Richard Coles - his journey from pop to pulpit

The Reverend Richard Coles was a pop star who became a priest. He talks to Chris Bond about his unlikely journey and why he believes Christianity still matters.
Faith story: Reverend Richard Coles, the former pop star who was ordained into the Anglican priesthood in 2005.  (Picture: Mike Prior).Faith story: Reverend Richard Coles, the former pop star who was ordained into the Anglican priesthood in 2005.  (Picture: Mike Prior).
Faith story: Reverend Richard Coles, the former pop star who was ordained into the Anglican priesthood in 2005. (Picture: Mike Prior).

York has a small, but not insignificant, part to play in the story of Richard Coles becoming a man of the cloth.

“I’d been up at the Edinburgh Festival where I’d been working and I was on the train heading back to London and I got off at York on impulse and spent a couple of days there,” he says. “I went to evensong at York Minster and sitting there was one of the moments when I began to sense what was happening was something that insisted on being taken seriously. I went to the shop and bought a silver cross which I wore around my neck until I lost it one day in a gym,” he says.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

It might not have been a Damascene Conversion but this was an important step in his journey from pop star to parish vicar.

Coles with Jimmy Somerville during his days in The Communards back in the 1980s. (Picture: Tim Anderson).Coles with Jimmy Somerville during his days in The Communards back in the 1980s. (Picture: Tim Anderson).
Coles with Jimmy Somerville during his days in The Communards back in the 1980s. (Picture: Tim Anderson).

Today, Reverend Richard Coles is a hugely popular broadcaster. He co-presents BBC Radio 4’s Saturday Live, is a regular guest on TV panel shows such as QI and Have I Got News For You, and has displayed his culinary skills on Celebrity Masterchef. He’s also the only vicar to boast a number one single, as part of 1980s pop duo The Communards.

For his day job, though, he’s local vicar in the Northamptonshire village of Finedon, something he ruminates on in his collection of memoirs.

In his book, Fathomless Riches, he wrote with unvarnished honesty about coming out as gay and his pilgrimage from a rock-and-roll life of sex and drugs to one devoted to God and Christianity. His latest book – Bringing in the Sheaves: Wheat and Chaff from My Years as a Priest – starts off where the first one finishes, with his ordination in 2005.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

“The first book charts the various adventures and misadventures on the way, of which there were many. I don’t have so many misadventures now though I have plenty of adventures and most of those happen because I’m a parish priest.”

Coles with Jimmy Somerville during his days in The Communards back in the 1980s. (Picture: Tim Anderson).Coles with Jimmy Somerville during his days in The Communards back in the 1980s. (Picture: Tim Anderson).
Coles with Jimmy Somerville during his days in The Communards back in the 1980s. (Picture: Tim Anderson).

Coles will be talking about his dual life as a vicar and broadcaster when he appears at the York Literature Festival on Sunday.

But what prompted him to write his memories and bare his soul so very publicly in this way? “People kept asking me, ‘how did you get from being a pop star to being a vicar?’ There are all sorts of ways of answering that question but the more people asked the more I thought perhaps I should write it down,” he says. “If someone looked at my CV, such as it is, it looks like the work of a fantasist but to me it’s just my life. But writing about it and reflecting on it made me see it a bit more clearly as a tale of twists and turns.”

Given the trajectory of his story it’s perhaps easy to view Coles as an unlikely priest, but in many ways he was much more of an unlikely pop star. “If you look at me in pop videos there’s very obviously a vicar struggling to get out,” he says, self-deprecatingly.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

His story begins in Northamptonshire where he went to public school and became a chorister. It was the realisation as a teenager that he was gay which altered the direction of his life. “I was in Kettering in the 1970s when I realised I was gay and I didn’t get a sense of endless possibilities and fun opening up immediately in front of me.”

He later moved to London to work as a session musician and it was here that he met other kindred spirits and immersed himself in the burgeoning gay scene. “When I came to London so much of working out who I was happened in nightclubs. So dance floors and dance music was something that became really important.”

In 1983, he joined the pop group Bronski Beat as a saxophone player where he met the singer Jimmy Somerville. The following year the pair left to form The Communards enjoying the UK’s biggest-selling single of 1986. This thrust the gawky, bespectacled Coles into the limelight – something he didn’t necessarily enjoy.

“I’d describe it as like water-skiing, though I’ve never actually been water-skiing, but what I think water-skiing is, which is standing up and holding on while everything moves very quickly around you,” he says.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

“When success came it was so dynamic and so fast you didn’t really have time to reflect about what you were doing, you just had to ride it. It was incredibly exciting and also very turbulent.”

Coles left the band in 1988 but found himself sliding into drug abuse. “I wanted to regain my bearings but instead found myself in the grip of addiction and I had to get out of that. I had a moment of realisation that if I didn’t sort it then I might not survive it and I didn’t want to not survive it.”

The pull of Christianity was initially slow but soon became overwhelming. “I was always rationally against the idea of religious faith which seemed to me to be a nonsense. But I just had this appetite that grew and grew for something I’d felt when I was a boy in chapel, that chapels, churches and cathedrals were uniquely important places where you could take feelings of great significance and there’d be room for them there, unlike anywhere else.

“That became irresistible and eventually I simply had to walk through the door, not as a sceptical tourist but as a willing participant and I’ve been there ever since,” he says.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

“Once I settled in I knew the idea of a ministry lay ahead. I put it off for as long as I could but it was insistent and I left my old life behind and started a new one.”

All clergy are public figures, but Coles, given his TV and radio profile, can reach a much wider audience than your average parish vicar. “I’m exactly like any other vicar in any other parish, but I do have this wider field in which I’m known, and I like very much the idea of somebody who wears a dog collar and who makes a public commitment to faith taking a place in the mainstream conversation other people are having,” he says.

“Very often religion is relegated to the loony sidelines or completely ignored and I think that’s regrettable. I like to think by wearing the dog collar and doing what I do I’m at least making the possibility of faith not entirely unimaginable. I can hardly say cooking a baked Alaska is a proclamation of the gospel of Jesus Christ, but I do think there’s a long tradition of the clergy getting out there and participating in the world.”

It’s a world that is increasingly secular and where Christianity often finds itself at odds with modern values. “The long story is one of gradual and then steeper and now more dramatic decline. And if you look at the numbers of church attendance it’s a very sobering statistic for those of us in this line of work.”

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

But he believes there are opportunities. “We have a chance to renegotiate our relationship with the rest of the world and to make the case for Christianity as persuasively as we can and come out of our corner and engage a bit more with the world even though it may seem hostile,” he says.

“Politically we live in a world which seems determined to fall apart rather than come together at the moment, and one thing Christians can do on a good day is think creatively about ways of being together, rather than falling apart, and that might have something of value for the wider conversation.”

The Reverend Richard Coles is appearing in conversation at St Peter’s School, Clifton, in York, on March 26. For ticket details call 01904 623568.

Bringing in the Sheaves: Wheat and Chaff from My Years as a Priest, published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, is out now.