Jimmy Somerville

On June 22, 1961, Jimmy Somerville entered the world in Glasgow, Scotland, and later supplied his soaring falsetto to Bronski Beat and the Communards, two leading dance-pop acts of the 1980s, before launching a solo path. He helped establish Bronski Beat in 1984; beginning with the band’s first single, “Smalltown Boy,” his material addressed his homosexuality directly, a subject that encountered little commercial pushback when both that track and its successor, “Why?,” reached the U.K. Top Ten. The widely praised Age of Consent appeared before the group’s 1985 reinterpretation of Donna Summer’s disco staple “I Feel Love,” yet Somerville soon departed to create the Communards, whose 1986 version of Thelma Houston’s “Don’t Leave Me This Way” topped the British singles chart.

Following two well-received albums, Somerville chose a solo route in 1988 and returned the next year with Françoise Hardy’s “Comment Te Dire Adieu”; the subsequent single, Sylvester’s club standard “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real),” climbed into the Top Five, while Read My Lips also entered the Top 40. A reggae-inflected take on the Bee Gees’ “To Love Somebody” came next, but after 1991’s “Run from Love” he stepped away from recording for several years, resurfacing in 1995 with Dare to Love. Manage the Damage appeared in 1999, Root Beer followed in 2000, and the dance-focused Home Again arrived on the Jinx label in 2004.

His fifth solo album, the acoustic covers collection Suddenly Last Summer, surfaced in 2009. The following year he issued Bright Thing, the opening installment of a three-part EP series, with Momentum arriving in 2011 and Solent completing the sequence in 2012. Two years afterward, Somerville marked the 30th anniversary of Bronski Beat’s “Smalltown Boy” by releasing a newly recorded version. In 2015 he delivered Homage, his sixth studio album, which drew on vintage disco sounds; Club Homage, a remix edition featuring legendary disco DJ Tom Moulton, appeared the next year.