Having stayed relevant down the decades, from synthpop groundbreaker to Smash Hits pinup to torch song trailblazer, Marc Almond is back with a new album, a UK tour and newfound joie de vivre in his adopted Portugal home. Antonia LeVay spent time chatting to the man, just ahead of the release of I’m Not Anyone, a suite of smartly chosen covers.

This new album is a real mix – was it a difficult process, selecting which songs to cover? I’m imagining Rob in High Fidelity, agonising over his mixtape…

Marc Almond: I go on YouTube wormholes, where it leads me to lots of other songs. It’s a particular adventure. I like to do an album of cover songs every few years – it gives me a break from my own songwriting because I’m not a natural songwriter. I can’t write songs all the time, or for other people; I can only write songs for myself really.

I started planning the album a couple of years ago, making lists – I’m a list person – and as the time goes on, some songs remain on that list, some go, others are replaced. I find it very hard to make final decisions on these things – I just want to do everything, 25 songs on an album and that’s that! A record company like BMG [who are releasing I’m Not Anyone] are quite strict on the number: no more than 12 tracks on an album, which is right because it’s classic, you know? That’s what people want to listen to. They say “no, get rid of that song… knock off that song… you should really keep that song.”

So I got my 12 songs that have the coherence of an album. When you pick from different genres – from rock, psychedelia, folk music to spiritual gospel music, big ballads – you need to bring them together thematically, or have some kind of coherence in the way they sound. Obviously, I can stamp my voice on them, that gives them a unified sound, but you have to bring it together. And lyrically they have to mean something: where I am in my life, what I’m trying to say about my life, how I feel emotionally.

It is a whole musical journey, not just like, “oh, let’s make an album of swing songs,” which has been done a million times. I stay away from covers you’ve heard a million times before, because you then have to totally think about reinventing them. I’ve tried not to stray too far from the original, because they’re not very well known songs. I’ve picked songs that have a great musical arrangement, a great sound to them. I can stamp my voice on that.

Your version of I’m Not Anyone’s title track – sung solo, unlike the Paul Anka and Sammy Davis Jr original – is fabulous, very moving. If you were to do that as a duet with anyone, who would you want?

Marc Almond: I did a vocal in the studio, just trying this song, and it was very emotional to do. You have these songs where you have to build up the courage to do them, or build up to the time you feel is right when you want to do them. I was originally moved so much by [the original] – why hasn’t somebody done it before? It’s so iconic, like a My Way or I Am What I Am without the cheesy connotations of those songs. It’s a song about strength, about where I have come in my life; I’m not going to put up with these things, this is what I am. A real statement song.

The version on the album is probably the first or second take. I just sang it through and I had so much emotion in it that Mike said to me, you’re doing too good to do the song as a duet. It’s gonna be your song, you’re gonna do it and it’s not going to have any backing vocals or anything. I’d originally decided I was going to do it with Brian [Chambers] – I really wanted to find a song for me and Brian, so that’s where Trouble Of The World [originally by Mahalia Jackson] came from.

Your take on Trouble Of The World is incredibly haunting. Tell us how this was chosen for the album.

Marc Almond: It’s probably one of my favourite songs of all time. I agonised over doing it. I originally knew this song from the film Imitation Of Life; at the end, there’s a funeral scene where Mahalia sings it. If you watch this and don’t cry at the end, you’ve got no heart. Of course, there’s a whole religious connotation with the way she does it – the gospel, spiritual thing, which I love – but I wanted to take it and make it about something else. We are very much in a troubled world.

It was a bit of a reinvention, a bit of a rewrite, to take it away from its more religious [context] – which I’m not, I’m very atheist – and to give it that spiritual feeling. I did it as a duet with Brian Chambers, one of my regular singers: Brian comes from that gospel sound and can bring that feel to it. I just thought it was a perfect song for Brian and us to do together.

I think some of the songs on the album are songs for now. They feel nostalgic because the real world we’re living in is so utterly crap that we’re all desperately trying to cling on to some kind of nostalgia at the moment! Lyrically, the songs I’ve chosen have lots of emotional and spiritual – and nature – references; you can tick the nostalgia box, but you can also, hopefully, tick the relevance box.

Chain Lightning, originally by Don McLean, feels much darker than the original and more layered. Was this purposeful?

Marc Almond: It’s very spiritual, which takes you through a whole gamut of emotions – life, love, death, resurrection – and on a very emotional journey. When I heard it, I thought, “I can’t take on a song like this,” but that’s the challenge! Working with [producer] Mike Stevens, we thought, we’re not going to take it a million miles away or reinvent it, because it’s a great song, but bring it to an audience who won’t have heard it before. Whenever I cover songs, for me it means curating: I’d like my audience to go back and discover the original music.

It was the same with Tainted Love and Gloria Jones: nobody really knew that song very well [before Almond’s band Soft Cell covered it in 1981]. We were slightly northern soul – you had to be an aficionado to have known about it, but with Tainted Love I opened that genre of music to a lot more people. It’s great when you can do that as a musician. 

Tainted Love is where a whole generation did their growing up, making up, breaking up to that song…
In the early 80s you could still be very creative as a musician. I felt there was still a new sound of music to be had. We took Tainted Love and turned it into something else. I’m really glad that I did, and still always sing it in my shows – I wouldn’t dare not to! However esoteric or obscure the songs I choose to do are, if you don’t do Tainted Love at the end… it has so many memories and meaning to people for different reasons.

When I sing that song onstage, it’s like taking a holiday: I can take that and give it over to the audience, they can sing it for me. [1982 Soft Cell hit] Say Hello, Wave Goodbye is like that as well. You have to acknowledge it and be grateful. 

You recently produced Dana Gillespie’s new album First Love. How did that come about?

I covered a song that she did originally, Stardom Road, back in 2006; we became friends over the years. She is mostly a blues singer, but her tone of voice is fantastic – a perfect pitch – and I thought she should be singing a wider variety of songs. So I decided I’d really like to and produce an album for her. I worked with my friend Tris Penna, who’s produced records for me in the past, curating songs for Dana and making an album.

I sort of came in with the vocals, helped choose the songs, worked on some arrangements. It’s not something I do a lot of! I like making my own music, really – I’m not a person who sits there in the producer’s chair. I do co-produce myself, though I don’t often credit myself as co-producer.

Has living in Portugal affected your songwriting and how you record?

Marc Almond: I came here to get away from the urban environment for a while. I don’t know how long that’s going to last! I’m a person who’s grown up in towns and cities – London, I spent time in New York, lived in Moscow for a while. I’ve always been kind of inspired by city life.

I think I wanted to get away from that for a little while, to a more rural, peaceful setting – which has affected the songs that I choose. I’m looking for more elemental references, nature references and spiritual, gentler kind of songs. There’s a little buzz about maybe writing new Soft Cell songs, and if I get back to my urban, hard roots again I can probably write those – at some point, I’ll miss the city too much. I’ll have to get back to the crime and chaos of the city.

But at the moment, I’m enjoying this time just getting away, having a new experience and a new adventure. I’ve got a small farm in Portugal; I like the idea of just growing trees, looking for plants in gardens. I needed to get away for a while, get back to being able to breathe again. 

Marc Almond tours the UK in September, including a date at the Bristol Beacon on Wed 18 Sept.

Tickets: £25-£55. Info: here

I’m Not Anyone is released on Fri 12 July.

words ANTONIA LEVAY