My Pride Anthems: Adele Roberts And Kate Holderness

The coronavirus pandemic has changed everything, and that includes how we’re all celebrating Pride in 2020.

With huge public gatherings out of the question, we’re asking a range of LGBTQ celebrities and allies for their personal Pride anthems, to help us all get into the Pride spirit from lockdown.

Radio 1 presenter Adele Roberts and actress Kate Holderness are the latest stars to share their personal Pride month playlists, making them the first couple we’ve spoken to for our My Pride Anthems series.

Among the Pride anthems they’ve chosen are the song that reminds them of their very first date, an offering from “Lesbian Jesus” and a track Kate describes as a “rallying cry to gays”...

Kylie Minogue – Your Disco Needs You

Adele: This was the first song on Kate’s list, and it always reminds me of Kate, and it just makes me so excited whenever it comes on.

Kate: It’s just a gay banger, and I don’t think you can get to any Pride in the country without this being played at least once.

Adele: It’s like at Christmas, you know with Last Christmas when people play Wham-ageddon? We should do Kylie-geddon at Pride, and the first time you hear Your Disco Needs You, you’re out.

Kate: Or you’re ooooout! I feel like this song is like a rallying cry to gays. When I was younger, and I used to go out in Preston with my best friend Paul to the one gay bar that we had, if there was ever a weekend when I couldn’t be arsed going out, he used to ring me and tell me ‘your disco needs you’.

Hayley Kiyoko and Kehlani – What I Need 

Adele: We supported this song at Radio 1 – and I just want to big up the music team at Radio 1, because they are so brilliant in terms of making sure we have diverse music.

This song from “Lesbian Jesus” Hayley Kiyoko and Kehlani was my Tune Of The Week, and Hayley came in to see us, and she was just so fabulous, so out and so proud, and it’s so good for me to have artists like that come in, be themselves. And then when you see the video that Hayley actually directed herself – she can act, she can direct, she can sing – the video is two women in a relationship, just being normal. And I think it’s so important for young people to see that. Big up Hayley Kiyoko.

For me personally, I don’t think I had [LGBTQ] role models growing up, so I was frightened for a long time of coming out, because I thought I was weird, I didn’t realise I was normal. So I hope Hayley can be that person for the youth of today.

Kate: The video is kind of old school, it’s like an old-style love story, but seeing two girls in that situation, it would have been amazing for me when I was growing up. 

Brainstorm – Lovin’ Is Really My Game

Kate: Would you say this was our song?

Adele: Yeah

Kate: On our first date, we went on a date to the cinema in the Trafford Centre...

Adele: I paid, I was the gentleman.

Kate: And on the way there, we were talking about music, and I think I had a cassette player in my car, and I had this song on my cassette player. And Adele said ‘oh my god, I’ve never met anyone else who’s heard this song before’, and I was like ‘neither have I’. So we took that as a sign that we were going to be together forever. And when we got to the Trafford Centre, you walk in through Selfridges, and this song was playing in there.

Adele: It was so weird… but this is a banger, and it just makes us want to dance. You know, like, when you’re young and you’re at the school disco and you just let yourself go? That’s how it makes us feel.

Deborah Cox – Nobody’s Supposed To Be Here (Dance Mix) 

Adele: Kate introduced me to this song at a club night in Blackpool called Fluffy Puppy. And we’ve picked the dance mix, there’s an R&B version which is great, but the dance version is the one. Over to you, Kate…

Kate: This is an absolute banger...  It just gets played in, well, I thought, all gay clubs, but definitely in Preston and Blackpool when I was first going out. And I thought it was a gay anthem, because it just used to get hammered in those clubs. But I don’t know if it is, I don’t know if anywhere else actually plays it.

But listen to it, you will love it. This is the song that I will annoy any DJ to play at Pride, and it’s the song that if I’m ever in a mood, I can’t not be happy when I listen to this song, it’s a tune. But also, Adele taught me that there’s an original version of this song, like a slow version…

Adele: Yeah, I knew the R&B version, it’s all about not really wanting to let someone into your life… and this song is about accepting someone, and going ‘it’s OK, love’s alright’, so it’s kind of got a really cool message, as well. Especially for gay people.

Village People – Go West

Kate: So, this is the biggest gay song, I think. First of all, it’s on the Priscilla Queen Of The Desert soundtrack, so it gets extra gay points. And I think this song just makes me really emotional, but in a happy way.

It’s just quite hopeful, and in the lyrics, they’re saying ‘let’s go and find somewhere we can be together’, and when you hear this song in a gay club and you look around at everybody, it just kind of unites everyone, and makes you hopeful that one day we’ll find a place in the world where everyone can be themselves.

Adele: One of the first times we went to Pride In London, we were in Piccadilly Circus, and you couldn’t see the end of the people. Pride is so colourful and so loud, everybody’s being themselves, and even tourists just get sucked in and join in, whether they’re straight, gay, bi, it doesn’t matter, it just brings everybody together. And that’s how this song feels to me.

And we just wanted to big up some football fans as well. So, one year, Pride In London coincided with the England football match, when they were playing Sweden. There were about 100 England fans all in their strips walking through Trafalgar Square to get to the bar where they were going to match the match. And I think the media would have you believe that potentially there might be a bit of trouble or whatever, but those fans walked through singing Three Lions, and all the gay people joined in…

Kate: ...waving their rainbow flags, it was such an amazing moment, and that’s what I think Go West feels like. It feels like a perfect moment, it feels like a perfect place, and that’s what Pride feels like.

Adele: Amen.

Kate: And the Village People were so ahead of their time. That was a time when people couldn’t be out and proud. And there they were on TV… and Muggles didn’t know…

Adele: ...but the gays did! So big up to them for that.

Kate: And such a diverse band, as well. What a load of legends.

Adele Roberts hosts the early breakfast show on BBC Radio 1 from 4am on weekdays.