Steve Bronski, keyboardist in Bronski Beat, the trio who created landmark songs of 1980s popular culture including Smalltown Boy – obituary

Steve Bronski, who has died aged 61, played keyboards in the eponymously named Eighties synthpop trio Bronski Beat, whose best-known hit, Smalltown Boy, has since become a classic of the era and a gay anthem.

The group was formed when Bronski was sharing a flat in Brixton, south London, with his fellow Glaswegian, Jimmy Somerville, and with Larry Steinbachek (who came from Essex). Bronski was then in a relationship with Steinbachek, who worked as a British Telecom engineer and had an interest in electronics which soon encompassed the new generation of synthesisers.

Neither knew, however, that Somerville could sing, and they only heard his distinctive falsetto when he recorded music for a documentary about young gay people, Framed Youth, which was subsequently shown on Channel 4.

The three then decided to form a group. Bronski had reputedly taken his own surname from a character in Gunter Grass’s novel The Tin Drum, and the band chose theirs as a kind of spin on Roxy Music.

At their first gig, in a pub in King’s Cross, they played six songs – and were given six encores. All those in the group were openly gay and were frustrated by the discrimination shown to homosexual people by society, not least during the initial panic about the spread of Aids.

They were also dissatisfied that gay musicians – for instance, Elton John and Freddie Mercury – were expected to pass as straight, if flamboyant. Bronski Beat were therefore determined to make their songs political.

This generated a buzz in the industry, and the budding pop impresario Paul Morley tried to sign them to his label, ZTT. The band objected, however, to his plans for styling and marketing them, and instead he signed Frankie Goes to Hollywood.

The massive success of that group’s single Relax – helped by the BBC imposing a ban on playing it – showed that a younger generation was receptive to music made by gay groups, not least because it was often designed for dancing.

Smalltown Boy, however, took things an important stage further when it was released in 1984. The lyrics spoke only in general of the unhappiness of a misunderstood youngster quitting home: “You leave in the morning with everything you own in a little black case / Alone on a platform, the wind and the rain on a sad and lonely face.”

The video promoting the song was more explicit, however. Shot by Bernard Rose, who had made the video for Relax and would go on to direct films including Candyman (1992), it depicted Somerville as a young gay man attracted by a male swimmer he sees diving at the local baths.

He is then beaten up by the swimmer and his friends, and his sexuality inadvertently “outed” to his parents when he is brought home by a policeman. He decides to leave town, although his father refuses to shake his hand as he does: “The love that you need will never be found at home.”

The video was something of a landmark in British popular culture and helped the record to reach No 3 in the charts. The song was also the group’s only hit of note in America.

The subsequent LP maintained their campaigning stance. Entitled Age of Consent, its inner sleeve listed the difference between the legal ages of consent for hetero- and homosexuals around the world.

In Britain in 1984, that for heterosexuals was 16. Sexual relations between homosexuals, however, were illegal unless all parties were over 21. The age was lowered to 18 in 1994 and equalised only in 2000.

Bronski Beat had several more big hits in 1984, including Why?, It Ain’t Necessarily So and a cover, with Marc Almond, of I Feel Love, which got to No 3. They also headlined a concert – Pits and Perverts – in support of the striking coalminers.

But the following year tensions within the group boiled over. Somerville quit to found the Communards, with the future Reverend Richard Coles, leaving Steinbachek to carry on the band with Steve Bronski.

He was born Stephen William Forrest on February 7 1960 and grew up in Castlemilk, Glasgow, living on the vast housing estate to which some 34,000 residents had been moved from the Gorbals. After leaving school, he played bass in a country & western band and worked variously as a labourer, a stagehand and a stock controller at Harrods.

After Somerville left, Bronski recruited a new singer, John Foster. A single, Hit That Perfect Beat, reached No 3, and was followed by two LPs, Truthdare Doubledare (1986) and Out and About (1987).

The band were then dropped by their label and a long hiatus followed before remixed versions of their early hits and an album, Rainbow Nation, were released in the mid-1990s. Thereafter, Bronski worked as a producer and spent periods living in Thailand, Paris and Amsterdam.

Larry Steinbachek died from cancer in 2016. That year, Bronski – together with another member of the group in its later incarnation, Ian Donaldson – put out a re-recorded version of the band’s debut album, now entitled Age of Reason.

Steve Bronski had suffered a debilitating stroke some years ago, and he reportedly died from the effects of smoke inhalation after fire took hold of his flat in Soho.

Steve Bronski, born February 7 1960, died December 7 2021