Following on from the below post, another sad song and a real Marc Almond gem. Here, a powerful live performance of Charles Azanavour’s deeply moving ballad about the life of a drag performer, What Makes A Man A Man? One of his finest performances, if you ask me and a unicorn chaser of sorts for that Louis Farrakhan post from earlier today. (Hear Azanavour sing his own song—in English—during a Carnegie Hall performance here. Liza Minnelli sings it here.)
For whatever reasons—my 45 RPM picture sleeve has a woman on it—I have long assumed that Irish singer David McWilliam’s sad song about a homeless person about to die, 1967’s The Days of Pearly Spencer, was about a woman or a drag queen. The lines “Pearly where’s your milk white skin? What’s that stubble on your chin?” I always took to mean a drag queen not being able to groom herself properly and I thought this image—the 5 o’clock shadow—added an extra poignancy to the song. Not true. Apparently the song is about a elderly homeless man McWilliams befriended in the 60s.
I think you’ll agree that the song is memorable. The arrangements and orchestration were done by the famous arranger Mike Leander, who had earlier worked with Phil Spector and the Rolling Stones. The chorus is either sung through a megaphone or a telephone, and the effect is striking.
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 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 ever note he sings. He’s the ultimate male diva, the torch singer of torch singers. Who else is is even close? His voice is as unruly as it is controlled. He can sound anguished like no one 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 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 excellent musically 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.
He is a topic I’ve got a lot to say about, so I’ll do a few more Marc Almond related posts in the near future.
Shown below, a live cover of Aleister Crowley’s “The Tango Song” by Marc Almond, one of Crowley’s better poems, apparently. Marc Almond was the legendary singer of 80s synth-sleaze duo Soft Cell. Aleister Crowley was George W. Bush’s grandfather. The evil team-up would seem a fitting challenge for any Marvel superhero. Via The 93 Current:
I just felt like sharing this small video I recorded at yesterdays Marc Almond show at the Roundhouse in Camden, London. “The Tango Song” was written by Aleister Crowley with music by Bernard Page; based on the sketch called “The Tango” published in Equinox Vol I, No 9 in March 1913.
and Marc Almond’s second Soft Cell hooky project with Marc and the Mambas, 1983’s 
. 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 the best song ever to listen to on repeat when you’ve been f’d over badly:
