Soft Cell's "Tainted Love" Was A Cover Version?

Do a Google search on 80s One Hit Wonders, and the first thing that will probably come up is Soft Cell's "Tainted Love." Actually, I just tried that, and it didn't come up. But anyway.

One surprising tidbit about Soft Cell, a duo consisting of singer Marc Almond and synthesizer player David Ball, is that they weren't really one hit wonders at all.

Guys, I just discovered something amazing, you're not going to believe it: America isn't actually the center of the world! Did you know that there are other countries in the world besides America? Like, there's this one that's called "England"? Well, apparently, in this "England," all those 80s bands that we've always thought of as One Hit Wonders (Madness, Gary Numan, Dexy's Midnight Runners, a-ha) actually had long, healthy careers. Guess the British public didn't get the memo that they needed to stop buying those artists' records, because the American pop culture zeitgeist had permanently and irrevocably deemed them One Hit Wonders, and that was that.

Nevertheless, while "Tainted Love" was far from Soft Cell's only UK hit, it was certainly the biggest. Come on, sing it with me:

Now I know I've got to -

CLAP CLAP

Run away, I've got to -

CLAP CLAP -

Get away from the pain you drive into the heart of me

And nothing beats that BART car "doors are closing" percussion sound. But the real surprise about "Tainted Love" is that it wasn't written by Soft Cell. It wasn't even written by one of their contemporaries. Listening to the original version of "Tainted Love," you have to wonder how Soft Cell even got the idea to record it in the style they did in the first place:



Whoa. How did we get from that to this?



Gloria Jones' version is a pure mid-60s soul stomper in the mold of Solomon Burke's "Everybody Needs Somebody To Love." Soft Cell's version is ... well, it's hard to say exactly.

In his AMG biography of Gloria Jones, Richie Unterberger refers to Soft Cell's cover version as "wimpy." This strikes me as an inaccurate way to describe Soft Cell's rendition. Unterberger tends to be heavily biased against all mainstream pop music made after 1971, so the adjective he uses is not surprising, and reveals why he is probably not the best writer to be writing about post-60s pop (which, to his credit, he usually doesn't). Soft Cell's version of "Tainted Love" may be more "robotic," more "white," more "trashy," more "artificial," but it's not exactly "wimpy." If anything, compared to most of the pop singles of 1981, it's rather lean and mean. Christopher Cross covering "Tainted Love" would be wimpy. Toto covering "Tainted Love" would be wimpy. One thing's for sure though: the way Marc Almond sings it, the "love" described in the lyrics certainly sound a lot more "tainted."

The fact that "Tainted Love" is actually an old soul song finally explains why Soft Cell paired it together in a medley with The Supremes' "Where Did Our Love Go." I used to hear this version on the radio and I would think to myself, "Hmm, OK, that's a completely random segue right there." In reality, it was perfectly thematic. Unfortunately for Soft Cell, because they'd written neither song, they didn't receive any songwriting royalties. And this was their biggest hit! From Wikipedia:

Usually, an artist releasing a cover version as a single would opt to write the song that appears on the B-side as this would still entitle the artist to some songwriting royalties stemming from sales of that single. However, as Soft Cell wrote neither "Tainted Love" nor "Where Did Our Love Go" (the 7" B-side track), they lost the opportunity to make a greater sum of money from songwriting royalties stemming from one of the most popular songs of the 1980s. Almond expressed regret for this in his book, and attributed the error to naïveté.

Well, Marc Almond may have been naive in the ways of the music business, but, as we shall soon see, he was not quite so naive in the ways of love.