Say Hello, Wave Goodbye

Marc Almond doesn’t know who he is. On the one hand, there’s that glittering run of chart hits, stretching all the way to Soft Cell’s perve-disco classic ‘Tainted Love’. In parallel with his achievements as a popular entertainer, though, Almond has had a fascinating career in the avant garde, the high point being his divisive 1983 album Torment & Toreros. He is, you suspect, quite conflicted as to which persona – the crowd pleaser, or the railer against banality – best suits his talents.

Or at least he used to be. Now, finally, he has reached a crossroads and decided the path he wishes to take. He is retiring from popular music, and will henceforth focus on the eclectic and the baroque. As a farewell gift to fans, Almond (55) is taking his songbook on the road one last time. An accompanying ‘Best Of’ arrives next year.
“Pop Troubadour is the name of the album,” he reveals. “It is going to be a big singles thing. It was supposed to come out this year. There were some legal problems so it’s been put back. The tour is going ahead. I had a choice whether to postpone or not. I decided to proceed. I didn’t want to leave people down. It will be predominantly hits and a-sides.”
He departs the pop scene with a heavy heart. After a quarter-century in the business he has, however, concluded his future is elsewhere. “I’ve really left the hit singles thing behind years ago,” he says. “That was part of who I was as a younger person. I don’t need that now. I’m looking for more challenging things.”
He is also probably going to give up releasing original material, in album form at any rate. One of his great talents, he believes, is as interpreter of other artists’ work. With so many great songs out there, why write new music nobody wants or needs?
“I spent a lot of time looking for songs I feel I can make my own,” he says. “Songs where people have probably done a better job writing them than I could have but which I can put my own twist on. I think it is unlikely I will do a record again of all original numbers. I will probably be a mixture of other people’s.”
He started to rethink his relationship with chart music after nearly dying in a motorcycle accident in 2004. He was in a coma for weeks and suffered a collapsed lung and serious hearing damage. Doctors told him he got off lightly.
“At the moment I’m in a great place,” he reflects. “I want to enjoy myself and my music. I’m lucky my records do well and that I can earn a living.”
You can get a sense of where he’s going from his performance at the Antony Hegarty-curated Meltdown festival in London, at which he recreated Torment & Toreros in its entirety. Recorded while Almond was in the throes of a break-up and suffering depression, it’s a wrenching, cathartic LP that obeys few of the conventions of popular music and actively flies in the face of several others. Enormously controversial at the time, it has come to be regarded as an overlooked classic. That was certainly Hegarty’s opinion – he personally sought out Almond and pleaded with him to reprise the project for Meltdown, an annual artsy wig-out at London’s South Bank Centre.
“It is a record about mental breakdown and madness, about destructive relationships and all of that,” says Almond.
“It was very dark. A lot of the songs were made up on the spot over two weeks in Trident Studios London, where Marc Bolan and David Bowie worked. We used the same piano as they did. It was a very odd album to make but one I am proud of.”