Tom Falle’s Rhumba Club is a place for real misfits. Not necessarily the fist-pumping flag-waving types, but more likely those who really do find themselves alienated by popular culture. These are the folk who crave a space where conventional ‘coolness’, social media, and personal demons are left outside the club door, whilst queerness and beautiful weirdos hold fort within.

Tom’s story is fascinating. Growing up gay in conservative Jersey, he knows what it is to regulate and repress your inner queer.

His childhood solution was to create a private escapist world, where classic 70s and 80s pop plays on repeat, and your choice of outfit is determined by how you feel, rather than by what mummy, daddy, or the hipster next door thinks.

10 years later, after making his way through London indie bands (with varying degrees of success), he has codified and packaged this queer escape, creating a kind of audio-Eden for queers and geeks, culminating in debut album ‘Welcome To The Rhumba Club’.

Kicking off with brass fanfare and burgeoning into a euphoric haze of 80s synths, album opener ‘Primitive’ is very much an “I have arrived moment” explains Falle. It’s a love song in its purest sense, but at the same time a summary of what Rhumba Club is about - being your most honest or...’primitive’...self.

From condemning conversion therapy in recent single, ‘Conversion’, quipping about heteronormative structures on ‘Normativity’, to being queer in a small, socially conservative place on ‘The Country’, the album is loaded with powerful themes around sexuality and culture, all doused with a colourful whit and infectious pop sounds.