Review
Genre and Mood
Bronski Beat’s I Feel Love is the long closing track of an album filed under synth-pop, disco and hi-NRG, and it takes the most ecstatic song in disco somewhere colder. The Quietus called the combination one that “induces cold sweat more than feverish longing”: haunting, full of longing and intense all at once.
Song Summary
On the album the track is a medley, credited as I Feel Love/Johnny Remember Me; the streaming edition titles it simply I Feel Love. It joins Donna Summer’s 1977 hit, produced by Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte, to Johnny Remember Me, John Leyton’s 1961 chart-topper, which Classic Pop calls a spectral “death disc”. The Quietus adds the detail that makes it memorable: a “sensuous surprise for the ending”, a refrain of Summer and Moroder’s Love to Love You Baby.
Musical Breakdown
I Feel Love
The medley opens on Summer’s song, and it keeps what The Quietus calls “the thrilled, ecstatic whorl of a Moroder soundscape”; the album credits keyboards and percussion to Steve Bronski and Larry Steinbachek.
Johnny Remember Me
The second song turns the mood: a “death disc”, a ghost song, which takes the medley “into spectral territory, a love stopped in time”.
Outro
The ending brings in Love to Love You Baby, and The Quietus singles out Somerville’s final “baby”, so tactile it seems pressed into the record.
Concepts in Focus
This is a cover version that keeps the sound and changes the meaning. Where Summer evoked, in The Quietus’s words, a woman melting with lust, Somerville sounds frozen. Classic Pop reads it as a reclaiming of the song, made after Summer’s remarks about AIDS, on an album whose inner sleeve listed the age of consent for sex between men across Europe.
Johnny Remember Me enters as an interpolation: Bronski Beat play and sing it again inside the medley, so Geoff Goddard, its writer, joins the credits. A second song can change the first, and here a ghost changes the dance floor.
The lead is Jimmy Somerville’s falsetto, the high, light register he was known for in Bronski Beat. In disco falsetto often sounds euphoric; here, The Quietus says, his voice “turns smouldering heat into an ice burn”. Hear the same voice in the band’s own song Bronski Beat – Small Town Boy.
Artistic Context
Bronski Beat were Somerville, Bronski and Steinbachek. The Age of Consent, produced by Mike Thorne and released by London Records on 15 October 1984, reached number four in the UK. In April 1985 a remade I Feel Love (Medley), with Marc Almond duetting, became a number-three single; this is the earlier album version.
Impact and Reception
Reviewing the 40th-anniversary reissue in 2024, The Quietus ended its account of the medley with “What a lovely way to burn”, and Classic Pop gave the reissue five stars. Listen to the end, for that last “baby”.
