It’s funny, or perhaps darkly droll, that the early 1980s should be seen these
days as a carefree time of comical haircuts and bouncy melodies sung by
shiny, happy pop stars. Just look at the casualties from that era. Boy
George of Culture Club succumbed to heroin addiction and was given months to
live by the tabloids. Steve Strange of Visage, from the highest echelons of
London’s clubbing elite, also sank into heroin addiction and had to go back
to live with his mother in Wales after being caught stealing a Teletubbies
doll from a supermarket. Nick Heyward of Haircut 100 and Susanne Sulley from
the Human League suffered nervous breakdowns after the hits dried up, and,
more recently, Adam Ant was sectioned after brandishing a gun in a pub. Ten
years ago, Billy Mackenzie of Associates gave up completely and committed
suicide.
Marc Almond, whose pioneering synthesised dance-pop with Soft Cell paved the
way for techno – most notably his biggest UK hit, Tainted Love (1981), the
new-wave duo’s fourth single that stayed in the Billboard Top 100 for longer
than any other record in US chart history – has had an even more wretched
time of it than any of his peers at their most self-destructive and doomed.
To read his autobiography, Tainted Life, is to lose count of his near-fatal
overdoses, perilous experiments with exotic narcotics and brushes with
death, either from self-abuse or in encounters with London’s (or
Barcelona’s, or Moscow’s) underworld.
The book, though published in 1999, missed out on Almond’s most disastrous
episode yet: the motorcycle crash, in October 2004, that injured him to
within an inch of his life. He was left a mess of black-and-blue flesh,
punctured lungs and ears and broken ribs, arms and shoulders. For weeks, he
was kept regular by catheters, steady by bolts and sane by painkillers. The
doctors at the Royal London Hospital assumed he would never recover. Almond
often wished he hadn’t. “I get very low depressions now,” he says, in a
matter-of-fact tone that suggests a familiarity with black moods predating
the crash. “I don’t want to get too morbid about things here. But after the
accident, I spent a lot of time on the internet, trying to find out the
best, and most painless, ways to commit suicide.”
When Almond, who turns 50 in July, strides into the Langham Hotel for this
interview, one of very few since the accident, he appears less tentative and
frail than I had been led to expect – I had been warned about his lapses of
concentration and tendency to drift off mid-sentence. But he is hardly a
wizened version of the leathers-and-chains-clad synth-pop sex dwarf behind
such classic tracks as Bedsitter and Say Hello, Wave Goodbye. “I’m really
happy to be the age I am,” he beams, his cheeks so flushed with health, they
bear the roseate glow of a retouched photo by the gay French artists Pierre
et Gilles (responsible for many an Almond image over the years). “I believe
I look better than I did a few years ago. I’ve grown into myself – something
to do with good Norwegian genes from my mother. Once I’d cleared all the
drugs and alcohol out of my system. ”
Time hasn’t diminished Almond; it’s just taught him some damn good lessons.
Stardom Road, his first album since the accident, revisits the styles with
which he made his name, from proto-electronica to a sort of goth-inflected
torch balladry. But it’s heavy on the, well, heavy: most of the covers come
draped in velvet strings and richly hued references to the sorrows of fame,
all lonely dressing rooms and anonymous backstage trysts.
Via covers of Sinatra’s Strangers in the Night, Bowie’s The London Boys, Bobby
Darin’s Dream Lover and Gene Pitney’s Backstage (I’m Lonely), Stardom Road
offers glimpses of Almond’s happy-to-be-sad life. It is suffused with the
experience of his melancholy childhood in Lancashire, the son of a violent,
abusive father, teenage years tormented by sexual doubt (he’s gay, although
the one graphically depicted sexual encounter in his 465-page biography is
with a female prostitute) and adulthood beset by one crisis after another.
“My childhood, especially my adolescence, was a very bumpy time. I go to
counselling once a week now. I worry that every interview I do is going to
turn into an extended counselling session,” he jokes. But he’s right: it
does. Almond almost uses candour as a weapon, and you wonder what he can be
hiding if he’ll tell you about everything from his problems with ablutions
in hospital to details of his finances, the latter usually more of a nono
for musicians than sexual or pharmaceutical peccadilloes.
Maybe it’s a distraction from his all-consuming dread of loss and fear of
death. The neon-lit cover versions on Stardom Road, even of previously
upbeat songs, reek of both. “All my songs are about death or loss,” he says,
laughing. “Even the poppy ones seem to be obsessed with death. Maybe I need
to lighten up, but I think it’s too late to change now. I do feel a terrible
sense of loss all the time. I see it in myself, in other people, in things.
I think of myself in Southport and I try to connect with that: longing for
the peacefulness of the sea when I was a teenager. As the years go on, I
feel more and more like that person.”
Even at his most morose – even when he says, ever so nonchalantly, things such
as: “You find yourself thinking, ‘Why the f*** didn’t I just die?’ That
would have been so much easier. Death would have been so painless. I
wouldn’t have felt anything” – Almond is great company. He is probably more
purposeful and garrulous even than the last time we met, in 1995, in Beirut,
one of the many unlikely places where his arrival on terra firma is greeted
by battalions of cameramen and news reporters. “When I came around after the
accident, one of the most amazing things was the attention I got,” he says.
“It was on CNN; it was on the Russian news; it was on the news in Pakistan.
I’ve always felt forgotten, really, like I’ve been treading the backwaters
somewhere. So I was shocked by the amount of attention and found it
difficult to come to terms with. But it was a nice shock.”
The kindness of doctors, television crews and other strangers has buoyed
Almond up these past two and a half years, as has “the euphoria of still
being alive”. As he puts it, “a kind of super-energy” kept him going,
especially in the immediate aftermath of the crash, “even though I was in a
lot of pain and there were periods when I felt very aggressive and
destructive”. So, too, did his music. For a man who has recorded 20 albums
in as many years – whether with his musical partner David Ball, as Soft
Cell, with Marc and the Mambas, with the Willing Sinners, or as a solo
artist with a Zelig-like ability to merge into the mainstream and the
margins, in collaborations with everyone from the noise-terrorist Blixa
Bargeld and Siouxsie Sioux to Gene Pitney and Jools Holland – retiring to
his sickbed was never on the cards. “I’m a workaholic,” he admits. “When I’m
not working, I get very low. I need to be doing things constantly.”
In hospital, Almond faced his grimmest test when it looked as though he’d
never sing again. “I had so much tubing down my throat, I was one day away
from a tracheotomy,” he says, making light of his darkest hour in his chirpy
Southport accent. “My mother was about to sign the form and she knew she’d
be signing away any chance I had of singing again. But I came round on the
day they were due to do the operation.”
His recovery didn’t mean, however, that Almond would be back to his old,
multitasking self. “In the past,” he says, “I’d always have four or five
projects going on at once. I find it hard to do that now, and that’s very
frustrating.” Another hurdle to overcome was his anxiety about performing in
public once more. He finally did so in June 2005, when he made a guest
appearance at the Meltdown festival curated by Patti Smith, contributing two
songs to a night of Brecht music: Bilbao Song and What Keeps a Man Alive. “I
was literally dragged on stage by Antony [Hegarty of Antony and the
Johnsons]. But I’m glad I let it happen, because it was another obstacle I
was having a terrible problem with. There was a big fear there.”
Through occasional live work and, more forcefully, Stardom Road, Almond has
staged his grand return. There is one new track on the album, the
Dostoevsky-quoting Redeem Me (Beauty Will Redeem the World), all chintzy
strings and supper-club slink. Despite the feeling of ennui and lyrics about
being “tired of trouble, tired of strife”, it strikes the album’s one
positive note. And it marks the point at which Almond embraces life with
renewed vigour. Even limb-crushing collisions can’t stop him now.
“My attitude is, ‘What else can life throw at me?’” he says, as the interview
comes to a close. “After the accident, everything is a doddle.” He is even
prepared to learn from his bumper catalogue of scrapes. “It’s like you spend
the first 40 years of life learning the lessons of life. If you’re lucky
enough to have 40 more, you spend those years applying the lessons.” Just
don’t call him a “survivor”, that’s all. “I hate that word, because it
implies someone desperately clinging on to some wreckage. I’m lots of
people, really. In fact,” he adds with an impish grin, “I’m still trying to
find out who I am.”
Stardom Road is released on Sequel tomorrow
