The Blow Monkeys’ “Digging Your Scene” Took the AIDS Crisis Into the Top 20

“Digging Your Scene” arrived in February 1986 sounding like the best-dressed record on the chart, and it behaved like one: number 12 in the UK, 14 on the Billboard Hot 100, top 30 in Germany, top 20 in Australia and New Zealand. Smooth soul, jazz phrasing, saxophone and strings, all polished to a shine. What the arrangement did not advertise was its subject.

The lyric did. “Tell me why is it I’m digging your scene, I know I’ll die, baby” was written about the AIDS crisis and the prejudice that travelled with it, directed most sharply at gay men. Robert Howard, the band’s frontman and writer, has said the song came out of the clubs he and his friends were going to, Taboo and Heaven among them. He wasn’t gay, he has explained, but that was his friendship group, and it was a brilliant scene. The fear gathering outside it was the other half of the song.

Its position in the band’s catalogue matters too. The previous single, “Forbidden Fruit,” had come out in September 1985 on RCA and stalled at 94, despite a lusher sound built on Mick Anker’s bass, Neville Henry’s saxophone and Tony Kiley’s drums. That record followed 1984’s “Limping for a Generation,” which had earned reviews but not sales. The budget grew. The follow-up did the rest.

Howard has also cited the moral framing of the period, including Donna Summer’s widely reported remark that AIDS was God’s revenge, which she later retracted. It gave him a line: “It’ll get you in the end. It’s God’s revenge.” Set against a chorus that sweet, the words did something pop rarely attempted then, and the production has dated far more than the argument has.