How we made Soft Cell's Tainted Love

Dave Ball, synthesiser

Marc Almond was in the year above me at Leeds Polytechnic, doing performance art. His main piece was called Mirror Fucking. He’d be naked in front of a full-length mirror, smearing himself with cat food and shagging himself. It provoked quite a reaction.

He had heard me making bleepy noises on a synthesiser and asked me to do music for his performances. These grew into proper songs. Everyone in Leeds was into doom-laden stuff, but we wanted to do something more uplifting. Marc was working in the cloakroom of a club called the Warehouse, when the DJ played Tainted Love. He ran up and asked: “What’s this?”

I’m from Blackpool and knew the song from northern soul nights. Written by Ed Cobb and sung by Gloria Jones, it was the B-side to a 1964 single that flopped. When we started on our own version, it felt twisted and strange. That suited us. We were a weird couple: Marc, this gay bloke in makeup; and me, a big guy who looked like a minder.

I’d borrowed £400 from my mum to make Mutant Moments, our first release, and we were now signed to Phonogram, though nobody expected us to have a hit. They gave us the producer Mike Thorne and the sound we came up with was a combination of my dodgy old Korg synths and this amazing new gadget Mike liked, a Synclavier that cost £120,000. So Tainted Love was a collision of really cheap and really expensive technology.

The song was just played in clubs at first – but then it took off, reaching No 1 in 17 countries. Girls would chase us in the street. We were living in a dodgy little housing association flat in Leeds and being flown about in Concorde. Then we’d get home to find neighbours had put graffiti over our door and superglued the locks shut.

Marc Almond, singer

Soft Cell were an experimental electro band, more in keeping with Suicide or Throbbing Gristle than the Top 40. We wrote weird little pop tunes about consumerism and I put my voice through strange, robotic effects. Then we decided to add a couple of cover versions to the live set.

The first was Black Sabbath’s Paranoid. The second was a choice between Frankie Valli’s The Night or Tainted Love. I was a huge T Rex fan and had seen Gloria Jones sing with them, so that clinched it. I loved the title and the opening line: “Sometimes I feel I’ve got to run away.” It summed up how I felt. It was 1981 and I was 21, already feeling world weary after some love affairs. I adored the sneering, curled-lip aspect of the song.

In the studio, I had a Roland synth drum, this flying saucer-shaped thing that made 1970s disco noises. Dave went “der-der” on his Korg and I went “dink-dink” on the flying saucer. I did two takes of the vocal and decided that was it.

We recorded Tainted Love as a long, improvised 12-inch single that at the end morphed into Where Did Our Love Go by the Supremes. It was chopped in two for the 7-inch version, a half for each side. This was the biggest mistake we ever made: having a cover version on both sides meant we didn’t get any songwriting royalties for the biggest-selling hit of 1981. That must have cost us millions of pounds.

I wanted to make the same shocking impact on Top of the Pops that Marc Bolan and David Bowie had made on me, so I wore black, with studded wristbands, bangles and eyeliner. The record company said: “Don’t go on like that. You’ll put people off.” Switchboards lit up with complaints, but most people loved it. All over the country, studs and black eyeliner were in.