Forty years ago this week Marc Almond released the album that almost finished his career. Derided at the time as an overblown, self-obsessed indulgence, Torment and Toreros is now considered a flawed masterpiece in the lineage of Lou Reed’s Berlin, Big Star’s Third, and Nick Cave’s Your Funeral…My Trial. Here the people who made the record tell its story in their own words.
The Mambas, portrait by Peter Ashworth
Right from the start, Marc Almond’s ambition reached further than the electropop of Soft Cell. Even before ‘Tainted Love’ topped the UK singles chart in September 1981, Almond was already talking up a side-project: “I’m doing a sort of off-beat lowlife sleazo disco thing with various friends,” he told Sounds’ Beverley Glick a...
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