Marc and the Mambas: Marc Almond’s Soft Cell side project
It’s always hard to pick your “top ten” albums when pressed, but two things that always come immediately to mind for me are Nick Cave’s first solo record, From Her to Eternity and Marc Almond’s second Soft Cell hooky project with Marc and the Mambas, 1983’s Torment and Toreros.
You wanna talk about BLEAK? Torment and Toreros is the bleakest, darkest, most depressing album, probably of all time. It makes Lou Reed’s Berlin sound like Alvin and the Chipmunks. If ever there was a soundtrack to slitting your wrists to, this is it, especially “Black Heart,” now regarded as one of Almond’s signature tunes. It’s probably the best song ever to listen to on repeat when you’ve been f’d over badly:
Marc Almond has always been a ‘love him or hate him” proposition and even gay male friends of mine who like what he stands for, still seem divided on the matter of his voice. I think he’s one of our greatest living vocalists bar none. It’s got nothing to do with his vocal range, control or any of that, it’s how he sells the song. It’s about the emotional wallop he’s capable of delivering. The personality that comes through every note he sings. He’s the ultimate male diva, the torch singer of torch singers. Who else even comes close? His voice is as unruly as it is controlled. He can sound anguished like no one has since Jacques Brel. If you’re into Judy Garland, Maria Callas, Edith Piaf, Cher, not to mention Scott Walker, how can you possibly resist Marc Almond?
I’ve been a lifelong fan since the Soft Cell days and have paid ridiculous amounts of money for Soft Cell and Marc bootlegs ‘back in the day.’ The material of his I find the strongest is not actually what he did collaborating with David Ball in Soft Cell, but the range of albums he made with Annie Hogan (seen in clips) as his musical director. They must have had some sort of falling out because how otherwise to explain that a partnership this profound could dissolve?
The brilliant Antony Hegarty from Antony and the Johnsons has said Torment and Toreros was an important influence on him and it definitely shows.