This month marks the 40th anniversary of The Age Of Consent, the landmark debut album from British synth-pop trio Bronski Beat, initially made up of musicians Jimmy Somerville, Steve Bronski, and Larry Steinbachek.
Powerful, propulsive, and unabashedly gay, the group’s music was a much-needed calling card for the LGBTQ+ community in the ’80s, especially at a time when Margaret Thatcher’s conservative reign was actively silencing queer voices in the U.K. and HIV/AIDS continued to spread.
While first single “Smalltown Boy” remains Bronski Beat’s most enduring hit, their followup “Why?” is just as potent and deserves to also be remembered as a timeless queer anthem.
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The song was inspired by—and dedicated to—friend of the band Drew Griffiths, a gay playwright who was chased out of the country by his boyfriend’s angry family and eventually murdered.
Lyrically, “Why?” doesn’t hold back, nor does it attempt to mask its righteous queer themes in metaphor. “Contempt in your eyes when I turn to kiss his lips,” vocalist Sommerville sings. “Broken I lie, all my feelings denied, blood on your fist.”
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Over cascading synths and a wail of horns, the chorus repeats the question, “Can you tell me why?,” begging, pleading for someone to explain the point of the ceaseless homophobic violence. Meanwhile, the bridge offers a defiant rallying cry: “You and me together, fighting for our love.”
Upon its release “Why?” came complete with a conceptual video, which featured Sommerville as a butcher in a market overrun by gluttonous consumers. When what we can assume is meant to a gay couple has their money refused as the counter, Sommerville defends them before being dragged away to a court where judges are being puppeteered by a spiteful god. He’s then sent to work on a messy, factory line job, where he eventually leads the others in a riotous protest.
Filmed on an intricate set in a single soundstage, the video is actually quite striking, though it’s been said Bronski Beat was “never happy” with the visuals as they felt “frivolous and sidestepped the anger and passion behind the song.”
Considering “Why” was written in memory of a friend lost to violence and is so direct and urgent in its lyrical messaging, it’s not hard to see why the band members might have preferred something more to the point.
In the four decades since, Bronski Beat’s roster changed a number of times, and Sommerville split off the pursue projects of his own. Today, he’s the only surviving member of the original trio (Steinbachek passed in late ’16, and Bronski in ’21).
In celebration of The Age Of Consent‘s 40th anniversary, Sommerville wanted to honor his bandmates’ legacies, as well as the generations of queer fans who have been empowered by the trio’s trailblazing work. Along with a deluxe, remastered re-release of the album, he also commissioned a new video for “Why?,” tapping filmmaker and activist Matt Lambert to reimagine visuals that would match the song’s revolutionary spirit and perpetual timeliness.
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The result is “Why?,” a hybrid documentary and music video that uses Bronski Beat’s towering anthem to link the past to the present. Lambert assembles archival footage to set the scene of the early ’80s, providing some context for the fraught era that birthed the song.
But as the synth beats fades in and Sommerville wails, “tell me whyyyyy?,” the clips jump through time, right up to this very minute, alternating between scenes of real-world cruelty and homophobia to moments of unity and celebration.
“It was such a dream to look into the past and future with Jimmy,” director Matt Lambert shares in a press statement. “This project was born out of an ongoing dialogue about the past and our ongoing responsibilities to protect what we’ve fought so hard for.”
In an ’84 interview with the Record Mirror, Sommerville shared the song was about “a constant fight for your right to love and that’s a right everybody should have—to love who they want.” Today he adds: “I never thought a song that we wrote in 1984 would resonate even more powerfully in 2024.”
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As wrenching and heartbreaking as some of the footage in the new “Why?” video may be, it stands to remind us of what Bronski Beat always hoped we’d take away from their music: We’re here, we have always been here, and we’re not going anywhere as long as we stand by one another.
It’s no accident that the new, extended mix of the song brings its bridge to the end, letting Sommerville sing, “you and me together, fighting for our love” as a final, hopeful note of resistance.
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