Somerville was born & raised within Glasgow and has a extremely distinctive falsetto (high pitched) singing style, & is besides openly gay. He is likewise the left-wing and human rights political activist.

His music has consisted largely of disco music, but has likewise contained another time innovative social comment.

He co-founded a synth pop group Bronski Beat in 1983, who proceeded to have a total of hits in the British stock and index charts. Their large hit, Smalltown Son, which reached Total Three, was write of persecution of a gay youth within the provincial town, which at the period was innovational.

He left Bronski Ram down 1985 and formed The Communards with classically trained pianist Richard Coles. It got the total of hits, including the cover of Thelma Houston's ''Don't Leave Me This Way'' which spent quaternity weeks at First in a stock & index charts, and became the large merchandising UK only of 1986. He too sang backing vocals on the Fine Young Cannibals' version of Suspicious Minds, which was a UK Top 10 hit.

A Communards split around 1988 and Somerville launched his solo career. He got many solo hits between 1989 and 1991, also singing on the 2nd Band Aid project at the prevent of 1989. However when releasing his 1991 album Process From either Love, Somerville left the limelight & was absentminded from either recording for a total of years.

He returned inside 1995 with an LP called Daring to Love. A second album, coroneted Handle a Damage was freed within 1999, and Root Beer come out a year late. Last, his dance-depending quaternary solo album, "Home Again," was freed inside 2005.

Somerville likewise has an acting career, appearing within Sally Potter's 1992 film of Virginia Woolf's Orlando, in Isaac Julien's 1998 Looking for Langston, and in the Girltown episode of the cult science fiction television series Lexx.