Soft Cell - Tainted Love

Each month we take a look at a classic track or album and discuss it from a music production perspective, examining anything innovative or notable that took place during its recording. This month we take a look at Soft Cell's 'Tainted Love' – a track that spent a record breaking 43 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100.

The song was a cover of a 1965 single by Gloria Jones that had initially been a complete flop. The song was rediscovered in 1973 by DJ Richard Searling, and it subsequently became a staple of Northern Soul club nights in the UK.

 Soft Cell were familiar with the song from the Northern Soul scene, and added a cover of it to their live set. In 1981 they went into the Advision studio in central London to record it as a single. 

Remarkably, Marc Almond's incredible vocal performance was captured when he was doing a 'run-through' of the song so that the engineers could get the levels right. The lesson here is that it's always worth hitting record when a singer is performing. Producer Mike Thorne explains that Almond 'poured his heart out on it and what you hear is a complete take. The compressor was pinned — [engineer] Paul [Hardiman] and I looked at it in horror and he was reaching to change stuff, but I told him, 'No, he's doing pretty well.' So, we just left it.

 The compression probably wouldn't have been far short of what we would have done in the mix, but fortunately the voice laid in very nicely, thanks to the rather over-compressed recording.'

They went on to record another five takes of Almond singing the lead vocal, but none of the subsequent performances captured the energy of spontaneity of the original. Thorne goes on to explain that in fact 'a lot of Marc's best vocals were captured on the first take.' Some singers need to warm up before they do their best work – but some really perform best when they are still fresh. It is fortunate that Mike Thorne was wise to this fact and took the precaution of hitting record before Marc Almond sang a note.