Marc and the Mambas

“All my rage, my bitterness, my sadness of that time are contained in this record. The addiction, the emptiness, the black despair, the stormy relationships, the drugs and the estrangement from the record business: it all poured into those recordings. In my eyes the album portrays an artist screaming at the top of his lungs, lost, wounded, flipping the bird at anyone and everyone. It's a deformed cabaret of my life as it had been up to that point. It's a Grand Guignol.”

(Marc Almond, “Tainted Life”)

It's not always easy to handle fame when it arrives out of nowhere. Or at least, it certainly wasn't for the then twenty-six-year-old Marc Almond, catapulted overnight into stardom on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to a northern-soul cover (“Tainted Love,” which sold over ten million copies and set a US chart-residency record of forty-three weeks) that had initially seemed like little more than Phonogram's last shot, following a single, “Memorabilia,” that had done rather well on dancefloors but poorly with the wider public. While the records made with Soft Cell climbed the charts, the inner demons of the fragile artist from Southport pushed him to experiment with every drug imaginable, from ecstasy to acid to heroin – the latter a constant presence during many of the recording sessions for the double album “Torment and Toreros,” the second one recorded with the eccentric Marc and the Mambas collective.

By this point in his life and career, the ambiguous Soho-based dandy wants to be both a pop star and an artist taken seriously by a cultured, alternative audience, to explore new territory, write with new collaborators and shuffle the deck on the subject of cover versions too. This is how Marc's project with the Mambas becomes the embodiment of the singer's double life, starting from the very same Leeds art college where he met his fellow traveller Dave Ball and where he had already sketched out the embryos of songs like “Fun City” – initially meant only for fans, later re-recorded with Soft Cell as a b-side – and “Twilights and Lowlifes,” arriving at the gothic, Spanish-flavoured tones of a record often described as a genuine mess, by critics who were never too kind and by Marc himself.

The Mambas came together as a supergroup as dynamic as it was amorphous, with collaborators drifting in and out after lending their contribution to the recordings: alongside Almond, front and centre, is Matt Johnson of The The, another flagship name on Stevo Pearce's Some Bizarre roster, not to mention cellist Martin McCarrack (later alongside Siouxsie and the Banshees, Therapy? and This Mortal Coil), pianist and keyboardist Annie Hogan, who co-wrote some of the record's finest moments, and percussion contributions from Peter Ashworth (The The) and the mad genius James Thirlwell, better known as Foetus but credited here under the pseudonym Frank Want. Rounding out the crazed ensemble are Billy McGee on bass – a constant presence in Almond's artistic life all the way through to “Enchanted” – and the violin duo of Anne Stephenson and Gini Hewes, who would soon go on to work with Siouxsie and, more than ten years later, with the Manic Street Preachers on their most commercially successful albums.

“Torment and Toreros,” from its title and its cover art by visual artist and musician Val Denham, evokes Spanish culture from the very start: the poetry of Federico García Lorca, the paintings of Salvador Dalí and the heartfelt songs of Carmen Amaya (who would be namechecked a few years later in “The Room Below,” from the album “Mother Fist and Her Five Daughters”), as well as flamenco, the absinthe served at Barcelona's historic Bar Marsella, and the cruel allure of the bullfight. These are suggestions born not of deep study of the subject, but ones that lend a decidedly European flavour to Mambas-brand goth – all while conjuring up old traditions at a moment in history when post-Franco Spain was looking forward with the pedal firmly on the accelerator, amid an explosion of underground art that included an illustrator like Nazario (one of whose drawings ended up on the cover of a Lou Reed live album, and whose comic strip “Anarcoma,” starring a transsexual superhero, became the subject of an Almond b-side in 1987) and new (then-synth-)pop phenomena like Mecano, considered by many the true standard-bearers of Madrid's eighties movida, more so than others credited with the title.

There's the Spain evoked by Jacques Brel in the sarcastic and prophetic “Les toros” (rendered here in English as “The Bulls”), as well as in the absurd, exhilarating finale entrusted to “Beat Out That Rhythm On a Drum” – a reworking of a Gypsy song from Bizet's Carmen, adapted by Oscar Hammerstein II for the 1943 Broadway musical “Carmen Jones.” But the group's wandering heart doesn't live there alone: one of the most intense moments is a cover of “Vision” by Peter Hammill, the voice of Van Der Graaf Generator, who recorded the song for “Fool's Mate,” featured here within a medley that also includes “Gloomy Sunday”; and just as English, though firmly rooted in the present, is the single “Torment,” co-written by Almond with Robert Smith of the Cure and Steve Severin of the Banshees (the two of them, in 1983, also active in the side project The Glove). It's impossible not to spot Foetus's fingerprints on the chaotic “A Million Manias,” at once campy and sinister (a perfect soundtrack for a horror cartoon, an updated take on Disney's Skeleton Dance from decades earlier), or to miss Hogan's compositional talent on “Black Heart,” the double LP's lead single. It may not be the hit Phonogram had pinned its hopes on, but it works well on the radio: the few singles pulled from the album gifted fans excellent outtakes, such as “Your Aura” and “You Never See Me On a Sunday,” included on Universal's 2004 Japanese reissue.

In 1982 and 1983, Marc Almond was a man overflowing with ideas. He had a thousand concepts for records all different from one another, and the fact that the Some Bizarre offices sat directly above Trident Studios, where David Bowie had recorded his earliest albums and John Lennon had cut “Imagine,” led him to put many of them down on tape. But if, by the singer's own admission, 1982's “Untitled” is an unfocused work riddled with flaws (Paul Buckmaster arranged the strings on “Big Louise,” a Scott Walker cover, but the musicians kept losing patience in the studio because the vocal track had been recorded without a metronome) and songs that drag on too long without a chorus or a decent hook, “Torment and Toreros” is a far less ragged concept record, one full of irony, attempts to exorcise the demons of the past and the anger that surfaces even amid the fights of troubled love affairs, along with the usual attention to themes like the loss of innocence (most notably in the touching “First Time”).

“The Untouchable One,” sung with a throat parched from amphetamine use, anticipates Marilyn Manson by a good ten years, while “My Little Book of Sorrows” already clearly points toward the theatrical leanings of the records made with the Willing Sinners between 1984 and 1987. Keeping it all together is the young Flood, who gives everything he has during sessions that run through the night, content to sleep a few hours on the studio sofa during breaks: he isn't yet the celebrated producer of U2, Nick Cave, Depeche Mode, Erasure and PJ Harvey, and more than a few people aren't exactly thrilled with the final result. Steven Severin, for one, takes the liberty of telling our man exactly what he thinks, face to face, at a party dedicated to the Banshees. “You're too much of a target for the bastards,” he tells him. “You should take a break, think about yourself.” But Marc is adamant, and to keep the passion of his vocal performances intact he decides that, come what may, it has to be right on the first take; moreover, aside from the percussion supplied by Foetus and Ashworth, most of the work is done by a drum machine, to avoid a sound that's “too rock.”

Even with Phonogram, who find themselves holding a double album with barely a single to promote it, there's constant friction – not least because Almond insists on selling it at the price of a single LP, giving up a share of the royalties if need be. Recording nonstop, Marc manages for a few weeks to mute his own problems, which inevitably resurface with a vengeance the week “Torment and Toreros” comes out. The artist is in fact perpetually hysterical and on edge, seeing every criticism of the record as a personal attack, and he even turns up dressed in black leather with a whip in hand at the offices of Record Mirror, leaving everyone present staring in disbelief. “Pathetic, write anything else about me and I'll kill you,” he shouts at Jim Reid of the staff, guilty of having called his songs “boring” in a review that wasn't even especially negative. Another journalist, who had described Almond's fans in a piece as “an audience of effeminate exhibitionists and second-raters,” receives instead a parcel of raw liver (and the singer promptly gets his own reply: a banana, or rather, a tribute to that “baboon” of a creative consultant of his). The artist is in pieces, feels surrounded on all sides, and has had enough, to the point of announcing to the press his premature retirement from the scene and from the world of music.

After “This Last Night In Sodom,” Soft Cell's 1984 album, there would in fact be no more of his music. Needless to say, the promise wouldn't be kept, and after letting his anger cool (it takes three days, no more) our man is combative again, announcing his comeback by tossing black silk roses to fans from the windows of Some Bizarre. “Torment and Toreros” is a key record in Marc Almond's career, every bit as much as “Non Stop Erotic Cabaret.” Less well known, and without doubt more difficult and thornier to decode, it reveals new details with every listen, and despite its imperfections and certain naiveties, the production has retained its charm and freshness. Antony Hegarty, one of the English singer's most devoted followers, asked him in 2012 to perform the double album live in full, and two other fans who might seem unlikely at first glance, Brett Anderson and Bernard Butler, have admitted that Suede's “Dog Man Star” was partly inspired by this strange magnum opus from the Mambas.

Perhaps it's no coincidence that right after performing the whole of "Torment" live again, good old McCarrick went back into the studio with Marc for the 2013 single "Burn Bright", produced by Tony Visconti, and that he's among the musicians on 2015's "The Velvet Trail": a sign that Almond may have finally made peace with his past, after the overly harsh judgments expressed in his autobiography "Tainted Life" (as well as those directed at the interesting, equally imperfect "French period" of "Jacques" and "Absinthe"). It's increasingly rare to find a mainstream artist willing to take a risk on a project so far removed from the expectations of any label or fan. But then again, back in 1981 it was already clear that Almond was no ordinary singer.

Note: the album was originally released under the name Marc And Mambas, while reissues have changed the credit to Marc And The Mambas.

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29/03/2015