Revd Richard Coles

There's more to love

It is peculiar to meet Richard Coles of Bronski Beat and The Communards fame and not talk primarily about pop music - yet his presence at the Greenbelt Festival in Cheltenham sees him supervising a church youth group, not performing chart hits with Jimmy Sommerville.

An ordained priest, Coles, a descendent of Northamptonshire shoe manufacturers, first balanced music and Christianity as a boy chorister, the former taking a lead in his late teens due to unusual circumstances: a road accident on the A45 yielded enough compensation to invest in a professional quality soprano saxophone.

Live session work and theatre commissions followed a move to London to pursue a classical music education, a chance meeting with Sommerville in a Kings Cross café the first paragraph of a new chapter in pop history.

'It was very exciting and very rewarding but it was a sort of three, four, five-year blip in the otherwise blandness of my life,' muses Coles on his time playing keyboards at the top of the charts on 80s' hits Don't Leave Me This Way and There's More to Love. 'I'm not the same person now at 45 as I was when I was 25 I suppose, and life is kind of bigger and richer and more exciting and more challenging than I thought it was then - and I suppose that’s why I do what I do now.'

As faith resurfaced during periods contributing to BBC Radio 4 and the Times Literary Supplement, echoes of a childhood calling could be heard.

'There was a sort of 35-year period of avoiding the implications of that,' he laughs, on responding to the voice of a vocation. 'I did at the urging of a friend and then it went quite quickly from there.'

Theology degrees in London and Leeds and ordination training at the College of the Resurrection, Mirfield, West Yorkshire, preceded a curacy in Lincolnshire, and now Coles has put the two main elements of his life - music and church - together again as chaplain to the Royal Academy of Music in London, and he is also on staff at Knightsbridge parish church.

These days the closest he gets to 80s' hits is seeing artists like Billy Bragg perform on the Greenbelt main stage: 'He's a very good thing - so I'm looking forward to seeing and hearing Billy.'

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