Possibly the first time I ever heard this song, it was while watching a fellow student I shan’t accurately name emphatically lip-synch to it with great, dramatic aplomb from across the divide of “the senior section” in the student commons of my high school. Kris (not his real name) was miming the lyrics with astonishing conviction at his steady date and school-wide crush, Nora (not her name), strangely providing a vague glimpse into their otherwise deeply private, interpersonal dynamic for the rest of the student body to bear full witness to. As a somewhat brazenly doe-eyed freshman rather strenuously unversed in the ways of the teenaged heart, it was a visceral vista into a world I was desperately trying to comprehend. Did it help? I have no idea. Probably not.
A rather succinctly worded summation of a genuinely toxic relationship, “Tainted Love” by Soft Cell — a song originally made famous as a Northern Soul hit by Gloria Jones in 1965 — does not exactly paint a rosy picture of the conventional romantic interaction. Pairing the swooningly wounded vocals of one Marc Almond with the spartan electronic arsenal of Dave Ball, “Tainted Love” was both disarmingly emotive and icy cold, incongruously framing Almond’s sultry cooing within a chilly, dot-matrix soundscape. Sure, in later years, I’d learn of the influence of trailblazing electronic proto-punk duo Suicide on the nascent music of Soft Cell, but, at the time, it was genuinely unlike anything I’d ever heard. Mechanized blips, metronomic beats, robotic beeps and Marc Almond’s campily sonorous account of emotional dysfunction, “Tainted Love” by Soft Cell — to say nothing of the preferred extended mix appending a steamy cover of the Supremes’ “Where Did Our Love Go?” — was the sound of a fraught, heartbroken future. Never had amorous tumult sounded so stylishly erotic.
Duly intrigued, I remember going with my forward-thinking grade-school comrade Pogo (not his real name, but immortalized here) to Disc-O-Mat on East 58th to pick up the 12” single of “Tainted Love.” For whatever stupid reasons, I remember being reassured that, on the back cover, Marc Almond was depicted sporting spikes on his wrists not at all unlike my favorites like Billy Idol, the Lords of the New Church, the Circle Jerks or Judas Priest. It was a relatively meaningless sartorial flourish, but it helped me contextualize it all.
What I wasn’t prepared for, however, was the single’s reach. While I may have projected upon it an indelible impression as an envelope-pushing bit of underground electronic pop, “Tainted Love” by Soft Cell was an ascendent phenomenon. At one point, I remember shuddering as I my own goddamn father pulled out his own copy of the 12” single from his collection while I was over at his apartment for dinner, one evening (him having divorced my mother several years earlier) and hearing him try to convince me of its groovy brilliance (I having already discovered it months earlier). I may have uttered an emphatic “please just shut the fuck up, Dad,” but don’t quote me on that. Suffice it to say, it did the single no favors, for me.
Sometime after that I remember being at some holiday get-together and having the preadolescent nephew of a friend of mine asking me to play it on the home stereo for the “laser sounds" on the 12” mix to score an imaginary conflict between him and another nose-picking rugrat in attendance. Clearly, the bloom was off the rose.
Moments like those made it hard for me to retain my initial impression of “Tainted Love” as that rarified collision of cutting-edge sonic technology with timelessly resonant songwriting, but clearly the song has endured as a classic, regardless of any genre-anal peccadilloes or predilections. It no longer belongs to any sub-group, it’s everyone’s favorite.
Here in 2021, you’re likely to hear “Tainted Love” by Soft Cell on the sound-system of your local grocery store. It has long severed its connecting tendrils to the comparatively subversive subcultures it might have once been associated with. It’s now just another slice of pop-culture nostalgia that doesn’t require that deep a dive. At the very least, one hopes that fact has fortified the coffers of Messrs. Almond and Ball, let alone the song’s original songwriters. But its days of being a seductively decadent dollop of freakydeakiness, are basically over.
To this day, however, I cannot shake the image of Kris singing it to Nora.
Wallow in it…
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