Born in Northamptonshire in 1962, Richard Coles was a chorister before escaping to London as a young gay man. He collaborated with Jimmy Somerville initially in Bronski Beat, then in the Communards, whose 1986 number one version of “Don’t Leave Me This Way” was that year’s biggest-selling single. When the band split, Coles turned to theology, eventually becoming a Church of England priest and later, one of Britain’s best-known vicars.
He presented Radio 4’s Saturday Live and has since written bestselling memoirs and crime novels. His late husband David Oldham died in 2019, and he now lives with his partner Richard Cant in East Sussex. Here he looks back on the moments that changed his perspective on work, love, family, money and health.
I was very close to my mother. We immediately connected and as a boy, I liked being with her. I enjoyed her company. She liked doing things with me that I enjoyed. I was quite a mummy’s boy, and I like being a mummy’s boy. I’m immensely grateful for being a mummy’s boy. I think everything I’ve got in life of lasting value has some got something to do with being a mummy’s boy.
The realisation that I was gay came along as soon as puberty, so 12 or 13. But I went to an all-boys school where it would have been risky to have declared myself, so I kept quiet until I was 16.
My parents accepted my homosexuality in a sporting way. It wasn’t what they wanted to hear, and they hadn’t had that happen before, but they would never have not loved me. I’ve never felt for a seconds I wouldn’t be loved, or that I’d be considered a disgrace. When I told them, they just took it on the chin and did their best with it.
Depression broadened my empathy. It made me sympathetic to people who were struggling. I’ve always had a very strong identification with people who were isolated from the world in which they grew up in, and demonised and marginalised. That always spoke to me very powerfully and still does. I’ve got huge lapses in it as well. My empathy is not always evenly distributed.
Mozart stopped me from taking my own life. The last movement of the ‘Jupiter Symphony’. I remember in the depths of depression putting that on and hearing it and thinking somebody somewhere was getting this out of life. So maybe I could too. So, it was Mozart that got me out of it, and then I just got help. I had treatment but I’m still a depressive person by nature. I’m still Hamlet but know how to handle it much better. And if ever I get into a situation where I think that might lead me into a dark place, I try not to. If I do go into it, I know what to do.
When fame arrived with Bronski Beat it was instantaneous. I’d yearned for it and longed for it and then when it was in front of me, I thought, ‘Don’t fuck it up!’ but I had the good fortune to hitch my wagon to Jimmy Somerville. It was his brilliance. I just followed in his slipstream.
Becoming a pop star did help me with finding other men. I had a very handsome boyfriend who was a French geezer, but it was a disaster. And then I met a really lovely man who was Scottish, and it was a real relationship. But I sort of spoiled it by just shagging around an awful lot, which at the time I thought was rather marvellous, but when I think about it now, it was just bad behaviour.
I spent a day with Yoko Ono in New York. The Communards were recording our first single and I walked into the reception, and she was just sitting there and I was very excited.
I met Dolly Parton once and she gave me a Dollywood fridge magnet. On Jimmy and I’s first trip to Manhattan, the PR company said, come to the Odeon restaurant and meet these people, so we went along and I remember the soup cost $20, which seemed extraordinary to me. And this was in 1984. Also at the table was John Lydon, Andy Warhol and Anna Wintour. Weeks before I’d been signing on at Neasden dole office and now there I was sitting in New York’s trendiest restaurant having dinner with Andy Warhol, who was very amiable but not really in the room.
I was an atheist from the age of eight, and I remember coming out of pop music with a bit of a crash and burn. I remember thinking, whenever the world is uncertain, if I know one thing, I’ll never be religious, and that was right just before I stepped over the threshold of a church, which was when I was 28 or 29. I was a bit burnt out on drugs and high living, and success, and then the end of success.
I went into a church because I wanted to connect with something I remembered from when I was a chorister, and it just all of a sudden came into focus. I walked into the church as a sceptical, reluctant observer, and I walked out as a participant. It was like I’d been sort of chained, and I couldn’t really breathe. The chains fell off, and I could breathe. It was very powerful.
Anyone who’s lived with an addict will tell you – it is the most gruelling experience. My ex-husband David died from alcoholic liver disease in 2019, and it was really, really tough. You get through it by just managing as much as you can of what’s in front of you. And also, if you love that person, and they love you, and they are destroying themselves and your relationship in that way, it is just so infuriating. It really made me angry and I needed to get rid of that. Before David died, I did just stop being angry with it because it was just pointless and didn’t do any good and he already felt bad about enough anyway.
The only thing that I was determined not to do was leave him. Sometimes people do have to leave addicted partners, but I found ways of not, and it was really important to me that I stuck with it to the end. I knew he wasn’t going to make old bones, but when he actually died, I couldn’t quite believe it. Although I rationally knew it was going to happen, when he actually did die, I was flummoxed by it.
Very soon after David died, we went into lockdown. I went back to being a vicar two days after his funeral, which was a stupid thing to have done, but then lockdown happened, so I sat in the back garden for that lovely spring, with the dogs. I couldn’t read, couldn’t watch television. I was just too consumed by it, and I just let it happen to me. I stopped trying to think that I would be a good griever, or that I would do the right thing. I just thought, ‘I’m completely overwhelmed by this experience.’ I just let it overwhelm me, and that was that was good. Then after a while I started thinking, ‘I’ve got to think of a new life now,’ which took a bit of thinking. Then once I started living that new life, I began to realise that you don’t lose the loss at all. You just live life around it.
My nephews and nieces got me on a dating app, and then I met Dicky. I liked it a lot. I found the right one where it was people like me looking for people like me, and I had a few goes, not many. I’d mucked up my profile because I accidentally uploaded a photo of Belted Galloway cattle rather than myself. But I met Dicky – he thought I was trying to be funny with the photo, I wasn’t – and we went on a date.
I’ve got a hearing aid as I’m deaf as a post since I had tinnitus, like everybody else I know who was in pop music. The noise felt like a distant but very noisy squadron of Generation Five fighter jets. Like F-38s or Typhoons. It spoiled the way I was able to listen to music, but then I sort of learned how to listen to music in a different sort of way to concentrate more.
I bought a speedboat in Ibiza in the Summer of Love. Maybe it was the second summer of love. But it was a lovely speedboat, and I lost it. It didn’t sink. I just parked it somewhere and I just can’t remember where. How could I lose a speedboat? I was off my tits the whole time. I can’t remember how much it cost – a lot – because I’d taken ecstasy. I also tried to buy an aeroplane. We went to the airport, but the guy didn’t let us in. He was quite right.
Money is very corrupting because it’s a substitute for the important stuff. Life is always difficult. We’re always trying to wrestle who we are with the rest of the world and negotiating our way through it, and then money becomes a sort of useful substitute, and if you get a big pile you feel successful, and it empowers you to do things that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to do. But it is a substitute for what is of really real significance and value, and so you have to be careful about that.
I’m much more I’m much more careful with money now. I think about it. I’m fortunate that I’ve managed to earn some, so I just try to do sensible things with it. If good fortune comes your way, then take responsibility for it. Don’t spend it. Invest it; do good things with it.
The stage adaptation of Murder Before Evensong is at Newbury’s Windmill Theatre until 14 November. For confidential support, Samaritans are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Call for free on 116 123 or visit samaritans.org