“Tainted Love” by Soft Cell

"Tainted Love" was an old soul song long before Soft Cell got their hands on it. Ed Cobb, once of the Four Preps, wrote it, and Gloria Jones cut it first. In 1981 the British synth-pop duo reworked it for their album Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret, and their version is the one that went around the world.

What Dave Ball and Marc Almond did was strip the song to a cold, clanking electronic skeleton and let the heartbreak rattle around inside it. Ball handles the electronic instruments, all bleeps, ticks and icy synth stabs, while Almond's voice is pure melodrama, wounded and camp and absolutely sure of itself. Vicious Pink add backing vocals, David Tofani brings a saxophone, and Mike Thorne produced it, with Paul Hardiman engineering and Harvey Goldberg mixing.

The result sounds like a torch song played in an empty nightclub at four in the morning: minimal, seedy and impossible to shake. Northern soul turned into something brand new, and since then, plenty of other artists have taken their own turn at it.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.