The Reverend Richard Coles has lived one of the most remarkable public lives in modern Britain: a Northamptonshire choirboy who became part of the fearless sound of 1980s gay pop, before finding a later calling in the Church of England.
Born in Northampton in 1962 and raised in Barton Seagrave, near Kettering, Coles grew up in a world that could feel narrow for a young gay man with imagination, intelligence and a love of music. He attended Wellingborough School, where he sang as a chorister, but adolescence brought both a changing voice and the difficult realisation of his sexuality. In an era when being openly gay could carry real danger, Coles has spoken candidly of the loneliness and mental-health struggles he experienced as a teenager.
Music offered a way through. In the early 1980s he became involved with the London gay scene and played briefly with Bronski Beat before joining forces with Jimmy Somerville in The Communards. The pair became one of the defining acts of the decade: sophisticated, passionate and openly political at a time when LGBT people were being vilified in much of the press and ignored by those in power.
Coles was the musical half of the duo, playing keyboards and shaping the grand, soulful arrangements behind Somerville’s unmistakable falsetto. Their 1986 version of Don’t Leave Me This Way, featuring Sarah Jane Morris, became the year’s best-selling UK single. Songs including Never Can Say Goodbye and So Cold the Night made them chart stars, but their importance went beyond pop success. The Communards gave gay listeners visibility, pride and a soundtrack for survival during the darkest years of the AIDS crisis.
After the group split, Coles’s life took a quieter but no less searching turn. He studied theology, first becoming a Roman Catholic before returning to Anglicanism. In 2005 he was ordained as a priest in the Church of England, later serving as vicar of St Mary the Virgin in Finedon, Northamptonshire.
For many, the image of a former synth-pop musician becoming a country vicar might have seemed unlikely. Yet Coles made the transition feel natural. His ministry carried the same humanity that had marked his music: a concern for outsiders, an ability to speak plainly about sorrow, and a refusal to pretend that faith makes life easy.
Alongside parish work, he became a familiar broadcaster, writer and panellist, most notably as a warm, witty voice on BBC Radio 4’s Saturday Live. He has also written bestselling Canon Clement mysteries, bringing his sharp eye for village life, human weakness and unexpected kindness to fiction.
Behind the public humour, however, came profound personal grief. Coles’s husband, the Reverend David Coles, died in December 2019 after a long illness. The couple had been together for more than a decade and had entered a civil partnership in 2010. Richard Coles has spoken with moving honesty about the devastation of losing David, later writing about grief, love and the strange business of carrying on when the person at the centre of your life is gone.
It is this openness that makes Richard Coles so widely loved. He has never offered a polished fairytale of either gay life or religious faith. Instead, his story is one of survival, friendship, celebration, loss and service: from the glittering keyboards of The Communards to the quiet duties of a parish priest.
Few lives have travelled such an extraordinary road — and fewer have done so with quite so much intelligence, mischief and heart.
