Review
Genre and Mood
Bronski Beat and Arnaud Rebotini’s Smalltown Boy (Arnaud Rebotini Remix) is a remix that carries a 1984 synth-pop classic into house. It is melancholic and nostalgic by design, and in the film it was made for it becomes haunting.
Song Summary
The French director Robin Campillo asked Rebotini, who was composing the score for his film 120 Battements Par Minute, to remix Smalltown Boy as a homage to Jimmy Somerville, whose early years included work with AIDS activists. Rebotini set out to make the remix as if it had been made in 1993, in the years the film depicts, adding subtle club references with layers of house and disco. Because Music released it on 23 August 2017, on the film’s soundtrack, and it reappeared on the expanded Age of Consent reissue in 2018, the album this page names.
Musical Breakdown
Main Section
No review we found walks through the record, so this page describes less than usual. The constants are Somerville’s falsetto and the song’s lyric of a boy who leaves home. The Quietus followed the remix through the film instead: in a protest scene, Rebotini strips the song back to its most basic elements, hollow and cold, like sound reverberating from the inner walls of a church; at first only Somerville’s elongated vocals, then strings plucked in a slow drip-drop cadence. When the film cuts to the nightclub, the song takes on a more conventional, if still minimal, production, and later its slow, metronomic beat merges with the laboured breathing of Sean, an activist dying of AIDS.
Concepts in Focus
A remix keeps an original recording’s identity while rebuilding its setting. Here the identity is the falsetto of Bronski Beat – Small Town Boy, a high, fragile voice that sang about leaving a small town in 1984 and, in Rebotini’s hands, sings for a generation of activists losing friends to AIDS.
That shift comes from the soundtrack. 120 Battements Par Minute follows Act Up-Paris in the early 1990s; its title refers to house music, which Campillo called the festive and anxious soundtrack of that era. Bronski Beat’s song and Mr Fingers’ What About This Love? play in it alongside Rebotini’s score. For another later version of the song, hear Bronski Beat – Smalltown Boy - Reprise 2014.
Artistic Context
Arnaud Rebotini, born in 1970, played in a death metal band before turning to electronic music, recorded as Zend Avesta and co-founded Black Strobe. His equipment runs from Roland’s TR-808 and TB-303 to the Sequential Circuits Pro-One. Bronski Beat released Smalltown Boy in May 1984 on London Recordings as their debut single; it reached number three in the UK.
Impact and Reception
The film won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2017 and six Césars, among them best original music for Rebotini, who dedicated the prize to the forgotten heroes of the AIDS fight. Smalltown Boy itself remains a gay anthem, and in 2024 the writer Ian Wade said it still means something to young people. Listen to it with the film in mind.
