“David used to call me a borderline national trinket,” says the Rev Richard Coles, mentioning his late former partner David Oldham. “I’ll take that. But I think, since then, I have graduated a little bit. People smile at me in the street. I am in West Yorkshire at the moment. I went to buy some Solpadeine at the pharmacist and the pharmacist smiled at me and said: ‘Oh, you’re so-and-so, aren’t you?’ Maybe my national treasuredom is slightly more assured.”
He is certainly unmistakable. Tall and gangly, Coles offered a perfect physical complement to the taut, energetic Jimmy Somerville in The Communards. The frame has filled out since then, but the sense of near-archetypal Englishness remains. Canon Daniel Clement, protagonist of Murder Before Evensong, has much in common with Coles. Both are clergymen. Both keep dachshunds. Only one has a dead body in the nave.
“He is absolutely not me,” Coles says. “One of the reasons I wanted to write it is because he’s not like me. He’s steady. He’s diligent. He’s stationary. Some of the settings are familiar. A pungently, vividly verbal mother? I’ve got one of those. Dachshunds? I’ve got two of those.”
The book continues a long tradition of wrapping gentle comedy around the Church of England. Anthony Trollope did that in his Barchester novels. Derek Nimmo made a career out of playing funny vicars. The Vicar of Dibley continued the movement.
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“I think the Church of England deals with serious matters with the lightest of touches,” he says. “Light-touch Christianity is a tacit formulation for the Church of England. And that’s something I just find comes naturally to me, really. There are moments of zeal where I’m kind of filled with the breath of God and the Holy Spirit, but, before very long, I’m photocopying or handing things out.”
You get some of that in the Church of Ireland as well. There is not such a huge cultural gap between the two denominations.
“I have ancestors in the Church of Ireland,” Coles says, going on to explain that his family were part of the O’Grady family that included the author Standish James O’Grady and the antiquarian Standish Hayes O’Grady. “It fascinated me that they were Church of Ireland, but they were greatly involved with the Celtic revival and the GAA. Which is why I am the only vicar of the Church of England to be a member of St Finbarr’s [National Hurling & Football Club] in Cork.”
I was watching this football game and I was really enjoying it and I thought: I’m sure they’re not meant to pick the ball up
I had read that his interest in Gaelic football stemmed from his enthusiasm for the TV series Normal People.
“Yes, I was watching this football game and I was really enjoying it and I thought: I’m sure they’re not meant to pick the ball up. But they did and I got very interested in it. Then I discovered through my Irish cousins that my father’s cousin was a hurler in Limerick.”
Anyway, where were we?
Coles was born to a middle-class family in Northampton. He came out as gay to his mother when he was 16. Later, the former choirboy moved to London and got caught up in the fecund music scene. That journey inevitably calls to mind Smalltown Boy, the indestructibly moving single by Bronski Beat, Somerville’s first band. Coles, a multi-instrumentalist, played with that group before the two formed The Communards.
“Yes, for about five minutes,” he says. “What I was doing in a pop band was preposterous. I was mates with Jimmy Somerville. We were gay runaways to London. Me from Kettering. He from Glasgow. We just happened to arrive in King’s Cross at the same time and became friends. We became comrades in our battle for equality and all the other stuff that was surging in politics. We started working together. Jimmy just happened to have the most extraordinarily brilliant personality and the most distinctive voice.”
Formed in 1985, The Communards had their annus mirabilis a year later when Don’t Leave Me This Way, thumping cover of a soul classic, became the biggest-selling single of the year in the UK (at a time when singles really mattered). It is a funny thing. Somewhere in those years someone decided that the standard format for synthpop was a duo comprising a charismatic singer and an apparently introverted boffin on keyboards. Think Soft Cell, Pet Shop Boys, Erasure, Yazoo, Eurythmics, Blancmange.
“That’s a really interesting point. You’re right,” Coles says. “I think there is something about the boffin and the street urchin that works rather well. Perhaps we like contrast. Perhaps pop music enjoys the energy that that gives.”
Maybe that was a good thing for him. There was less pesky attention.
“No, I deeply resented it at the time,” he says with impressive frankness. “I was consumed with envy. That was inadmissible at the time. You had to pretend you didn’t mind, but you did mind. Also, if you stand next to someone who’s prodigiously talented they get a lot of light and air. And if you’re in the business of light and air yourself, you can feel that your diet is a little thin. Not that that was Jimmy’s intention.”
Then, as suddenly as he had arrived in the public eye, he was gone again. Coles entered King’s College, London in 1990 to study theology. He became a Roman Catholic for a spell before coming back to “light-touch Christianity” in 2001. He was ordained in 2005 and went on to become a curate in Lincolnshire and chaplain to the Royal Academy of Music. It wasn’t long before he was appearing on the radio and television again. That is an odd fame dynamic: childhood, pop fame, retreat to obscurity for 15 years, celebrity cleric.
I got ordained and I thought I would shake the showbiz dust from my shoes. But the irony is it relaunched me
“It was weird, actually,” he says. “Because pop music is such a consuming thing. You get used to the privileges it confers. And it is quite a job getting used to losing the privileges. Finding yourself NSFU — not suitable for upgrade — turning right instead of left on a plane took some getting used to. But I never particularly wanted to be a pop star. I always knew it would be time limited. I got ordained and I thought I would shake the showbiz dust from my shoes. But the irony is it relaunched me and I became ‘Britain’s best-known vicar’. Which was not a title I sought.”
What turned him towards religion? It is hard to resist the glib conclusion that the Aids crisis must have had some influence on his decision.
“It wasn’t really a decision,” he says. “Something just came into focus. After a while I could see a pattern and an outline and a colour that had been there, but shadowy before. For me, the exposure to Aids was so dreadful. I couldn’t find the place to ask the questions it raised. I was a chorister and I remembered being in chapel. I had thought the doctrine was nonsense, but I loved everything else about it. And when I got to my late 20s and life was really tough, I wanted to connect with it again.”
He now says that, once he became properly reconnected, he realised that the church was his natural “habitat”. There were, nonetheless, compromises. He met David Oldham, then an A&E nurse, when he came to Coles to discuss the notion of joining the clergy. As the Guardian put it a few years back, they “began a celibate relationship and were married at a civil ceremony in 2010″. It is none of our business, but that phrase “celibate relationship” does stand out. What did they mean by that?
“One of the most disagreeable habits that Christianity has is of adding public dimensions to your private life,” he says. “So, it was necessary to find some way of describing it. But reality was, of course, not entirely consistent with that. I can say that now because I’ve retired. But we had a relationship — sometimes it was one thing, and sometimes it was another thing. We worked out a way of doing it.”
Coles is moving on to another phase. His book The Madness of Grief talks movingly about Oldham’s death in 2019 after a long addiction to alcohol. He retired from his parish in Northamptonshire earlier this year, but remains committed to his calling. As we speak, he is filling in the forms required to work in prison chaplaincy. “I retired in order to fill in more forms,” he says wearily. And Coles remains a celebrity. Murder Before Evensong seems likely to sell well and launch another strand to his singular career. There may be no escaping national treasuredom.
“I was in Rye with my PA a while ago,” he says of a trip to East Sussex. “Rye couldn’t be more my home patch. I was there doing an event and people were stopping and talking and it was all lovely and everyone was smiling. As they were going away, my PA said: ‘My God. If only they knew.’”
Murder Before Evensong is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson
