The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
Marc Almond
Perth Concert Hall, March 25
Marc Almond has enjoyed a chameleonic career in pop music for nearly four decades now.
The best of his music is distinguished by the unique qualities of his deep, mysterious voice and his roots of torch singing and Brechtian operatics.
Yet it’s fair to say that his very first success may have been his greatest.
Released in 1981, the version of Gloria Jones’ 1964 Northern Soul track Tainted Love which his group Soft Cell recorded has entered on to the list of classics, hitting number one in the UK and going top 10 in America.
The joyous, moody electropop hit may still be the song most people know him for but it’s unfair to say it defined his career.
Born into a military family in Southport, Manchester and raised by his grandparents, the then-Peter Almond studied art at Leeds Polytechnic in the 1970s, where he idolised David Bowie and Marc Bolan and took to calling himself Marc after the latter (Gloria Jones, who originally sang Tainted Love, was Bolan’s partner).
It was at Leeds he met painter Dave Ball, who had a sideline in making music on a synthesiser.
Together, they became Soft Cell and the combination of futuristic music and a distinctly risque live performance quickly saw them signed to the independent label Some Bizarre.
Within the next 12 months they had five big UK hits (including Tainted Love and Say Hello, Wave Goodbye), then the duo split in 1984, getting back together for a fifth album in 2002.
The Tainted Love story offers up one of those unpleasant pop ironies. It sold 1.27 million copies and at the time it was the single which spent longest on the Billboard Hot 100 – but Almond and Ball made no real money because it was a cover.
Yet Almond’s diverse and interesting career was only just beginning; having formed Marc and the Mambas while still in Soft Cell, some of the band played on his 1984 debut album Vermine in Ermine, the first of 21 solo records.
Last year’s 10-disc boxset Trials of Eyeliner testifies to the diversity of his career so far, which spans the international 1989 hit Something’s Gotten Hold of My Heart with Gene Pitney, other signature hits including Jacky and the Days of Pearly Spencer, an album of Jacques Brel covers, an album of Russian folk songs and the Stardom Road covers record.
In recent years he’s also taken to the stage, including in the Fringe Firstwinning 10 Plagues: A Song Cycle at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre during the 2011 festival.
With such a hugely creative track record, this show won’t just be about hanging on for the big hit.