Wilton’s Music Hall in East London is full of ghosts. The world’s oldest surviving “grand music hall”, its 150-year-old floorboards and peeling walls played host to Victorian music stars, the anti-fascist warriors of Cable Street and, it’s said, Britain’s first cancan. Now, materialising out of a side door, is another phantom: pale, delicate face, pierced nose, jet-black hair, long flowing coat. Wilton’s is a special place for Marc Almond; it is where, last year, he chose to perform his first solo concert after the motorcycle accident that left him in a two-week coma in 2004.

“I wanted to find a spiritual home,” he says. “Somewhere I could be intimate with my audience, where I could say, ‘I’m back.’ ” Across the Thames from Almond’s home in Bermondsey, Wilton’s was an inspired choice: an atmospheric backdrop for the three-hour comeback set of cabaret and chansons. He has since returned for another run, captured in a new DVD, Marc Almond: in Bluegate Fields. Many said that they have never seen him sing better.

Drama swirls around Almond like Gothic mist: the abusive childhood, the difficult first flush of fame with Soft Cell, the decadent, drug-filled Nineties and then the accident, that left him contemplating suicide. But for someone who professes to feeling “manically depressed at times”, he’s marvellous company: courteous, candid and an engaging storyteller.

The crash, which happened when he was riding pillion with a friend near St Paul’s, left him with a fractured skull, a punctured eardrum and numerous other injuries, some of them psychological. He says he has trouble concentrating now, but the only sign is an occasional stutter, which only deepens the impression that you are talking to a Dickens character. Even the name is perfect.

Peter Mark Sinclair Almond was born 51 years ago, but, perhaps because of the foundation and eyeliner, he looks younger. His vowels still have a hint of his native Southport, which he hated as a kid but now loves. He was a sickly child, with bronchitis and asthma, and struggled to keep up at school, where he kept shtoom about his sexuality (“I always had a girlfriend whom nobody saw”).

Did his parents know? “People always know,” he says. “My father stormed into school one time and, in front of all my teachers, demanded to be told if I was homosexual.” Was his father, a soldier who struggled with alcoholism, ever violent? “Er, that’s a very sensitive subject. Let’s just say that he was a very abusive person.” When his parents divorced, he lived with his grandparents, from whom he learnt his politeness.

Still, he didn’t need much prodding to escape to Leeds Polytechnic, where he met fellow student David Ball. They started Soft Cell and, in 1981, had a worldwide hit with a subversive version of Ed Cobb’s Tainted Love, one of many covers that Almond has made his own. It was a golden age for British pop and Almond was one of its princes. But he felt “completely disconnected from it. Everybody bitched off against each other. We’d be the antithesis of Duran Duran and they’d be the antithesis of us, and you’d meet years later and think, ‘What was that all about?’ ”

Much was made of his rivalry with Boy George; now, they admire each other from afar: “George and I are like phosphorescent fish in a tank, moving around each other and passing messages saying, ‘I really like what you’re doing.’ ” He immersed himself in “an underworld, with people who I thought were glamorous. But you lie with dogs and you catch fleas.” People close to him tried to defraud and blackmail him and, when exposed, threatened to kill him.

Compounding this was a stream of drugs, both rock’n’ roll and prescription: “I’d have doctors in different parts of the world. I’d fly to Bangkok because you could get things without prescriptions.”

By the early Nineties, he was “a complete nightmare, and then I became just insane”. Friends took action: “I was forced with a crowbar and a winch into rehab. They took a photograph of me looking mean, bloated and sick. That was a real turning point.”

The routine helped: “You’d have to be up at five scrubbing the toilet and I loved that. I always thought that, ironically, I’d be fantastic in the Army, because it’s regimented.”

And rehab worked – bar a relapse on millennium eve, he has been drug and drink-free ever since. He is still with his partner of many years, whom he’d prefer not to name. Is he faithful? “Ah well, you know, we have different lives.”

Since Soft Cell split in 1984, he has kept one foot in pop and the other to the left of it, collaborating with or covering everyone from Jimmy Somerville to Berthold Brecht.

The crash had a big influence on his output. He recalls everything about the lead-up: watching The Incredibles, having lunch at a Chinese restaurant in Soho, buying a chicken for dinner. Then nothing, until he woke up two weeks later to his mother’s voice, telling him he’d been in a terrible accident. “I never did reclaim that chicken,” he chuckles.

Euphoria was followed by depression, and guilt: “There was a lad in the hospital who’d been hit over the head by a brick and he didn’t survive.” He considered suicide, but then set about putting his life back together.

Finding that he had forgotten how to sing, he turned to a teacher, Mary Hammond: “I was a wheezing, whispering person who’d lost a lot of weight and couldn’t breathe properly. Mary really brought my confidence back.” He appeared live with friends including Antony Hegarty. And then he took a deep breath and mounted the creaking stage at Wilton’s.

His emotional sets included Jacques Brel and Charles Aznavour covers, and songs of his own such as Bluegate Fields, about the East End quarter in which Wilton’s stands, beloved of Dickens and Wilde, a place of shadowy docks and opium dens, where prostitutes would hang out of windows touting for trade.

Almond wallows so magnificently in the dark and stormy, the seamy and painful. Nobody would relish his struggles, but isn’t there a part of him that would get a kick out of being a tragic figure like his heroes Edith Piaf and Judy Garland? He smiles. “I don’t want to be a tragic figure, but I know what you mean.” But he says on the DVD that he feels the world is about to end. Does he really? “I do!” he laughs. “But I feel very positive about it!”

ALMOND ON DISC: SIX OF THE BEST

Nonstop Erotic Cabaret (1981)
As well as Tainted Love, Soft Cell’s determinedly sleazy debut featured the immortal Sex Dwarf.

Torment and Toreros (1983)
With Soft Cell about to implode, Almond expressed his loathing for the music industry with his side project Marc and the Mambas.

Stars We Are (1988)
The album that launched one of his biggest hits, an expansive duet with Gene Pitney on the latter’s Something’s Gotten Hold of My Heart.

Jacques (1989)
Almond’s heartfelt tribute to his hero, the wry Belgian singer-songwriter Jacques Brel.

Tenement Symphony (1991)
Electronic collaborations with the Grid (who featured Soft Cell’s David Ball), and another hit cover version in the shape of David McWilliams’s The Days of Pearl Spencer.

Stardom Road (2008)
A set of covers featuring Jools Holland, Antony Hegarty and Sarah Cracknell of Saint Etienne.

— Marc Almond: in Bluegate Fields is out on Mon

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