Soft Cell’s ‘Tainted Love’ Hits One Billion Streams On Spotify
In 1981, Marc Almond and Dave Ball’s turned a mid-1960s Northern Soul club classic into an electro-pop hit.
Soft Cell’s 1981 classic “Tainted Love” has joined the Spotify Billions Club.
“Tainted Love” was a specialist club favorite in the 1960s, written by Ed Cobb and recorded by Gloria Jones, the future girlfriend of T. Rex’s Marc Bolan. In 1981, it was reborn as an early landmark of the electro-pop sound when Soft Cell put the synths in northern soul and took it to the top of the UK charts.
Marc Almond and Dave Ball had been making music together for a couple of years after meeting at Leeds Art College. “Dave introduced me to the record,” Almond later remembered of the “Tainted Love” original. “I loved it so much, and we wanted an interesting song for an encore number in our show. Dave loved northern soul and it was a novelty to have an electronic synthesizer band doing a soul song.”
With a 30-week chart term, “Tainted Love” became Soft Cell’s breakthrough and helped their subsequent first album Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret to become a big seller. When the single was released in America, it reached No.8 and created a new chart longevity record at the time by spending an incredible 43 weeks on the Hot 100.
Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret “tells a story of a bored ordinary bloke seething with his life wanting more and looking for excitement and adventure in a red neon lit Soho world of red-light cabarets, prostitutes and sex dwarves, looking back at his youth and wondering what happened,” according to Almond.
Soft Cell recently announced a reissue of their 1982 remix album Non-Stop Ecstatic Dancing. The new double-CD version features the original album remastered and the original extended versions of “Torch” and “What!” (a cover of Judy Street’s 1968 Northern Soul single). The second disc includes new remixes by Erasure, The Hacker, Jon Pleased Wimmin, Daniel Miller, The Grid, and Hifi Sean, as well as highlights from 2007’s Heat – The Remixes.
