A northern soul kiss turned cold
A drum machine snaps, a synth bass ducks under it, and Marc Almond’s voice arrives already too much, pleading and showing off in the same breath, as if the club had no back room to hide in.
Tainted Love was written by Ed Cobb and first released in 1964 by Gloria Jones, a B-side that northern soul DJs, Richard Searling among them, later turned into a secret. Dave Ball, who loved that circuit, played it to Almond. They were art students in Leeds, a duo called Soft Cell, and they wanted an encore that was not theirs. The record they made, produced by Mike Thorne at Advision in London, came out in 1981 and sat on Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret. The label heard the demo and asked for bass, guitar, drums, something less odd. They put it out anyway. It was the year’s biggest British single, No. 1 at home, and it stayed on the American chart for most of a year. The twelve-inch does not end. It slides, without apology, into Where Did Our Love Go.
Almond has described the result as cold electronics carrying a vocal that is over-passionate, over-exuberant, slightly out of key. That is the whole method. Jones later said she loved the emotion in his voice, and that their version was better than hers. He has also admitted, much later, that for a while he resented the song, because Soft Cell were more than one cover, which is true, and beside the point the radio had already settled. The original is a soul record about spoiled affection. The cover is a neon corridor with the same complaint, sung by a man who sounds as if he might cry or laugh and has chosen, for the length of the chorus, to do both.
A mixture of cold electronics with an over-passionate, over-exuberant, slightly out of key vocal.
(Marc Almond, 1000 UK Number One Hits)
In clubs the twelve-inch was the point. DJs could live inside the segue, two songs about love gone wrong stitched into one long exit. On television Almond in eyeliner and Ball behind a keyboard looked like a joke the charts were not ready to tell, and then the charts told it every hour. The song has been revived, sampled, shouted at weddings by people who have never heard Gloria Jones. It survives because the riff is a hook and the vocal is a character. Take either away and it is a museum piece. Together they are still a little indecent, which is the correct temperature.
What remains is a cover that did not pay tribute so much as change the lighting. Cobb’s song was already about love that stains. Soft Cell made the stain fluorescent. Almond’s debt to Jones, and to Bolan through her, is in the performance, not in a speech. He sings as if the feeling were larger than the notes, and the notes, chilly, precise, refuse to swell with him. The gap between those two temperatures is the record. Forty years on, the drum machine still snaps, and the voice still arrives too much, which is exactly enough.
