed to be blanket acceptance at home, when the time came for Frankie to try to crack the States, things changed, subtly perhaps, but perceptibly. The homosexuality of the two singers was toned down (something that pleased their three heterosexual bandmates), and because MTV refused to air the original video for ‘Relax’, an anodyne version was issued in its place. Despite choosing to make their live debut in the United States – before their biggest audience had a chance to see them in action – ‘Relax’ stalled at 67 on the Billboard charts. ‘Two Tribes’ fared little better, rising to 45 (‘Relax’ was repromoted in 1985 following the release of Welcome to the Pleasuredome, and this time hit the US Top 10). ‘The gay thing was played down because of the boys in the band really, they weren’t gay and being Liverpool lads they really didn’t want that badge,’ reveals Rutherford:
But we were so busy just doing it that we really didn’t have time to take stock of what was really happening. We played up to it a hell of a lot! That was our nature; throw a few beers down our throats and we were off again. We were just a big bunch of Liverpool lads getting pissed and then the two gay ones would come along with their arses hanging out! It was fun, and it was funny but we soon got bored. It became as though we were being gay on demand. It’s America, and you’re not going to go on TV unless you play by the rules: we weren’t very good at being told what to do, so we ignored all that … we wouldn’t make excuses: it wasn’t us. That’s what Frankie was really, an exercise in being really honest. That’s why we split up in the end, because we were very honest with each other!’
‘Rage Hard’, the first single from their second album (Liverpool) peaked at Number Four in the UK in 1986, and the album itself reached Number Five. A worldwide tour was lined up to follow the release, but by April 1987 Frankie Goes to Hollywood had broken up – dates set for Australia had to be cancelled after the group split into two factions – Johnson versus the rest of the band. ‘We had a very big career in a very short space of time,’ Rutherford explains. ‘We burnt ourselves out quite quickly. We fitted a lifetime in to those few years. It was exhausting but we didn’t care, because it was also fun.’ The same hypocrisy that had forced Rutherford and Johnson back into the closet saw MTV ban the video for Queen’s single ‘Body Language’ because it showed Freddie Mercury in a women’s sauna,28 yet the broadcaster was happy to show all four members of the band in drag – and Mercury crowd surfing over a sea of nubile young men – when it programmed the film clip for ‘I Want to Break Free’ on heavy rotation.
The rise of two of the most influential American bands of the decade was aided by the massive amount of airtime afforded them by MTV. And like many others who came to fame in the decade, they would also have their lives forever changed by their run-ins with HIV and AIDS: one would lose a beloved founder member (and brother), the other would become one of the most outspoken acts of the century, with much of its political activity directed towards HIV and AIDS awareness and prevention. Both acts hailed not from New York or Los Angeles, but from Athens, Georgia: the B-52’s and R.E.M. Both acts would produce some of the most defining music of the American indie/New Wave scene – and both featured LGBT members. In the case of R.E.M. it was ‘equal opportunity letch’ Michael Stipe. Hailed as the politically aware voice of a generation, Stipe was the only queer member of the planet-straddling colossus; in the five-piece B-52s, singer and percussionist Cindy Wilson was the only straight member. Stipe came out, identifying himself as queer, at the height of his band’s fame: when a gaunt-looking Stipe appeared at the Grammy Awards in 1992 wearing a baseball cap with the legend White House Stop AIDS emblazoned on it, rumours about his sexuality and health began to circulate. He really had little choice but to say something, but when he did, he did it on his own terms. He wrote in The Guardian shortly after the twentieth anniversary of the event:
It was September 1994, and my band had released the two biggest records of our career. With Out of Time and Automatic for the People, we had sold more than 25 million records worldwide, and we were ramping up to tour for the first time in five years. I was more famous than I could have ever imagined. For the promotion of our next album, Monster, and its world tour, I decided to publicly announce my sexuality. I said simply that I had enjoyed sex with men and women my entire adult life. It was a simple fact, and I’m happy I announced it.29
Formed in 1976, with four of the band’s founding members gay or lesbian, the B-52’s odd mix of surf guitar licks and Yoko Ono-inspired vocals singled them out as at odds with the rest of the world even before the media started to pry into the various members’ private lives: debut single ‘Rock Lobster’ sounded nothing less than otherworldly. Sadly, while recording the band’s third studio album Whammy! guitarist Ricky Wilson discovered he had contracted AIDS. He died on 12 October 1985 at just 32 years old. The group had enormous success worldwide with hits including ‘Love Shack’ (the video for which featured an early cameo from RuPaul) and ‘Roam’; singer Kate Pierson, who married her girlfriend Monica Coleman in 2015, added her distinctive vocals to fellow Athenians R.E.M.’s multi-platinum album Out Of Time, including on the worldwide hit ‘Shiny Happy People’.
‘These 20 years of publicly speaking my truth have made me a better and easier person to be around,’ wrote Stipe. ‘It helped develop the clarity of my voice and establish who I would be as an adult. I am proud to be who I am, and I am happy to have shared that with the world.’ San Francisco-based Mark Eitzel, an occasional collaborator with R.E.M.’s guitarist Peter Buck, outed himself a decade before Stipe felt comfortable enough to do the same. ‘I didn’t get a good reaction,’ the singer for the cult band American Music Club told Ben Walsh of The Independent. ‘The record company wasn’t happy and they wanted to put out that I was bi, not gay. It was the Eighties and a completely different world. In the rock ’n’ roll world, even in San Francisco, it was not really acceptable to come out. Twenty years on, it’s completely changed, thank goodness.30
Mista Majah P, 2011
