Disco as community, space and memorialisation: Jimmy Somerville fights AIDS in 4 albums

<p dir="ltr">This chapter outlines the resonances of Jimmy Somerville’s career, and examines the significance of disco for marking a gay history, and memorializing the past. Somerville was designated an unusual role in the music industry. He was for many officially the gayest musician in the UK. He was regularly referred to as the most high-profile gay pop star, and his first band Bronski Beat were the “first real gay group in the history of pop.” His repertoire established the politics of a gay canon delivered through the cover version, marking the importance of gay liberation’s Sylvester, and that of Judy Garland, honoring disco and showtunes. In the fight against AIDS, remixes and covers were themselves acts of memorialization and awareness raising. Somerville left traces of disco’s importance (as sound, heritage, and space) in the Hall Carpenter archives and oral history project, the music and gay press, popular accounts of the 1980s, the IBA, BFI, BBC, and in the basement of the Gay’s the Word bookshop. Thus, he acts as a tour guide around the variety of grassroots responses to HIV and AIDS, raising funds, awareness, campaigning, counseling, and supporting friends and family.</p>