REISSUE OF THE MONTH
HE’S been through a lot, has Marc Almond. For many he’ll always be the voice of “Tainted Love”, the Gloria Jones song his duo with Dave Ball, Soft Cell, remade in needlepoint vision in the early 1980s. The excesses of that decade, and their after-effects, seem to have scored, or scarred, much of Almond’s subsequent life. And while he’s flirted with pop stardom a number of times, including his No 1 duet with Gene Pitney on “Something’s Gotten Hold Of My Heart”, he’s always seemed more comfortable singing from a psychological space somewhere between the mainstream and the margins.
It’s a life lived fully, though, even as, at its most extreme – his motorbike accident in 2004, for instance – it’s had Almond near death. Moments…
