Bronski Beat’s Smalltown Boy was never polite pop product; it was a getaway note set to a drum machine, a public wound dressed in nightclub chrome. Every second of it carries the sick knowledge of being marked, mocked, and finally pushed toward the station with nowhere to go but far away. It carried itself with pop poise, but inside it lived panic, flight, and the cold slap of recognition. You heard Jimmy Somerville singing from the edge of the platform with a suitcase in one hand and a life in tatters behind him, and every kid who ever felt cornered by a hometown knew exactly what train he was boarding.
Now, London Plane makes that old sorrow feel frighteningly current. With Carlos Dengler (ex-Interpol) producing and Oweinama Biu, Havovi Cooper, Bryan Garbe, Andrew B. White, Kristofer Widholm, and David Mosey rounding out the band’s lineup, the song takes on a broader, more harrowing dimension. Subtitled A Refugee Song, their version stretches the original ache across a wider map of dislocation, where the boy on the run becomes one among millions driven from home by war, persecution, collapse, and the ordinary daily brutality that makes departure feel like the last available prayer. That is a dangerous move, because grand gestures can flatten a song this beloved into piety. London Plane avoids that trap by making the performance feel immediate, physical, and slightly unmoored, as if the room itself were beginning to splinter while the singer struggles to hold the center.
David Mosey comes in first with a delivery that has a bit of stage blood under its fingernails. You can hear the glam spectre in him: a little Peter Murphy, a little latter-day Bowie, but he keeps his footing, sounding like a man trying to keep dignity intact while the floorboards give way. Then the band arrives with force and shape: those immortal Bronski synth lines now reinforced by electric guitars, bass that rolls like bad news under the door, drums that land with serious intent, and Bryan Garbe’s steel pan adding a strange gleam, almost festive until you realize it’s catching light from a fire.
Smalltown Boy was never merely autobiographical: personal pain is political pain when enough people are made to carry it. Dengler’s production gives the arrangement breadth without sanding off its nerves, and the ensemble plays like six people who know that songs about escape should never sound comfortable. Smalltown Boy: A Refugee Song, drawn from the sessions for Villains Heroes Ghosts (out this summer via Declared Goods), feels less like a cover than a reopening of the case file, the evidence spread out again under harsher lamps.
The lyric video, assembled by Andrew White in the style of La Jetée from Alice Teeple’s New Year’s Day photographs in NYC’s Astoria Park, gets the mood exactly right: still images, passing time, memory under pressure, history refusing burial. A song about leaving home becomes, once again, a song about who gets to have one.
Watch below:
London Plane will be playing at Main Drag in Brooklyn on 24 April with 12090AD and Fuck You, Tammy!.
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The post NYC Post-Punk Collective London Plane Shares Video for Their Reimagining of Bronski Beat’s “Smalltown Boy” (A Refugee Song) appeared first on Post-Punk.com.