Marc Almond

Composer and singer, Marc Almond is associated with the advent of synthetic pop and new-wave thanks to the track "Tainted Love", covered with David Ball, his Soft Cell alter-ego, from 1982 to 1987. Yet Almond is not just the singer of one glamorous hit: openly homosexual, he is a complex artist, author of an impressive discography with Soft Cell, Marc & the Mambas (two albums in 1982-1983) and then solo from 1984 with the albums Vermin in Ermine (1984), Stories of Johnny (1985), Mother Fist & Her Five Daughters (1987), then The Stars We Are (1988), including a number-one duet with pop veteran Gene Pitney and another with Nico, the short-lived lead singer of the Velvet Underground, who died shortly afterwards. Inspired by the world of cabaret, his work extends to an album of Jacques Brel covers in 1989(Jacques) and the following Enchanted with visuals by Pierre & Gilles (1990) and the orchestral and electronic Tenement Symphony (1991). Marc Almond returned to the Virgin label in 1996 with Fantastic Star, before setting up his own production company, Thirsty Ear, which released Absinthe: The French Album (1996), Slut (1998) and Open All Night (1999), featuring a duet with Siouxsie, lead singer of Siouxsie & the Banshees. A motorcycle accident in 2004 interrupted his career and plunged him into a coma for several weeks. The English crooner returned to the studio with albums of pop covers in Stardom Road (2007) and Orpheus in Exile: The Songs of Vadim Kozin (2009). In 2011, he composed the songs for the album Variété. Thereafter, Marc Almond multiplied his musical experiments on Feasting with Panthers (2011), The Dancing Marquis (2014), The Velvet Trail (2015) and Shadows and Reflections (2017). In 2018, the singer, who was made an Officer of the British Empire (OBE) for his services to culture, collaborated with Jools Holland and his band, The Rhythm & Blues Orchestra, on the album A Lovely Life to Live, which was followed by Chaos and a Dancing Star (2020), featuring the flute of Ian Anderson (Jethro Tull). The latter also participates in the following work I'm Not Anyone (2024), alongside Bryan Chambers and Louise Clare Marshall.