PASSING THE TORCH

Marc Almond prepares his orchestral salute to classic ’60s pop!

n July 2014, Marc Almond was made an Honorary Fellow of the Leeds College of Music. “It was a great honour,” he says today. “Leeds has always been a musical spiritual home of mine, because my musical career really kind of started properly there. It was like being given the musical keys to the city, really.” His connection with the conservatoire will deepen this summer when he plays An Evening With Marc Almond: A Celebration Of 20th Century Torch Songs And Greatest Hits with the Leeds College of Music Orchestra and Pop Choir, at the Leeds Town Hall (July 8) and London’s Royal Festival Hall (July 10). The collaboration began last year when Marc was asked to work on a one-off concert with students from the college. “I gave them a bunch of my songs to do whatever they wanted with,” he says. “It was such a success I thought, Let’s make more of a project of this and take it further.” The larger presentation offered the chance to scratch another creative itch. “It came from a conversation I was having last year with your very own [MOJO scribe] Mark Paytress,” says Marc. “We were talking about the great orchestral pop-opera songs of the ’60s, the dark romantic torch songs, and the great arrangements that went with those – Shadow Of Your Smile, which was done by Scott Walker and Ella Fitzgerald, and the ’60s pop opera stuff we liked. So I just said, Let’s do something that shows all the skills of the musicians, and do some great arrangements, for a selection of three decades of torch songs. That became the theme.” Almond reveals there will be 25 players in the orchestra and another 20 in the choir, and adds that the

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