One morning last week, my cat was performing his daily ritual of standing in the hallway and wailing until we got up to feed him. Instead of waking up immediately to address his concerns, I instead just incorporated his wails into my dream.
I don’t remember what the specifics of the dream were, but now it had a background track of Bronski Beat’s song “Smalltown Boy,” or at least the vocals at the beginning.
I’m skeptical that either Jimmy Somerville or my cat would appreciate being confused for each other, since they were both singing about something so deeply heartfelt and important to them. One the trials of being a young homosexual living in a town that doesn’t accept you, and the other having not been fed for at least six hours.
I really like this interview with Somerville from a Dutch TV show in 2007, where he’s a lot more lighthearted about the song than I would’ve expected, while still being defiant and assertive about what it means. I also have to admit that as many times as I’ve heard it, I never actually knew what it was about until just recently. I’m terrible at being able to decipher lyrics, so I never knew the lyrics beyond “run away, run away,” which I’d thought was the title.
Unlike the song “Run Runaway” by Slade, where I didn’t know the title and only remembered the lyrics “see chameleon, lying there in the sun.”
They’re kind of the opposite of Somerville’s smalltown boy, running back to Scotland to cavort amidst a castle with kilt-wearing pipers and dancers. I’m positive I saw that video back in the 80s, but I saw lead singer Noddy Holder and conflated it with a Doctor Who episode. I guess they’re also the opposite of Bronski Beat in that I’d always heard Slade associated with glam rock, and they are the straightest glam rockers I could possibly imagine.