The New Cue #387 June 10: Marc Almond
"There’s only one version of Tainted Love and that's Soft Cell’s version"
Good morning!
It’s Monday again, as it was last week and as it will be next week. And where Monday is, so will be a free Start The Week With… edition from your friends at The New Cue, unless it’s a bank holiday because bank holidays are when we all go ultimate frisbeeing together. But you are in luck – today is not a bank holiday!
With just a few gentle scrolls, you can get stuck into our interview with torch-song master Marc Almond. He made this comprehensive playlist of his best work across five decades: give it spin to get you in the zone.
We’ll see you on Friday. And then it will be Monday again. Whoo!
Enjoy the edition,
Ted, Niall and Chris
Start The Week With… Marc Almond
Next month, Marc Almond releases his new record I’m Not Anyone. It’s the electro-pop pioneer’s 27th solo album and his third in a series of covers projects, this one seeing the Soft Cell singer tackle songs by Don McLean, Blue Cheer, Neil Diamond and more. Marc originally nixed his chat with us because of an old grudge against Q but Niall talked him round and tried to find out what the beef was about during the interview - he can’t remember. But he can recall lots of other good stuff which you can read about below:
Hello Marc, how are you?
Hello there! I’m fine. I didn’t have a fantastic sleep last night and everything but I’m fine, I’m okay and looking forward to talking to you.
Thanks for doing this. Where are you at the moment?
I’m in Portugal. I’ve been here for about two years. I decided to be a little a little more rural as opposed to urban which I’ve been for a long time. I think it was trying to find some new adventures and new experiences before it’s too late. I’ve never really known Portugal - I’ve lived in different places, I lived in Moscow and lived in New York, London, Barcelona but I’ve never really known Portugal so well and I ended up having a little bit of money saved and I had a chance of buying some unloved bit of land with a broken down farmhouse so I thought, ‘Well, let’s have a project and go and be rural, plant trees, be druid, be pagan and do a project and give some love to a place that’s a bit unloved’. I got sick of London, I fell out of love with it a bit. I’d been there for a long time and the London at the moment is not the London that I love too much. Maybe I will again, it’s a lover I’ve fallen out of love with. You fall in and out with lovers sometimes and London is that lover. In a couple of years’ time, I’ll probably be bored crazy going absolutely mad and desperate to get back to urban chaos again.
Haha. What’s your favourite thing about living there?
Planting trees and going to garden centres! I never thought I would do that in my life, when I’m thinking ‘ooh, look at that plant, isn’t that nice?’. I really try desperately to still be a punk and not settle into garden centre old age but I like the peace, it gives me a chance to write, which is good. There are too many distractions in London all the time. I like writing, I like making artwork, I make montage and collage artworks and stuff. Also just generally getting my head together a bit and getting a chance to listen to music as well which I found distracting all the time in London but here I can go down the YouTube wormholes to my heart’s content, discovering new songs, new things, listening to music I haven’t listened to for a long time and just generally enjoying life.
You were a bit hesitant about doing this interview because of our Q past. What did Q do to upset you?
You know what, I can’t even remember but most publications have upset me at some point. I’ve usually fallen out with most publications at some point and then we’ve all made friends again afterwards. I used to be much more thin-skinned and now I’m much more thick-skinned - I hardened my heart and thickened up my skin. I think it’s when you get older, you just don’t give a damn anymore. I don’t read my reviews, I don’t read my interviews, I don’t watch myself on the TV. Once it’s done, it’s done and it’s out in the ether. People say, ‘Oh, you’ve got to look at this, you’ve got to look at that’ and I go, ‘why?’. If you read good things about yourself, you feel you’ve got something to live up to and if you read bad things about yourself, it just pisses you off. So you just think, ‘Yeah, that’s done, whatever’. I tend to avoid the comments under YouTube clips. I’d love a sweep of YouTube, just get rid of half of it on there because it’s blocking up the servers with all this crap. How many times can people watch Say Hello, Wave Goodbye on somebody’s mobile phone or Tainted Love from some festival in Croatia or something?
That’s a good idea. Onto your new record, I’ve really been enjoying it. It’s also been quite educational as I don’t know a lot of the songs you’ve covered. Where did it start?
This is the third album that I’ve done of this type, if you go back to Stardom Road, which I did back in 2006, just after I’d had my bike accident and then I did Shadows And Reflections and now this one, so it’s the third in a line of those albums where it’s kind of curating an album of songs They’re not songbook albums per se, where you say, ‘Let’s do an album of swing songs’ or ‘let’s do an album Frank Sinatra or even Jacques Brel songs’, they’re albums of different songs. I tend to always keep going back to songs from the late 60s to 70s and through the 70s because that was my time of growing up listening to music, when music made an impression on me for the first time. I had young parents who listened to pop music all the time at home, we watched all the pop shows in the 60s and the early 70s. In the early 70s, I became a record buyer because I was doing a part time job or it was pocket money, I’d buy a single now and then. I grew up loving different kinds of music, different influences of music, different music that was kind of inspiring me… I’ve actually forgotten the thread of what I was talking about!
Where this one began…
I started planning it maybe a year and a half, two years ago. I knew there would come a point where I’d do a covers album again because I take these breaks from songwriting, I have these bouts of songwriting - I’m not a natural songwriter who can write a song anytime, anyplace, I have these bouts. At the moment, I’m having a bout of songwriting, writing lyrics and writing stuff, but I’m not a natural, I can’t write songs for other people. I write songs that fit me or fit what I do, fit my voice. I always know at some point, I’m going to take the break from that and do an album of covers, because that’s what I really enjoy. I enjoy the curating of it. I enjoy the planning of songs, looking for songs and taking from different genres. I mean, I can’t think of many people that would put Blue Cheer and Paul Anka on the same album but try and make it somehow that it comes from a similar world.
That’s the best thing about the record, it’s all got the same flavour.
It’s looking for songs that have that emotional resonance, that say something about where I am in my life, that say something about how I feel, and how I’m generally kind of feeling, whether it’s esoteric, or whether its elemental, emotional. I make lists, I’m a list person. So I’ll make these lists, I’ll start off with songs I would like to sing. And then that develops and changes but there’s always one or two that hang around and stay there. I compile a list of songs, I listen to how things go together, I try things out live. Usually I pick around the same timeline so you’ve got songs and the very late 60s to the early and mid 70s I mean. I listen at home to a lot of kind of West Coast stuff and Laurel Canyon music and and I listen to a lot of American music and a lot of soul. I love the arrangements of late 60s, early 70s songs, beautiful arrangements with beautiful string arrangements and interesting instruments, acoustic-based songs. What I don’t listen to is a lot of modern artists or new artists. If I do, I tend to be watching something like True Detective and I’ll Shazam the song and be like ‘Oh, my God, that’s Billie Eilish, I never realised!’ Then I listen to Billie Eilish and realise I love it. I listen to a lot of Lana Del Rey, I feel an affinity with the songs, that broken down, decaying Americana that she sings about which I really love. I probably listen to more American modern artists. I listen to a lot of interesting hip-hop, like Tyler, the Creator, even Kanye. But mostly I can’t go back and listen to the 70s and late 60s cos I just love the musical arrangements.
Which song on the record do you have the longest relationship with?
I’ve wanted to sing I’m Not Anyone for a long time. I just felt I wasn’t in the place to sing it, it’s such a big song. I originally loved Paul Anka and Sammy Davis Jr’s versions that they sang. That song has been hanging around with me for quite a while and I just think it’s a very now song in a way, it’s a statement song and it really hits a chord with me emotionally. I grew up as a kid loving Elusive Butterfly. I loved it ever since I was a kid really. And it was nice that Bob Lind sent me a message about it saying how much he loved it and he was so happy I’d done the version of it. Chain Lightning - I love that period of Don McLean. I just thought, ‘I’ve got to attempt to do this’, it just goes through this gamut of emotions.
It’s epic and you’ve done a suitably epic version of it.
It’s life, love, death, spirituality, resurrection, guilt, all these things that it goes through. I didn’t want to change the arrangements too much. I didn’t want to totally reinvent everything. I think I pick a lot of songs that are not generally overly well known or overly sung by too many people. You think ‘What else can I bring to this?’ and sometimes you just can’t, there’s no point because there is a song has a great arrangement, it has a great string arrangement, it has a great kind of body to it and everything, great sound and you just want to recreate that in a way but with modern technology in a modern way and stamp your voice on it. To your fans or the people that like you, that’s the version of the song that they’ve heard first of all, then they can go down the YouTube wormhole and discover other versions of it, you’re a curator of song, which I love. Even going back to something like Tainted Love. People go, ‘Which is the best version? It’s the original’ or ‘It’s the Soft Cell version’ but there’s only one version and that’s Soft Cell’s version because nobody would have ever really given Gloria Jone’s version if it wasn’t for Soft Cell bringing it into the public. Gloria’s version is fantastic, of course it is, but Soft Cell gave it that sound.
Yeah, that’s the version you hear in your head when someone says Tainted Love.
It’s become a part of pop culture. Even northern soul, it introduced the whole northern soul genre to a lot of people outside the aficionados. I get a lot of jealousy from that sometimes from Northern Soul aficionados, I’ll probably get it from something like Gone With the Wind, My Love and Rita And The Tiaras’ version of it as well on this album!
But it’s OK because you’re not going to pay attention to the YouTube comments.
But I know that people say out there! There’s always somebody who very helpfully will tell me. I love Rita And The Tiaras’ version of it. Ironically, I learned after loving the Rita And The Tiaras’ version for so long that Gloria Jones has actually done a version of it. I thought that was an omen.
Was there anything from doing the last Soft Cell album, 2022’s Happiness Not Included, that you took into this or are all the projects separate in your head?
I think they’re completely separate things for me. I’ve always thought as a solo artist I can explore the more of the romantic stuff. In Soft Cell, I enjoy being what I like humorously cynical. So it’s the cynic and the romantic, which is basically the same things really but one’s disillusioned. With Soft Cell, I’ve got a different head on, a little bit more of a of a simmering rage, a little more sarcasm, a little more cynicism. It’s much more of an urban feel with Soft Cell. I wrote the last Soft Cell album on lockdown, we hadn’t really planned to do an album. After we’d done the O2 thing, which was 40 years and farewell and goodbye what-have-you, a year or so past and Dave out of the blue sent me some songs he said, ‘If you feel like writing anything to these, that would be great.’ I was sitting there in my basement in lockdown, in my music den, trying to create artworks and do something, singing over Instagram - I look back at some of the crazy things that we did during that time just trying to survive really, trying to keep sane - and I thought, ‘I really love these tunes’. I had the ideas, the whole mood of that time that was going on with lockdown and the crazy mentalness of it all and I thought, ‘These are Soft Cell themes’ and Happiness Not Included came out of that. Will we do another album? Maybe. I’m writing at the moment, I’m writing some angry cynical songs at the moment so they might find a place in Soft Cell.
Talking about that Soft Cell O2 show, I interviewed John Grant the morning after. He’d been at the gig and spent the first part of the interview raving about it and you. How does it feel when you see other artists acknowledge the influence you’ve had on them?
That’s really lovely of him. I totally respect him and I love his music as well, what a great voice and he’s a great person, I’ve got to know him over time. I don’t know him very well but I know him a little bit. But it’s really nice to hear that. I was very thrilled when we did the joint thing with the Pet Shop Boys on the last Soft Cell album. It was kind of a thrilling thing because Pet Shop Boys have always been very forward that they were influenced by Soft Cell, in particular songs like Bedsitter, and Neil did a lot of interviews with me in the early days. He did some of the first interviews with me, I’d just come out of art college. It was nice that after all this time we came together. I always say slightly tongue in cheek but meaning it really, it’s UK’s most influential electro duo meets the UK’s most successful electro duo. It was just a lovely thing.
It was without me evening knowing that the Pet Shop Boys did a mix of Purple Zone. I think Dave knew about it, they’d heard the song and loved the song and had asked to do a mix of it and Neil had actually put his own vocals in. I felt very moved about that. I just thought, ‘That is it, that’s how the song should sound, it’s brilliant, it’s fantastic.’ It was Pet Shop Boys signature sounds, Soft Cell signature sounds, and Neil and I singing together on a record, I love when you can close a circle, the meeting of two bands that have had some kind of connection to each other through the years.
Last one – what’s left on your musical bucket list?
Oh, you can always write a better song and always do something better. You’ve got to believe that in yourself. I am getting back into a songwriting mood again, I’m writing some lyrics. I’ve probably got about three albums planned at the moment with different people and different things that I’d like to do. I can’t say now because that’s a jinx. It would be interesting to do another Soft Cell album. I’d love to work with a hip hop producer or something on Soft Cell, that would be interesting. But there’s still songs to sing, songs to write, plenty to do. I’m only 67, isn’t that marvellous? I can at least be on stage for another 10 years, hopefully!
ND