Of all the places that Marc Almond may have envisioned himself at this point in his life, a small farm in Portugal was probably pretty far down the list.
“It’s not an animal farm. It’s just for fruit trees and plants and various things,” he protests, laughing. “It’s just somewhere to retreat to, really, a new adventure – but also to have a project. I’m enjoying growing different things, and planting trees, and trying to do environmentally friendly things.”
For the 67-year-old, who is warm and chatty, part of the appeal of his country idyll is that none of the locals knows who he is. “And that’s fantastic,” he says with a chuckle. “I mean, I get occasionally recognised – mostly by the Brits who come here on holiday. But people don’t go hysterical; they just kind of leave you to yourself, really, so it’s nice having that bit of peace and quiet. I never thought I’d be the type of person to enjoy the quiet of rural life, but I do enjoy it. And it also gave me the chance to get my head together after the whole lockdown Covid period; I needed to get my head together and sort out my life a bit, do a bit of writing, stuff like that.”
Almond’s career has marked him out as both a versatile and an exceptionally curious artist. Most know him from his role in Soft Cell and his subsequent solo career; he laughs knowingly when I tell him of my early-childhood recollection of seeing him on the telly, duetting with Gene Pitney on Something’s Gotten Hold of my Heart in 1989. Even back then, pairing the synth-pop star with a 1960s crooner (on a remixed version of Pitney’s 1967 hit) was a radical undertaking.
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“That feels like a long, long time ago,” says Almond. “I remember when we did that video [in Las Vegas]. That was actually the first time I met him, on that stage and performing that song. He was such a lovely, warm, professional guy, really down to earth. At that time I was kind of hysterical about everything, really. Everything was total drama.
“So he was a really nice, quiet, calming person. You could learn a lot about professionalism from him. He was very easy to get on with – and, sadly, he went before his time,” says Almond, referring to the singer’s death, on tour, in Cardiff in 2006. “Nobody had expected it, because that record had reignited his whole career, and he was playing bigger venues. It was a really sad thing when he passed.”
Almond has always enjoyed throwing creative curveballs. While some pigeonholed him as a pop artist because of his success with Soft Cell, he never left his freewheeling art-school sensibility behind. Other projects have included Ten Plagues, a song cycle based on Daniel Defoe’s Journal of a Plague Year; a collection of Russian folk songs; a role in a reworked version of Monteverdi’s opera L’Incoronazione di Poppea, and collaborations with artists including Nico, Jarvis Cocker and Siouxsie Sioux.
“Yeah, well, I’ve been around for quite a long time now,” he says with a nonchalant smile. “This year it’s been 45 years of making music, and during that time there’s always been these two artists, I suppose; here’s this pop artist wanting the successful records, but also someone wanting to have musical adventures and try lots of different things. I became a music fan at a very early age, and I listened to lots of different types of music. I’ve loved the fact that I’ve gone on all of these adventures. I’ve never thought, ‘This is going to be detrimental to my career,’ or, ‘This is not going to be a commercial success,’ because I never think like that.”
Almond’s most recent release is I’m Not Anyone, a collection of cover versions that includes songs by Neil Diamond, Don MacLean and King Crimson, among others. He has always enjoyed translating songs that other people have written.
“I’m looking for that emotional core, the emotional resonance in a song,” he says. “Something that says something about my life, or the way that I feel, or the way that I’m feeling about the world, in a better way than I can express it through my own lyrics, maybe. I’ve always enjoyed that double life. I write a lot of my own songs, and I go through periods where I write a lot – but you sometimes feel trapped by the baggage of your own songs at times. You’re a prisoner of your own songs, in a strange way. And I’ve always had more enjoyment from singing other peoples’ songs. Those two things have always gone hand in hand for me.”
His current tour, which hits Dublin later this month, will see him perform only cover songs, both from the album and from other points in his career – including big hits such as Tainted Love, itself a cover of Gloria Jones’s 1964 song.
“I don’t think I can get away with not doing Tainted Love or Something’s Gotten Hold of My Heart. That would be a huge gaping hole,” says Almond. “But I think I’d like to go back to the original Northern Soul sound of it or something; maybe just rethink it a little bit, as opposed to the Soft Cell sound.”
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He says the door is always open to the odd one-off gig with Dave Ball, his old Soft Cell sparring partner. They played a gig with their fellow 1980s artists OMD and Heaven 17 in Dublin this summer.
“Dave can’t always do the gigs because he’s quite disabled,” says Almond. “So he’s able to do ones that he’s able to travel to. He’s always there at the heart of everything we do. I don’t know how long the live thing will carry on, [but] it’s great that we opened that door again. We are writing some new songs together at the moment – so that’s quite a hopeful thing for the future, whatever form that’ll take.”
Almond speaks passionately about all of the projects he has planned for the next few years; he says he will probably stop touring, although he has no intention of giving up live performances. He is eligible for his bus pass, he notes, but hasn’t collected it yet. “I should do that, really,” he says, laughing. “I asked somebody the other day whether I’m eligible for a pension, and I’m actually not, because I’m still working full time. But if someone gives me a free travel pass, I’ll take it quite happily.”
Perhaps it is the knowledge that things could all have worked out very differently that keeps Almond moving forward. It has been 20 years since a near-fatal motorbike crash in London left him in a coma.
“I have memory problems, which almost certainly stem from that, and I have to use teleprompters more than I had to in the past,” he says. “Occasionally I still get stage fright, and I tend to just forget everything – and that’s probably a result of the accident. And it affected the hearing in my ear a little bit, but those are all physical things. I have some aches and pains that are probably a legacy from that, too.
“But after a while it becomes blurry, because you think, ‘Well, I am in my 60s, although I still feel 27 in my heart.’” He laughs loudly. “But [the accident] is something I rarely think about these days. It seems like a strange dream. You can certainly have those cliches, where you think, ‘It’s made me more spiritual and more appreciative of life’, and that’s probably true. I think anybody who has a near-death experience probably values what they have more. But it’s almost becoming like something that happened to someone else, in another life.” He shrugs. “But I’m still here.”
After almost half a century in the business, he says, he has learned a thing or two about himself. “It’s very hard, you know. After 45 years you end up going down all sorts of roads and avenues that you wish you’d never gone on, and then you have to pull back from that.” He sighs. “But I think you have to try, as much as possible, to be true to yourself, in a business that wants you not to be true to yourself.” He nods. “Be honest with yourself. That’s it.”
Marc Almond is at the 3Olympia Theatre, Dublin, on Thursday, September 26th
