Britain’s first gay anthem? Why the UK’s pioneering LGBTQ+ protest band reunited

‘There is a little bit of gay in everyone today,” sing Michael Klein and Gillian Bartlam, the lead singers of Everyone Involved, a collective of musicians formed by Klein and the UK Gay Liberation Front (GLF) activist Alan Wakeman. “Gay is natural, gay is good, gay is wonderful,” the song continues. “Gay people should all come together, and fight for our rights!”

The aptly titled A Gay Song is thought to be the first LGBTQ+ protest song to have been recorded on vinyl. It was written by Klein and Wakeman, then recorded in London in 1972, with backing vocals from GLF members – only five years after the partial decriminalisation of male homosexuality in England and Wales.

Now, the anthem has been rerecorded by the original members of Everyone Involved, as part of an exhibition of the same name by London-based artist Ian Giles. A film of the recording session, when the band reunited at RAK Studios in London, is currently screening at Southampton’s God’s House Tower, alongside wall hangings by the artist. The hand-stitched quilts and cartoon-like paintings pay decorative tribute to the queer rights movement, while also creating an intimate, cosy feeling for the audience.

Giles first discovered A Gay Song while working on another project, On Railton Road, a play about a group of queer squatters in Brixton. “As part of the research, I came across this song,” he remembers. “And it really encapsulates the activism of that era.” Rerecording it was also a nod to the not widely known queer history of Southampton. In 1976, the annual conference of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality was held at its town hall, after other councils refused to host it.

A special train, nicknamed the Away Gay, was chartered from London to allow 600 delegates to attend for just £5 return. Overall, attenders received a warm welcome in Southampton, although some faith groups picketed the event. One person wearing a Gay Liberation badge was refused service at a local pub, resulting in delegates showing up en masse to protest. The landlord eventually backed down.

Getting the members of Everyone Involved back in a room together was surprisingly easy, Giles says, because the band had already considered marking the 50th anniversary of the song, before Covid scuppered those plans. Giles says the band – who have continued to make music individually – were delighted to perform together again. “Nigel Stewart, the pianist, recently wrote an opera with his partner,” Giles explains. “And Richard Lanchester, who plays percussion – his whole life is basically gigging and working at festivals. He has a solar-powered festival stage.”

It is difficult not to be moved by the footage of the colourfully dressed members of Everyone Involved reuniting, now that their once fringe message of gay acceptance is mainstream. They seem like a group of friends who swap in-jokes and quickly slide back into their old dynamic, even though it’s been years since they last saw each other. “It was magical,” Giles says, recalling the atmosphere.

After a slightly nervy rehearsal day, when some of the group had “a wobble”, the band brought their A-game to RAK Studios – previously used by musicians ranging from Michael Jackson to Adele. “It’s one of those buildings where you can just feel the history,” Giles says. “Being there does something to you.”

Giles says his work often relies on building relationships between people and slowly bonding with them. His 2018 film After Butt celebrated the cultural legacy of Butt magazine, an unashamedly sexy culture publication made for and by gay people that folded in 2011 but has since relaunched. Giles spoke to those involved, including editors Gert Jonkers and Jop van Bennekom, before sharing the transcripts of these interviews with a much younger group of gay men in London. The transcripts were discussed in workshops, which were filmed.

The following year, Giles’s 2019 play, Trojan Horse, told the story of the Joiners Arms – a London gay bar that closed its doors in 2016. The script was created through conversations with activist group Friends of the Joiners Arms, who shared their memories of the space. A film was also made from the interviews, which explore similar themes of nostalgia and queer displacement to the rest of Giles’s work.

The concept for his latest project was honed over many conversations with Klein in his home in London’s Covent Garden, sipping tea made to a precise recipe: half regular tea and half earl grey, with half cow’s milk and half oat milk. “In the same way that a painter might make a whole sketchbook of drawings before making a painting, these conversations are similar,” Giles explains. “It’s like thickening the sauce. If the trust isn’t built up, I think it can be felt in the work.”

Giles says that such intergenerational dialogue “continues beyond the work” – and inspires him in his own projects. Making this film, he discovered that the members of Everyone Involved are the same “radical hippies” that they were in the 70s. Sometimes, activists become more straight-edged as they get older, “but actually, in a great way, they’ve all had these wonderful, creative lives.”

In the film, the band – mostly now in their 70s – reminisce as they perform. They giggle and gossip about how, on the original recording day in 1972, members of the GLF bickered with each other. “They never followed the rules,” they say of the campaign group, which disbanded the following year amid factional infighting but left behind a radical legacy.

Documenting the queer histories of this era can be a race against time. “The gay liberation generation of activists are dying out,” Giles says. “For me, there is a power in thinking about the depth of lives they have lived, so this is a moment to celebrate them and to capture their histories.”

Giles could just as easily be described as a historian as an artist. In fact, 700 pages of interview transcripts – source material for On Railton Road – now sit in Bishopsgate Institute’s LGBTQIA+ Archives in London. Though Giles was initially hesitant about this aspect of his work, there is a clear overlap with activism, too.

“I used to struggle with how that all sits together,” he says. “But equally, when I’m fatigued and wondering why I’m doing all this, the activism side does make it feel worthwhile. I hope I can use the small platforms I have to keep the fire burning around LGBTQ+ rights, because we never know when the wolf will be at our door.”

• Ian Giles: Everyone Involved is at God’s House Tower, Southampton, until 27 October