Soft Cell’s reinvention of “Tainted Love” is based on a simple shift in emphasis. In the Gloria Jones recording, the point of the record is the love – it’s troubled, besmirched, but Gloria is strong enough to fight her way past that – or carry through her intention to quit. Either way the decision’s hers. For Marc Almond, the point is the taint. Without the taint, there is no love. “Once I ran to you, now I’ll run from you” – but he’s not running yet.
What Almond’s rough, deceptively slight voice brought to the song was vulnerability: he understood that a singer surrounded by machines could sound naked, shockingly exposed and human. In the filmed performances of “Tainted Love” on Top of The Pops, Almond looks gamine and frail, bangles heavy on skinny arms, his handclaps a gesture at once magnetic and oddly pitiful. He’s dwarfed by the sound around him while still its centre.
And the sound itself is a mix of the sleek and the rusty – cutting-edge machines that need to be jump-started into life, as in the record’s iconic intro: that double synth stab and then a rat-a-tat of hissing valves as the rhythm starts up. Like Dave Ball’s astonishingly sleazy moustache, it adds to the track’s seediness, its sinister edge. It’s a seediness which can feel slightly overplayed, teetering on kitsch: something Soft Cell were certainly aware of – like their English industrial mates, they were interested in what happens when your pleasure and humour and arousal and discomfort receptors get all mixed up. But that side to the band is more apparent on stuff like “Sex Dwarf” than it is on this, where the strength of the song is a challenge for Almond to rise to. And he does – when he sings “Touch me baby, tainted love”, his hollowed-out vowels are as chilling an evocation of need as the charts have seen.
Score: 9
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I’m sure Soft Cell’s version bears more relation to the cover version by Ruth Swann on Spark records (northern soul), around 1975.
I got this in a jumble sale, way back.
While I would have agreed with you on this a while ago, for me this is a record that’s severely been damaged by overexposure, to the extent I find it quite annoying. I’d much rather hear the original, or Memorabilia, or Torch, or Bedsitter, or Say Hello Wave Goodbye than this.
I don’t feel I hear it as much as I did a few years ago actually: it’s definitely overexposed (as is the case for a lot of the early 80s stuff we’ll be talking about!) but I think it withstands that exposure better than most. If I’m out in a club I’d rather hear another hit, but if I’m playing Non-Stop or an SC best of I never skip this.
Yeah as I said elsewhere I think all right-thinking people love both this and the original (forget all subsequent versions tho from Impedance to Marilyn Manson…obv Rihanna’s ‘SOS’ doesn’t count) and this is definitely how to do a cover – one of the greatest examples perhaps – whatever sense of “soul” is lost vocally (not that Almond doesn’t deliver his own take on this concept well…find it difficult to measure tho) we gain a more powerful representation of the song’s message through the stark, sinister synth sounds whereas in the original the music remains fairly upbeat and jaunty.
I used to really like this song – I didn’t realise it was a cover version at all until a couple of years ago. And then I heard the Gloria Jones original, and was amazed at how much Soft Cell botched it. The original is so loose-limbed and liberated, and I think conveys the conflict and ambiguity of the song far more than Tom gives it credit for – the backing vox driving Jones out of her mind, the ominous horns underpinning the chorus (it could be either freedom or more trouble which is imminent). And for all Soft Cell’s emphasis on the seediness (flagged up so OBVIOUSLY), Jones’s performance is much more carnal – her switch-up to a husky twist on the line “you don’t really want it from me any more” is just WHOA. By comparison I’m just not a huge fan of Marc Almond’s slight, inexpressive style, and if anything I think Soft Cell’s cover shifts it too heavy-handedly towards the taint and doesn’t leave in enough of the love. If I’d been familiar with the Jones original when this came out (er if I’d been alive when either came out), I’d have been seething at what Soft Cell did to it.
From my actual vantage point it’s an interesting example of how you “grow into” your tastes as you hear more and more music – the song is so good that I don’t think anyone could ruin it, which is why I loved the Soft Cell version when I first heard it (sometime in the ’90s, I guess). But since then my tastes have swung so much further towards “passionate” soul and R&B vocals, and away from the archness of Marc Almond and his ilk, that it was inevitable that I’d prefer Gloria Jones’s original when I eventually heard it…
I think I’d give this a 6? A botched cover but tbh this will never be a bad song.
Actually, all the other covers/interpolations I’ve heard have been botch jobs as well. Rihanna’s ‘SOS’ is one of her weakest singles, the sample is used so clunkingly and blaringly, and it buries her completely. The line “Y-O-U-R making this hard” is good to laugh at though; as RiRi herself put it in a later single, “dumb-dumb-de-dumb, dumb-dumb-de-dumb-dumb”.
The Pussycat Dolls’ version is OK but really their own material is so much better than any of the weird cabaret covers on their first album. Marilyn Manson’s version is probably his best moment to date but that is b/c he is total shit, obv, and the fact that even he didn’t ruin it says much for the song’s inherent strength.
I think it’s the interaction of Almond’s vocals (which aren’t as strong as Jones, though his closing section is tremendous) and the backing synths that make it work so well: the instrumentation is what’s made this version as iconic as it’s become – it’s noticeable that all the subsequent covers have been pretty weak, whereas all the subsequent records sampling this one’s noises have been awesome.
Lex you say they botched it but it sounds as if to you the only way to cover this song well would be to do it in pretty much exactly the same style as the original?
I’d include “SOS” in that – I think it’s atypical of Rihanna rather than weak: it’s like a weird appendix to the mid-00s machine-pop boom, from which she learned lessons and went off to become the diva she is today.
But the instrumentation on the original is so much better! thr horns! The jittery beat! The frantic tempo! And you still get the DUN-DUN except it’s footloose and fancy-free, whereas w/Soft Cell it’s more like THUD THUD and clunky.
#10 So wrong. With Soft Cell it’s more macabre, mysterious and MILES from whatever “clunky” is supposed to mean. You could argue that has a de-humanising effect maybe but even then that’s hardly a flaw.
There’s a kind of steampunk stiffness to it but that’s true of a lot of early synthpop (not that I’m guessing Lex is a big fan of early synthpop in general).
i was wondering if we were going to get another ten
i think maybe throwing this over in favour of the gloria jones version is a pretty common reaction to first becoming aware a) that it’s a cover and b) that the original is pretty damn great too – it’s certainly what i did but i’ve since come back to preferring the soft cell version. in wondering why it’s so great i think ‘it’s the machines!’ (chunky certainly, never clunky), then ‘no, it’s marc!’ (sleazy and overwrought – marvellously so – but also playful – is it just me, or is there a touch of elvis in his ‘i love you though you hurt me so). i suppose it’s marc vs the machines.
#13 there’s a thicket of tracks recently and upcoming which are good shouts for 10s – on this the stars didn’t quite align
This isn’t so much a cover version as a reinterpretation isn’t it? I wouldn’t even bother comparing it to Gloria Jones version – which, though obviously terrific, a little voice in the back of my head sometimes tells me is too linear and one-note. I always want to hear some variation of that sledgehammer beat but it starts at 100mph and stays there.
Yes it’s overexposed (and I prefer “Say Hello, Wave Goodbye”) but somehow that doesn’t affect it for me as much as a certain Sheffield band’s #1 coming up. The 12″ is way too long though, I can never sit through it.
Oh this is a ten for me. This and Ghost Town was the sound of a gloriously outdoorsy summer for me. We had some kids down the street who were a few years older and would pump music into the garden from their dads stereo and I remember this wafting over the fences and just loving it. I remember asking to buy it with my tiny pocket money and my mum telling me it would be a waste and then distracting me with an ice cream or something. But it did turn up on a year end compilation (a buy one get one free which I cannot for the life of me remember). Again it was one of those tracks which I knew nothing about and oddly when I finally heard the Gloria Jones version I kind of had the opposite reaction to the Lex. It clearly exists within the Soft Cell version, but seems antsily shuffly compared to the gleaming chassis of Soft Cell.
I found later Marc Almond a massive let down because of this high benchmark to start off with.
The 12″ is great for the ‘Where Did Our Love Go?’ segment, even tho it takes a while to get there. The introduction of that song’s melody tussling with the remnants of the previous song’s framework really lighten the mood – now there’s no real menace just the sadness…as if the witching hour is over but the night goes on.
This is one of those records where I wouldn’t change a single note, as every sound on the record is well-nigh perfect. I particularly love the way the two honks of synth that stab into the riff, just before the vocal kicks in, sound out of place at first, but you realise immediately afterwards how they fit into the whole – a bit like the percussion on “Honky Tonk Women”.
Wasn’t this the record that instigated the “Second British Invasion” in the US charts, with the longest ever run in the Billboard Hot 100? On Channel 4’s list of the all-time UK top 100 singles, this was placed 57th, making it the biggest seller of the 80s so far (to be overtaken at Christmas by the abovementioned Sheffield band). Channel 4 interviewed Gloria Jones, who said with an “OK, you got me guys” sort of shrug that Soft Cell’s version was better than hers. I wouldn’t necessarily agree – they both do a great job with very different aims in mind.
Geoff at #2 mentions their other big hits – uniquely I think, their first five singles peaked at 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 though not in that order – with the exception of “What”, which I thought was gorgeous. “Bedsitter” would have been a good soundtrack to my life in New Cross a few years later, even though I didn’t go to the same kind of clubs Marc would have!
I was otherwise engaged while this was at the top. Taking advantage of the fact that you get more freedom as a student than anytime before or after, I combined the family holiday that summer (which none of us could know was the last family holiday we’d ever have) with trips further afield. During the summer term I’d been invited to an event at the St Ives music festival in September, and in July I gave a Swiss family a guided tour of Tintagel in return for a lift and they invited me to visit them in Zurich. So beginning on Bank Holiday Monday, the day before “Tainted Love” hit number one, I set out to do the most adventurous (or plain foolhardy) thing I’d ever done –spent a fortnight hitch-hiking to Paris, then to Zurich to visit the family, then to Heidelberg for a firework display, back to the UK through Belgium and west to St Ives before returning home. It was while waiting for a lift out of Dover that I heard the next number one for the first time – and for a moment thought of heading back across the Channel…
Great Quotes Coined While This Was Number One (an occasional series):
“Maggie Thatcher, your boys took a hell of a beating” – commentator Bjorge Lillelien after England lost 2-1 to Norway in a World Cup qualifier on 9 September.
The Lex is more and more of a rockist with every passing day.
I’ve just listened to the Gloria Jones version for the first time in years and I have to say it’s a great vocal performance but the backing seems pedestrian to me in comparison to the great Motown and Stax hits of the same era. I think LondonLee is right about the unvarying beat.
The Soft Cell version would be a contender for a 10 with me, although had Say Hello Wave Goodbye got to the top that would definitely have got a 10 from me. Non Stop Erotic Cabaret would be a 10 as an album too.
I’ve heard very little from the other Soft Cell albums – how do they compare?
overplayed just shy of the permanant breaking point for me, this one is saved by its joyful amateurishness. you can tell they barely know how to use that synth, stumbling upon that beat after 10 seconds, fully realizing their dumb luck and being afraid to alter it for the remainder of the song.
it also pulls of the neat trick of being overplayed without being dated, no mean feat for the decade it belongs to. for some reason, this becomes much more difficult to do as the decade wears on, and i can’t pinpoint why. perhaps it can be blamed on the rise of the gated snare? maybe a discussion for another time, perhaps when we get to a certain relaxed number one several years away.
Ah, this is wonderful, one of the greatest cover versions ever.
I was thinking about their b-side It’s A Dog’s Life (Where The Heart Is, their first flop, was the A-side) the other day – it’s taken me 25 years to realise that the lines,
‘Oh no it’s another disease and you’ve just got rid of the last. You were beginning to feel OK and the friends you gave it to are speaking to you again’
probably don’t concern the common cold. Tainted love indeed.
As a six-year-old, I demanded that we (my family) bought this record and it was duly purchased. I think it was the first time I had ever issued such an order. Needless to say, I loved it and I believe it still stands up as a landmark track despite regular exposure, as has been rightly noted. I had no idea that it had done so well in the States. For me one of the best number ones of the year. No cheese at all…but lots of onion!
having just told peter off on another thread, can i just say that — will i rather dislike the modern young prson’s category “cheese” — i very much like his “cheese versus onion” dialectic!
that said: the whole content of SC’s “tainted love” — lyrical content and synth-pop form — is surely declaring that the allure of cheese depends on it being onion (and vice versa)
(will = while)
Inescapable and unbearable – I think I liked it okay when I first heard it but before I got the chance to love it I’d heard it too many times. Should be right up my alley but I can’t even bring myself to listen to it now before I write this because I am so thoroughly sick of the song. None of that is Soft Cell’s fault but there it is, overplay killed this one dead.
(*sigh* apparently i am incapable of writing what i mean today:
“the allure of cheese depends on it being onion (and vice versa)” shd read something like “the allure of cheese depends on it being IMPOSSIBLE IN THAT INSTANT TO SEPARATE FROM onion (and vice versa)”)
i love this performance even more now than I did at the time – it never fails to cheer me up. I’m sure that the Gloria Jones ‘original’ has its merits but this is still the best version for me. I always assume that the interpretation owes something to Suicide in terms of its instrumentation and mood although David Ball is a big dance music fan.
I remember Marc Almond’s effete persona was a source of profound irritation to some of my more macho acquaintances – I’m not sure that there had been such an openly camp perfomer at number 1 for a while. I watched the video on youtube recently and found it hilarious – like a sleazy version of a Crackerjack sketch. (I’m becoming a bit worried about my repeated use of Crackerjack as a cultural benchmark – if I had been a bit younger I think I’d be referencing Tiswas) I hadn’t realised that MTV had started a month prior to TL getting to Number 1 in the UK so wonder if the video played a part in its US success.
#24, 25, 27 – I bet you’ll be obsessing over my “cheese/onion” concept for the ever after, ’cause the world is like a great big onion. Did you not know that?
#22 I meant It’s A Mug’s Game. Got it mixed up with a Gentle Giant song. Still, prog/electropop – it’s all synths innit?
so far i have discovered 30 versions of “tainted love” — are they all the same song tho? i shall tell you shortly!
ok rather disappointly the one by “blue øyster cült”, “the clash” and “the ramones” are in fact by soft cell
still i think there’s still a good 25 here — inc.a reggae one by ras shiloh
and kwan and dimitris korgialas’s tainted love is a completely difft song
For what it’s worth, Tainted Love is inextricably intertwined with memories of Sharon Day, who lived two doors away from me, hurtling through a turbulent transformation into adolescence. She started wearing two streaks of rouge, much to the consternation of her parents, and was clearly looking for An Event to show her peers that she was no longer the swotty long-haired square of yore. A one-off lunchtime disco dancing competition in the school hall was the perfect opportunity for her to shine. She unveiled her new hair, (just like Marc Almond’s) and gold sequinned dress, and choreographed her own routine to Tainted Love, which mostly comprised of joining her fists together and shaking what appeared to be imaginary coffee beans during the two-note synth signature. The whole school thought it was the funniest thing ever, and poor Sharon had to try harder to show that she had put her innocent Sandra Dee years behind her. Hence, the nickname “Sharon Day – Easy Lay” in ensuing years. Poor thing.
I’m a bit disappointed with so many comments about ‘overkill’ as we’re talking about number ones after all. A HUGE number of the entries up to this point are overexposed (every Beatles entry bar Ballad Of John & Yoko for instance) – kinda goes without saying.
But, Tainted Love. Unlike Are Friends Electric this didn’t sound remotely steam-driven at the time. Very sleek, with a minimalism borrowed from Suicide that creates a stark, delicately menacing backdrop, allowing more room for emotional manoeuvre in the vocal than the original’s chunky sub-Tamla stomp.
This was punk’s true legacy for me, having (fortunately) been a tad too young to get hooked by the Lurkers or The Cortinas. Tainted Love could never have been recorded, got released, or got airplay pre-punk.
It is incredibly simple, clearly put together by a pair of amateurs who could barely play or sing, but made the very most of what they knew, had a great idea, and got it across beautifully. I was amazed how basic the whole of Non Stop Erotic Cabaret sounded when I heard the recent re-issue. The fake party noises on Chips On My Shoulder almost sound sarcastic – Almond and Ball attempting to create a frenetic atmosphere as they play to an empty dancefloor.
(Though it’s also conceivable that their great bonhomie was because they were the only people in Britain who knew about MDMA back then, as in Non Stop Ecstatic Dancing – or is my chronology slightly out?).
re. overplay – could it be that there are some songs which respond to overplay better than others, though? I was always a bit surprised that “Tainted Love” became so ubiquitous, because of its seedy, nocturnal feel: it seems like the sort of song which ought to be a private pleasure, laughable though that is for a huge smash hit.
But for me that helps it resist overexposure.
Also we’re now coming into the era where a significant proportion of these tracks still get regular play in nightclubs as well as at wedding discos etc. Encountering the Beatles without wanting to is actually less likely (I’d say) than a chance encounter with “Tainted Love” or the Sheffield Song.
was just discussing the skeez of “repeat-play tolerance” with my editor (re: the lion king, which he has sat thru w. his tinies 25+ times, and still rather likes) (contrast: the musical, which he was v bored by)
obviously we are tiptoing into “stands the test of time” abomination-territory BUT i am not so allergic to this concept in the negative sense — “can still stand after seen it 5496872349586 times” is indeed a material quality, tho i’d like to know its specifics, rather than some airy claim attributing such success to “genius” or “artistry” or whatevs
Yes the test of repetition and the test of time are surely different things!
sounds like there might be a nice complex graph in this, viz frequency heard v time from inception v ‘depreciation’
Material factor in “Tainted Love”‘s passing the ToR: it’s SHORT! (Obviously this doesn’t apply to the Lion King).
(I should possibly do some logging of which Bob The Builder/Teletubbies etc episodes I can still tolerate.)
Overexposed or not, this is a terrific single.
A&B had already demonstrated their Northern Soul credentials on debut single, “Memorabilia” which lifts wholesale from Vicki Sue Robinson’s classic mid 70s stomper “Turn The Beat Around”.
For the follow up they went the whole hog and delivered the fourth chart-topping cover of 1981 (a fifth is just around the corner).
And they brought to “Tainted Love” the things that all too briefly made Soft Cell one of the most engaging and thrilling of early 80s pop acts – equal parts naive and amateurish to inspired and inspiring.
Ball’s synth riff is the record’s highlight for me. It just sounded like nothing I’d before. Stark, eerie, danceable but not funky. Warm and pulsing but cold and unemotional. Kraftwerk and Moroder on a shoestring.
Hearing it in Neros, the under 18s disco I used to go to on a Monday night, was always a thrilling experience, particularly when the DJ let the track segue into “Where Did Our Love Go.” The instrumental middle part with its ominous drones and cleverly shifting overlap of the two riffs was quite moving when I first heard it – almost a magical experience.
Maybe it’s hard to write about such iconic records with any freshness in 2009. I don’t know – but when I comment I try to capture how I felt about the track at the time, when I first heard it, and also how I feel about it now.
Today, I don’t think “Non Stop Erotic Cabaret” holds up quite as well as I remember it – but “Tainted Love” sounds more than ever like Soft Cell’s finest hour.
Erithian – like your “Honky Tonk Women” comparison at #18.
On the strength of “TL” I purchased “Non Stop Erotic Cabaret” and all the subsequent Soft Cell singles until “What!”
(Actually, their chart performance was even stronger than you recollect – 1, 4, 3, 2 and 3. A great run that was brought to a halt when they stopped being a pop act and started taking themselves a bit too seriously – the first single from “The Art of Falling Apart”, which conspicuously avoided anything so trivial as a melody failed to make the Top 20).
on the reverse on one of the 12″ they try and do the synthpop-on-a-shoestring remake/remodel to a hendrix song which is ambitious beyond boldness but — sadly — not that grebt iirc
forget which hendrix song tho: i shall dig it out when i get home from work
I think it was Purple Haze wasn’t it? In fact, from recollection possibly a medley with Hey Joe (!)
Not their finest hour.
Lineman, #36, you are spot on with your chronology. I remember watching an interview with Marc Almond where he was fondly recollecting the out-of-control rollercoaster that Soft Cell so quickly became in 1982. Getting their drug dealer in to sing on one of their singles being one of the many highlights! (Cindy Ecstasy on “Torch” – possibly the first overt pop reference to MDMA right there).
Cindy Ecstasy, ah yes. Her ‘performance’ would have stopped Torch from getting a 10 if it had managed to chart one place higher. I desperately want to mention something similar about the Sheffield Song but I won’t. Oh, I just did.
Where The Heart Is was the single after What, wasn’t it? A trifle harsh, Conrad. Maybe it didn’t have a killer hook but again the 12″ mix was marvellous with a proto-house piano motif and big, yearning analogue chords. Also one of their best lyrics.
The Art Of Falling Apart got across the board 5 star reviews from memory (NSEC certainly didn’t, there was a decided air of cynicism around it). I tried and I tried, but no, and I think “history” judges NSEC much the better. Never got to hear the last album.
Maybe I am being a bit harsh about “Where The Heart Is” but it was just such a disappointment after NSEC. A big part of that was due to the loss of the minimal electronic sound of the earlier material.
I think Marc’s Scott Walker obsession led Dave Ball to try and create mini-orchestras with the backing – which served only to flatten the sound and highlight the flaws in the writing.
I did get “Numbers” 12″, it came with a free copy of “Tainted Love” 12″.
Didn’t Marc end up crushing a grape with malice at Phonogram’s offices?
‘Where Was Your Heart When You Needed It Most?’ may be Soft Cell at their darkest.
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=sFC7yNNuDXM
Ditto ‘Disease And Desire’ from the remastered version, which also includes their version of the ‘007’ theme – not heard this!