The Communards are reissuing their debut album to celebrate 35 years of the duo. 

The classic album, featuring their Hi-NRG cover of Don’t Leave Me This Way, will be re-released on CD and vinyl, along with digital platforms, as an extended package. 

Alongside the package, the classic track – which features Sarah Jane Morris and hit No. 1 in the UK – will also be re-released with a new remix, courtesy of 7th Heaven. 

“The Communards were more of a political outfit making music,” says frontman Jimmy Somerville.

Richard Coles adds: “We wanted to bring down Thatcher by doing cover versions of ‘70s disco classics and sort of supper club jazz music. It perhaps seems a rather over ambitious project now, but at the time it was a brilliant idea.

“Before anything else, Jimmy and I were activists. We’d grown up gay in a hostile world and for us that was a matter of life and death – literally – so we weren’t messing about. We wanted to fight that fight,” he continues. 

“And that was not just a fight on one front, it was a fight on all sorts of fronts. We thought that our liberation could only happen if it liberated others.”

The album also features the Top 40 hits You Are My World, Disenchanted and So Cold the Night. 

For Somerville, The Communards was intended to be less commercially successful than Bronski Beat – but the runaway success of Don’t Leave Me This Way changed all that.  

“I was basically in the throes of being famous and realising, ‘S**t, I’m famous!’ and not really dealing with it very well.” he recalls. 

“But at the same time, it had amazing parts as well. We were doing so much live stuff. There was myself and Richard and eight other people on stage, three openly gay men and seven women, and it was just this fantastic mayhem and just great fun on tour.”

‘The Communards (35th Anniversary Edition)’, out December 3, is available to pre-order on CD and vinyl.