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Features

MARC ALMOND

In the fourteen year span of his career, Marc Almond has been one of the busiest artists around. Three years with Dave Ball as Soft Cell, including two albums uder the guise of Marc and the Mambas, a twelve year solo career that has gained him critical and commercial success, recording with other artists such as Jim Thirwell and Sally Timms, self financed side protects and a book of poetry. In more recent years his battle with prescription drugs has held him back from recording and touring but now as 'Clean & Serene' as his t-shirt states he is back on the road to promote a new single 'Adored & Explored', the first from a new album due later in the year.

When's the album coming out? "'Round about September sometime, there's going to be another couple of singles before then." Are you trying to spread out the releases? "There's are a lot of potential singles on the album you see, also the album's not quite finished yet, so I wanted to take the time in finishing it, and maybe jutr put out a couple of different styled singles,two or three to pave the way slowly for it as opposed to just releasing a single then banging out the album really quickly." Are there a wide diversity of styles on the album, or are the songs similar to Adored and Explored'? "No, it's quite a diverse albam, I suppose there's a dance feel to it. Dance, very pop guitars, a lot of potential singles, but it's still quite diverse from the sound of 'Adored and Explored'." You were recently interviewed in the Gay press which the 'Super Soaraway Sun' took great delight in 'reporting' on, what was all the fuss about? "Oh well,basically I'd had a problem for about ten, twelve years, since the beginning of the Eighties really, with sleeping pills, Valium, downers. I had problems with other things as well but my main problem was the sleeping pills. The Sun said I had a twelve year addiction to coke which is a slight exaggeration to say the least, you know. But really since the beginning of the Eighties, and I hadn't taken it to task, it was starting to really affect my life, and starting to ruin my life, hence the reason I haven't toured for a few years. It was starting to make things really difficult for me, thanks to my manager, Stevo who made me face up to my problems, and thanks to having good friends around me. Of course I was the last person to see that I had problems, everybody else could, but I was the last person to see it, they made me face up to things and I spent a while sorting my life out." Do you feel happier? "I do, yeah, the eighties were a wild time for me, a very wild time and the beginning of the nineties as well, through Soft Cell and the solo stuff, right up to about '93 it was all wild times. I think because of that, certain aspects of my career were beginning to suffer, musically I was really starting to lose direction, starting to lose direction in my whole life really, not just in music. So, I really wanted to sort it out and thanks to good people around me I did. I'm much happier now, I've been there and don't want to go through it again, I learned a lot of valuable lessons from it," Did the state of mind it put you in affect the music or your lyrics? "I've always been very prolific and creative. I sort of think, 'Well maybe if I hadn't been doing drugs at that time, then that album wouldn't have sounded like that', but maybe it wouldn't have been as good as that either, you just never know. That was the state of mind I was in at that time and that was maybe reflected in the music I was doing, so that's all been part of my career, I can't go back and change. l'm very proud of all the records that I've made. All the albums that I've done, they've all represented particular stages in my development and progression. Some have been successful, some haven't, but that doesn't bother me." Over the years some of your albums have just seemed to appear, with very little promotion, the "Jacques" album, the French Album, which I didn't know existed until I saw it in a record shop for example. "Not many people do know it exists, no. I think because I did a lot of solo stuff, even back to Marc And The Mambas, when I was doing Soft Cell, and being very prolific as an artist, I've done these little side albums. I've thought, 'Well I really want to do an album like this' so I'll put all my own money into it and do something that I want to do. People might think that's self indulgent but it's just something I've had to get out of my system. You're a record collector's worst mightmare. "When Record Collector did a thing on me it took them two issues or something like that to get all the records, yeah. So, sometimes I just put a record out and make it available and there hasn't been a big promotional campaign because if you're putting it out through a record company, they want a single to go with the album and a follow up single and these just haven't been commercial albums. I loved the 'Absinthe' album, it's a very personal album, and it's a collection of quite obscure French songs and it's just something that I really love to do. Now I'm writing so many of my own songs, and I'm working with some great people who I'm writing the songs with, so I don't feel the desire to do covers at the moment." How did you get involved with guitarist Neal X ? "Well I was looking for a guitarist to write with, and I wanted someone with a great pop sensibility, someone who'd have a real feel for pop music, bring a fun, trash element to what I was doing. Someone that would come from the same influences I grew up with, like T.Rex, New York Dolls, Alice Cooper, Bowie, all that style of music, so Neal was suggested to me to work with and at first I wasn't sure if it was going to work out. I was a bit shy and reticent, but I really wanted to work and write with a guitarist, because I've always worked with keyboard players before. So Neal and I got together and wrote some songs, the first of which was 'The Idol' which is going to be our next single. We wrote about four or five songs together and it was fun working with him, and he's brought some of that fun and trash back into the music which I'd really been missing. It's nice having a guitar presence as a lead instrument as well, it adds a bit of edge to the music as it were. The press release from your record company says that you are "A Legend and a genius, who wrote 'Memorabilia' years before anyone had the right to" what do you think they meant by that? "I think they meant 'Memorabilia' was ahead of it's time, it sort of paved the way for a lot of acid house records. At that time it was very much an experimentation, with very repetitive beats, it was very linear and I think it was the forerunner of many of those records really. Other people can make those claims for me, I'm not making them, but I think that's what they mean when they say it." I know you worked with Dave Ball on your last album, what do you think of The Grid? "I like The Grid a lot, I'm realy pleased for Dave because he's a brilliant, brilliant musical guy and I always think he should have had more credit for the Soft Cell stuff. He's so innovative, I've seen his style ripped off by so many people that have come afterwards. I hear the little hooks he used to put into things in so many dance records now, things that have followed like the Pet Shop Boys and stuff like that, I hear so much of Dave. I often get frustrated though, cause I listen to The Grid and think 'Oh, I'd love to put a vocal on that'. 'Love to write some words to that'. We wrote together on 'Tenement Symphony'. We wrote three songs together. One was 'Hand Over My Heart' which is one of my favourite songs, I love that song. I know I'd like to write with Dave again, do some production work or some mixing, there won't be Soft Cell again, you know, although I do enjoy performing some of the songs live again." You maintained for a time that you wouldn't do them anymore. "I wouldn't do them until I'd established myself totally on my own terms, and have success on my own terms. When I stopped with Soft Cell I didn't do any of those songs for like seven, eight years, it's only in the last few years years I've put some of them back in the set again. I thought I had the right to do that now. I've had enough solo success, I've made enough solo albums. Some of them I hadn't done in so long they feel like fresh new exciting songs again, so it's quite fun. I've got to learn not to deny my past, this is me facing my past and embracing it, saying this is where I come from, this is where I am now and this is where I'm going. People have said to me for years, 'Why don't you do this song or this song' and I've said 'No, no, no' and I think those people deserve some reward for being so loyal to me for all these years, through times that I've not been the most easy and accessible artist to follow." Do you plan to publish any more poetry? "I'd love to. I do want to release an entire book of lyrics to every song I've ever written. The book is there waiting to be published. I have the publisher getting all the photographs together, so it will come out at some point." Have you ever seen the Italian lyrics book? "Yeah, that's a bootleg book isn't it, a very naughty book. I love the way they've got all the lyrics wrong, it's absolutely fantastic. The record with it, nearly got me sued. got into terrible trouble with that, it was a tape that was taken from me." I was under the impression that you had somethin do with it, the record says 'Hanx Marc'. "No. I was in big trouble with the people who owned the copyright of the track, but I like the book. They have the most bizarre lyrics, they're better than the originals I think." John Barrett