Celebrity vicar Richard Coles shares his powerful story

The Communards were riding high back then in 1986, remembered one half of the duo, the now Reverend Richard Coles.

“We were sent a case of Dom Pérignon by Elton John and another one by our record company – by the end of the week we were pissing champagne.

“At that time I was also taking ecstasy in such huge quantities that during one trip to Ibiza, I was banned from Avis Rent a Car for life and I couldn’t remember where the speedboat I’d bought was – there’s probably one still lying around out there, rusting!”

It was the best of times, but also, as the deadly scourge of HIV began to march through their ranks, the worst of times too.

Britain’s most famous vicar and beloved Radio 4 presenter took his Queen’s Hall audience at Hexham Book Festival with him as he cast his mind back to the 1980s gay scene and the fear that stalked them all.

There was a good reason ecstasy took off the way it did in the clubs, he said.

“We were suffering such catastrophic losses, then along came this pill that made you feel happy and I had this crazy year.”

One particular high was punctured by a telephone call, just as the Communards were about to go on stage, telling them that their close friend Mark Ashton had died.

The charismatic co-founder of the Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners group – and the subject of last year’s cinematic hit, Pride – was just 26.

“He developed a cough and died within a week,” said Richard.

“He was the first one of our friends to go and after that, HIV rampaged through us.”

The turning point for Richard (‘Mr Coles’ doesn’t sit well with the warmth and candour of the man) came when he saw a reflection of himself after one particular bender.

Two rivulets of blood ran down from his much-abused nostrils and his T-shirt had tyre tracks across it – how, he didn’t know.

An avowed atheist, he had yet begun to feel a tug towards the church.

Worried that the mental ill-health he had experienced as a teenager – so acute he attempted suicide – was returning, he sought help.

“The church had been my last redoubt of opposition, but I felt this pull within me,” he said.

“I thought it was a prelude to insanity, but when I went to see a psychiatrist, he said ‘you need a priest, not me’.”

On the advice of a friend of a friend, he headed for St Alban’s Church in Holborn. “It was the most flamboyant of churches, so they had me sussed, but it’s just typical that I went to a Catholic high mass and experienced a Protestant conversion!”

Coming out as a Christian had, if anything, been more difficult than coming out as gay.

He’d done the latter as a 16-year-old by playing Tom Robinson’s Sing if You’re Glad to be Gay to his mother over and over again, until she’d asked ‘darling, is there anything you want to tell me?’

But to confess to being a Christian, well ... “My father thought religion was a bit weird, along with yoga and quiche.”

And then he had to tell his musician, activist, clubbing, popster friends, not least his Communards sidekick Jimmy Somerville. Things were already very tense there.

They had never been the most likely of pairings, said Richard.

“I was this quite boffinish boy from middle-class Kettering, all four-part harmonies, Mozart and string arrangements, while Jimmy was a run-away from a tough working class tenement in Glasgow.

“He had no affection for the past and no real sense of the future, so he lived intensely in the now, which made him a great artist, but a dangerous person to be around. He gave no quarter.

“There was tension between us, because we didn’t really understand each other. I understood the dark art of negotiating, but he only understood nuclear war.”

In contrast to Richard’s way of doing things, Jimmy had inadvertently outed himself by being the only boy in his school to bunk off to see the Bay City Rollers open a carpet shop.

“You didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to work it out,” laughed Richard.

In his autobiography, Fathomless Riches: Or How I Went from Pop to Pulpit, he admits the draw he felt to the church could in some part be attributed to his need to be forgiven, not so much for the louche lifestyle, but the petty jealousies, the attention seeking and the lying (“I lied all the time”).

And there was one lie in particular for which he felt he had to atone.

At the height of the Aids epidemic, when friends were dying by the month, he announced he, too, had been diagnosed with HIV.

His subsequent unmasking led to a deep rift in his friendships, not least with Somerville.

Today, he is drawn to people who have had equally troubled pasts, not least because he feels he can help them.

However, he knows his pop star past and radio broadcasting present could hardly be at greater odds with the clerical imperatives of modesty and self-effacement.

“Sometimes I feel like I’m paddling a canoe into a dark place. Am I faithful? Am I intelligible.

“But I am also very aware that I do have a wonderful opportunity to raise the subject of God and my faith in a mainstream environment.”