soft cell

Cover Versions of #1s – ‘Tainted Love’

/ UK #1s blog / 7 Comments

It’s been a while since I did a ‘cover versions’ week, so I thought I’d bring it back to allow us a break from the regular countdown, as we make steady progress through the mid-to-late ’90s. Later on this week I’ll be featuring a cover of one of that period’s most famous hits, but for now we’re focusing on various versions of the same song: Soft Cell’s massive 1981 smash ‘Tainted Love’.

Okay, this means that Gloria Jones’s versions aren’t covers of ‘Tainted Love’… They’re the originals. But it didn’t make #1 either time she recorded it. In fact neither managed to chart at all.

Which is pretty shocking, as the funky, stomping, Motown-influenced track is an instant classic, that should be mentioned in the same breath as The Supremes, the Ronettes, even Aretha. But the charts can be a fickle beast. A decade later, Jones’ original started getting played on the Northern Soul circuit. This encouraged Jones, who had since moved into musical theatre and then into being T. Rex’s backing singer, to have a go at re-recording it in 1976…

The updated version is a bit slicker, a bit less frenetic, and benefits from the advances in recording technology that had taken place. I wouldn’t say it’s an improvement, though I do like the smokiness that Jones’ voice has gained in the twelve intervening years. Jones’ boyfriend Marc Bolan produced the track, but even that couldn’t make it a hit. The following year she was the driver of the car that crashed and killed Bolan, also badly injuring herself. It gave her cause to flee the country (from an impending court case, and from T. Rex fanatics who had looted their house…)

Meanwhile, synth-pop duo Soft Cell heard the song in Northern Soul clubs, and had started incorporating it into their live sets. They were encouraged to record it, released it as their 2nd single, and the rest is chart-topping history, nicely summed up – if I do say so myself – in this post right here. But it seems that ‘Tainted Love’ is a song that demands to be recorded more than once, as Marc Almond also had another go in 1991. This version made #5, and is sometimes mistakenly played as the ‘original’ Soft Cell version (it’s the one with Marc Almond floating among the stars in the video…) God this is a bit complicated…

And then ten years after that, ‘Tainted Love’ returned to the Top 5 with its joint-second most succesful version, from a fairly unlikely source…

Recorded for the soundtrack to the parody film ‘Not Another Teen Movie’, Marilyn Manson scored his/their only Top 10 hit with this industrial-glam cover. In the video, Manson’s band of freaky goths crash a frat party, and mayhem ensues. For me, this version really works, and goes to show the strength of the song that it can still exist in a sound so removed from its original incarnation. I’m a fan of Manson (the band, and the music; not so much the creepy person behind it all) and am glad that this sent them briefly into the mainstream. You could argue that this was sell-out moment for an act that a few years earlier had been terrifying middle-America, even being blamed for school shootings, but this campy cover just goes to show how ridiculous those fears were.

And that wasn’t it as far as ‘Tainted Love’ and the top-end of the charts were concerned. In 2006, Rihanna made #2 with her Soft Cell sampling, electro-pop banger ‘SOS’. Not a cover version as such, but I’m still embedding the video below because it’s a TUNE.

Join us tomorrow for another ‘Cover Versions of #1s’ special, when you’ll get two songs for the price of one!

485. ‘Tainted Love’, by Soft Cell

/ UK #1s blog / 17 Comments

Compare and contrast, if you will, this next #1 with our last. ‘Tainted Love’ has the same instruments, is in the same basic genre as ‘Japanese Boy’, but how different it sounds…

Tainted Love, by Soft Cell (their 1st and only #1)

2 weeks, 30th August – 13th September 1981

It’s a collection of synthesised beats and sound effects, intricate but minimalist, and it sounds thrillingly futuristic. One of the sounds – the poink poinks, you know the high-pitched ones that contrast with the lower dun duns, the ones the song fades ends on – always make me think of a life-support machine. In actual fact, they sound nothing like a life-support machine (though Intensive Care wards would be a much more fun place if they did). It’s strange how music can put images into your head.

Sometimes I feel, I’ve got to, Run away… It’s a tale of a toxic relationship, about a lover who needs the tears and pain of their partner, and the singer’s escape from their tainted love… Don’t touch me please, I can’t stand the way you tease… It’s a cover, of course, of a 1964 release by Gloria Jones that failed to chart. A cover of a cover, even, as Jones had re-recorded it in 1976, with the help of her boyfriend Marc Bolan, though it still failed to chart.

And it’s a great cover version. Soft Cell take the original, strip down all the sixties froo-froo and do it up in an early-eighties style. It’s like seeing an old building renovated in a much more modern fashion, but with the walls all in same place, the support beams still running across the ceiling. They take the song in a completely new direction (a direction semi-influenced by Jones’s re-recording), though to most listeners at the time it would have been brand new. It’s sexy, it’s abrasive, it’s very, very now.

By the end, the singer is having second thoughts about giving up on this relationship. Touch me baby, Tainted love… he urges. It might be wrong, he thinks, but it feels so right. Meanwhile the music video is very much in the ‘anything goes’ spirit of the early-MTV age: there are cricketers, Greek Gods, Regency-dressed women, suspicious looking children…

Actually, what I thought was the video – the one I’ve seen several times before, in which a man writhes on a bed and Marc Almond sings among the stars – is actually the video for the 1991 re-recording, which seems to have now usurped the original. One thing I do notice, as great as this strange, sexy record is, Almond’s voice lets it down slightly. It strains at times, and is slightly flat at others. He sounds much better a decade later, on the re-recording.

Soft Cell were another early-eighties act that burned brightly but briefly. They had a handful of other Top 10s before Almond and his sidekick Dave Ball went their separate ways. They won’t re-appear on this countdown (though Almond will, eventually) And, carrying on the fine tradition of covering and re-recording the life out of ‘Tainted Love’, Marilyn Manson scored his (their?) biggest UK chart hit when his/their Industrial-metal version reached #5 in 2002. I can’t think of many songs that I love in three different versions; but ‘Tainted Love’ is one.

Before I go, and seeing as this is my last post for 2021, I’d just like to wish all my readers, followers, likers and commenters a very Happy New Year! See you all in 2022, as we push on through the eighties!