Marc Almond arrives slightly late at the hotel, which is in the heart of London’s nightlife district, Soho. The British singer comes straight from his new adopted country of Portugal. He recently moved to the coastal town of Cascais near Lisbon. “After the pandemic, I had to leave here, I felt so imprisoned,” says Almond in an interview with the German Press Agency. On Saturday, July 9, he will be 65 years old.
“I figured I’d have to look at things from the outside for a while. I’m sure I’ll come back at some point.” Now he has come to London for an intimate concert. The singer is only accompanied by a pianist. The occasion is Almond’s 65th birthday. “I thought I’d do something special,” he says happily. “Instead of hiding like I usually do on my birthday, I’ll stand up and make it an event. After all, it’s a milestone.”
You can hardly tell that the pop star, who was born Peter Mark Sinclair Almond on July 9, 1957 in the English seaside resort of Southport, is in his mid-60s. Slightly tanned, with dyed black hair under a baseball hat, he sits on the sofa and is in a good mood. “To be honest, the older I get, the more I like life,” says Almond, who forms synthpop duo Soft Cell with keyboardist and arranger David Ball. “My life is a lot clearer. Creatively it’s never been better. Everything has kind of become clearer in the last few years.” Here’s the big hit again:
Soft Cell have just released their first studio album in 20 years. “Happiness Not Included” delighted fans and critics alike. Thanks to the pandemic, Almond has had plenty of time to write on it. “I didn’t want to make an album about lockdown and Covid and stuff like that,” he emphasizes. “But I was influenced by the atmosphere, this strange closed-off life that we had when we only saw the world out there through the computer.” Here’s a recent Almond song:
Actually, Soft Cell had already given their farewell concert in 2018. “I thought that was it, then,” says Almond. But then the record company asked him for a new album. He initially refused. “But Dave really wanted to do it, and part of me was like, ‘Let me see if you have anything good that I like. And then he bombarded me with all these songs and I just wrote tunes to them.’ Soft Cell also went on tour again before the record was released in May.
He met David Ball at Leeds School of Art, where Almond dabbled in what he called “performance art and theatrical stuff”. “Dave had a synth and made all these cool sounds,” he recalls. “And I distorted my voice with all these effects and did weird robotic effects. That was kind of the birth of Soft Cell.”
The cover version of Gloria Jones’ “Tainted Love” became a breakthrough hit in 1981. Soft Cell ranked number 1 in the hit parades throughout Europe. After further hits like “Say Hello, Wave Goodbye” or “Torch” the duo separated in 1984 for the time being.
Inconceivable today: his record company advised Marc Almond at the time to hide the fact that he was gay. “Back then it was like this: If you’re a gay artist, then you’re only interesting for gays,” he explains. The PR team therefore launched stories about him in the press. “When I was photographed with a woman, they always brought up a story about an alleged affair.”
That only ended in the late 1980s. “I think it was 1987 and someone looked at my record collection and said, ‘You’re obviously gay, you have a Judy Garland record in your collection.'” Almond laughs. “So I said, ‘Of course, that’s pretty obvious.'” He was never married. He now lives in Cascais with a friend after spending the pandemic period alone in the UK.
As a solo artist Almond has released more than 20 albums with very different styles to date. The most commercially successful was 1988’s “The Stars We Are” with the singles “Tears Run Rings” and “Something’s Gotten Hold Of My Heart”. His most recent was “Chaos And A Dancing Star” in 2020. It could also soon continue with Soft Cell. “We would like to play more concerts,” says Marc Almond. “Now that the machine is running again.”
