13 September 1986
Only from seeing a Top of the Pops repeat on BBC Four recently did I actually realise, after all these years of hearing it, that there are two lead singers on The Communards’ ‘Don’t Leave Me This Way’; the second verse is sung by a guest vocalist, Sarah Jane Morris, who also pitches in on the choruses. To my ears, her voice and Jimmy Somerville’s are almost identical.
Perhaps that’s a clue to why, despite it being the sort of ’80s disco pop I normally have time for, this track has never found its way into my heart. Somerville’s glassy falsetto suits Bronski Beat’s ‘Smalltown Boy’ because that’s a song about finding strength out of a bleak situation; it calls for a certain icy resolve. Here, though, he’s just a hi-NRG setting on a keyboard. That Morris’s voice and style are so similar just compounds my lack of feeling for this version of a song that leaves me cold anyway; the repeated triple stresses in the chorus (“de-SIRE FOR YOU!”, “NEED IN ME” and so forth) get tiring even before the shrill, shouty key change. It all makes me feel like I’m having an ice pop shoved into my brain.
