In a particularly cruel moment, his father hands him money for his journey but refuses to shake his hand, and turns away from him. He is effectively outed to his parents when a police officer escorts him home with bruises on his face, so makes the decision to leave home. Later, outside a snack bar, he is ambushed and subjected to a vicious homophobic attack by the diver and his friends. The “Smalltown Boy” is played by Somerville, who we see making a pass at a handsome diver at his local swimming pool. While the “Relax” video had been deliberately provocative, full of leather bondage gear and featuring a Caligula-like emperor, the video for “Smalltown Boy” is a starker and more grounded short film that viscerally brought the song’s narrative to life. But I do think their approach was much more politicised and much more serious.” So in a sense, I don’t think it was like their thunder was stolen, but they weren’t the first. It propelled to being huge… Bronski Beat were around before that happened, but their record came out after, and they were coming out into a market where the Frankie thing had already happened. “Frankie Goes to Hollywood were really the first ones who came out and said, ‘Well, yeah, we’re gay.’ And it caused a shockwave, but it also didn’t hurt them – it did the opposite. “There were a lot of artists who were gay but not open about it, like Boy George, George Michael, Freddie Mercury, Elton John – these people we now think have always been out, but they were not out in 1984, and they were all at the height of their fame,” Rose told Yahoo Music in 2019. The director recalls how groundbreaking it was at the time that both acts were “out” in public. The “Relax” video was directed by Bernard Rose, who was hired by Bronski Beat the following year to create the visuals for “Smalltown Boy”. Alicia Keys review, KEYS: An experimental double record that stops short of reaching its tall ambitions.
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