Marc Almond on being the antidote to Thatcher and why he’s probably a queer icon after all

It feels quietly thrilling to find Marc Almond in Soho, the once-grimy London neighbourhood he sang about on Soft Cell’s iconic debut album, 1981’s Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret.

Home to the era-defining hits Tainted Love, Bedsitter and Say Hello, Wave Goodbye, it propelled Southport-born Almond and his keyboard-playing bandmate Dave Ball, who hailed from nearby Blackpool, onto Top of the Pops and into the national conversation.

“I always think people wanted either to mother me, murder me or fuck me – and sometimes it was a mix of those things at the same time,” he says today with an mischievous smile.

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On Sex Dwarf, a synth-pop banger from the album that has aged rather better than its title, Almond sang about “luring disco dollies to a life of vice”. The accompanying video remains banned to this day due to its allegedly pornographic content. Almond noted in 2019 that it was “ahead of its time” because it featured trans people and real-life Soho sex workers.

“Looking back, we were more political than we probably gave ourselves credit for,” Almond says today, pointing to the subversive “social commentary” baked into the duo’s songs.

“We like to think we were kind of an antidote to Margaret Thatcher’s times,” he continues. “Say Hello, Wave Goodbye was about an aristocratic person, maybe even a politician, who has an affair with a prostitute and then rejects her.”

Those early songs and skirmishes laid the foundations for Almond’s enduringly successful career, which is still going strong today. In 2022, Soft Cell returned with their first studio album in 20 years, Happiness Not Included, which debuted at number seven in the UK.

Now comes I’m Not Anyone, Marc Almond’s 27th solo LP – yes really. Released last Friday (12 July), it features stunning orchestral rock covers of songs by Neil Diamond (Lonely Looking Sky), Don McLean (Chain Lightning) and Mahalia Jackson (Trouble of the World).

Almond’s flair for pop melodrama drives a rollicking cover of Gone with The Wind (Is My Love), a Northern Soul deep cut that was once recorded by Gloria Jones, the singer who cut the original version of Tainted Love in 1964. It’s a cute full circle moment for Almond, and another career highlight.

The trendy hotel we meet at today is a bit different from the underground Soho clubs that Almond frequented in the early 80s, but then again, so is the still-impish singer. Now Marc Almond OBE, he’s a leftfield national treasure, queer elder statesman and, since the end of the pandemic, permanent resident of Portugal.

“London and I had a great love affair, but it’s gone a bit sour,” he says between sips of tea. “I felt the need to get away from London so I can come back and fall in love with it again, because I think that will happen. Just not at the moment.”

Living in rural Portugal, where Almond is “very much on my own a lot of the time”, allowed him to focus on his new album I’m Not Anyone. The 67-year-old has a rich history with cover versions: after Tainted Love, he scored big solo hits with gleaming remakes of Gene Pitney’s Something’s Gotten Hold of My Heart (which he reworked into a duet with Pitney himself) and David McWilliams’ The Days of Pearly Spencer.

“I did a year-and-a-half of preparation because I looked at it as curating an album of other people’s songs or putting an exhibition together,” he says. “I went on many YouTube journeys where I would rediscover great old records that I’d not listened to in ages.”

Marc Almond compiled a long list of songs he felt a strong emotional connection to, then whittled it down to a final tracklist of 11. “If it was left to me, I’d make a double album with 25 songs,” he says, “but my label told me that people have short attention spans these days and won’t listen for that long on Spotify.”

Almond was drawn to the album’s title track I’m Not Anyone, which was co-written by Paul Anka and first recorded by Sammy Davis, Jr. in 1973, because of its “defiant lyric”. In the first verse, he sings empathically:  “I’m not any man / Designed to fit someone’s plan / I have my own desires / All the things a man aspires.”

“That’s how I’ve always been – I don’t want to be manipulated and told what to do,” he says. “And that has meant shooting myself in the foot many times. I’ve been told that [a record] will be more commercial if you do it that way, but if I don’t feel it, I can’t do it that way.”

At the same time, Almond believes that I’m Not Anyone acquires a fresh queer-coded edge when he sings it. “It’s quite an out and proud song, isn’t it?” he says brightly.

Marc Almond has been an out and proud gay man since 1987, when he first spoke publicly about his sexuality, six years after his first flush of fame. At the start of his career, he had “the fear of God” put into him by record label executives who issued a stark homophobic warning: “You can’t be open [about your sexuality] because you won’t sell any more records.”

Almond was hardly the only 80s pop star to conceal his queerness, at least to begin with. Culture Club singer Boy George famously deflected the issue by quipping that he “would rather have a cup of tea than sex”.

“People like me and George, we were poisoned by our time,” Almond says today, sounding reflective rather than bitter. “We had to maintain a kind of ambiguity, and I think you see that too with the artists that came slightly later like Pet Shop Boys and Morrissey.”

Still, he acknowledges that his own brand of ambiguity was, well, pretty thinly veiled. “We tapped into the fact we could be very subversive in a mainstream world,” he says. “I would go on Top of the Pops in a [gay] leather man’s hat trying to be as camp as I possibly could. The record company guys were probably holding their heads in their hands!”

At times, he used his ambiguous public persona as a Trojan horse. In 1985, he performed his shimmering solo hit Stories of Johnny – inspired by a TV documentary about male sex workers – on the BBC’s early evening talk show Wogan. But nearly 40 years after he came out, Almond says the way he perceives his sexuality is still evolving.

“For me, the weirdest thing was accepting being called ‘queer’,” he says. “Because when I grew up, ‘queer’ was usually followed by a punch in the face. I know you’ve got to take back these words that were used as weapons against you, but for me and other gay people my age – and for some younger than me – it’s hard to come to terms with [that word] even now.”

Happily, Marc Almond says he’s learning to embrace ‘queer’, not least because he now finds the word ‘gay’ “a bit jazz hands”. He lets out a laugh. “Queer has a kind of darker affinity to it – it covers people who aren’t in the mainstream, who are out on the periphery,” he says. The sort of people, of course, that Almond has always spotlighted in his songs.

“So now if someone says to me, ‘Oh you’re a queer icon’, I don’t mind,” he says. “I even think: ‘Well actually, maybe I am one.'”

I’m Not Anyone is out now via BMG.

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