Review
Genre and Mood
Bronski Beat‘s Smalltown Boy - Reprise 2014 is the band’s most famous song sung again by its singer, Jimmy Somerville, thirty years on. The synth-pop has gone: what is left is an acoustic ballad for voice and piano, haunting in Slicing Up Eyeballs’ word, reflective and melancholic where the original drove forward.
Song Summary
Smalltown Boy, released in 1984, tells of a gay teenager who is bullied, misunderstood by his family and leaves home on a train. For the thirtieth anniversary, Somerville recorded this stripped-down version, released on 16 June 2014 under his own name. His website, quoted by Slicing Up Eyeballs, said the song deals with loneliness, rejection by family and society and being bullied for supposed differences, and that it continues to inspire many people. The 2018 expanded edition of The Age of Consent later added it, at 2:45, to its second disc, credited to Bronski Beat, and that is the copy the yearbook names.
Musical Breakdown
Verse 1
The first lines arrive without the sequenced octave pattern that powered the original: the boy on the platform, the little black case, the wind and the rain, carried by a voice and the piano.
Chorus
No source describes how the chorus is sung here, so listen for yourself: the words that once rode over a dance beat now have only the piano under them.
Concepts in Focus
This is an alternate version: a second finished recording of the same song by its own singer, with a different arrangement. The Georgia Straight described it as stripped of burbling synthesizers, with the piano accompaniment foregrounding the soulfulness of the survivor that the lyric conveys. Hold it against the original in Bronski Beat – Small Town Boy and you hear how much of the 1984 urgency was in the machines.
The music video, on Somerville’s own channel rather than the audio upload embedded here, is the opposite of Bernard Rose’s 1984 story of a swimming pool, an attack and a train. Filmed in May 2014 at RAK Studios in St John’s Wood, London, and directed by Freddie Hall, it shows Somerville singing and Nick Nasmyth at the piano, a performance rather than a plot.
Artistic Context
Somerville, born in Glasgow in 1961, left Bronski Beat in 1985, after The Age of Consent, which remained the only album the band made with him. The reprise came out under his own name, with a 2014 copyright of Jess E Musique Ltd, and it reached number 51 in Ireland. Its place on the reissue folds it back into the band’s story.
Impact and Reception
Slicing Up Eyeballs called it a haunting new stripped-down version, and the Georgia Straight noted that the story still holds for many young LGBT people in small towns. Listen to it after the original.
