Tainted life: as his new operatic show Ten Plagues opens, Marc Almond is still surprising

The singer and gay icon rails against the Shard, feels no desire to get married and says he has one more pop album in him
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22 April 2013

It’s a perfect symbol of our times: a phallic, monumental abomination,” says Marc Almond. “A knife in the heart of London. It’s violent, it’s aggressive, it’s greedy. It’s jagged at the top, like a broken bottle in a pub on Saturday night that someone would stick in somebody’s face. I’m sorry, I have to say I agree with Prince Charles when it comes to buildings …”

Almond is talking about the Shard, of course, and it’s refreshing to see that, 30 years after he first managed to épater les bourgeois with Soft Cell’s camp, vulnerable and edgily euphemistic electro anthem Tainted Love, he’s lost none of his capacity to surprise. The “cheerfully dark” 55-year-old singer and gay icon can see the Shard from his south London home. And he looks balefully for it now from an upstairs window at Wilton’s Music Hall, where he is preparing to perform Ten Plagues, the operatic song cycle written for him by playwright Mark Ravenhill and composer Conor Mitchell.

Ten Plagues is ostensibly about the Great Plague that ravaged London in 1665 but it’s also about the hysteria with which the public habitually greets all threats of mass infection, from swine flu to SARS. Like Tainted Love, it is also about the first onrush of Aids, the “gay plague” that both Almond and Ravenhill — who is HIV-positive — “lived through and lost friends in”. When the show premiered at the Edinburgh Festival in 2011, it felt like the wrong place: the dilapidated, pungently atmospheric Wilton’s, dating from 1746 and so close to the historic heart of London, is much more fitting. That the show is going on in the capital when homosexuality is again a hot-button issue thanks to gay marriage also seems apt.

So sexuality, illness and the ability of London and its residents to reinvent and rally themselves are all on his mind. Hence the rant about the Shard. Ten Plagues sees Almond’s unnamed character journey through a city that is becoming increasingly strange to him. “He loses his friends, his lover, his family, his sanity,” Almond says. “In his isolation and madness he decides to dress up in his best clothes and buys a wig that is made from the human hair of bodies in the pit and is full of infection. So he decides to go and infect other people. Mark [Ravenhill] is going back to that time when Aids appeared and people were deliberately not practising safe sex, deliberately infecting other people, which I think comes with a feeling of hopelessness.” The show, he assures me, deals with these things in a “darkly funny” way.

Some critics saw in Ten Plagues an expression of “survivor guilt” by Mark and Marc but also an assertion of their resilience. In 2007, Ravenhill went into a near-fatal epileptic coma, triggered by a toxoplasmosis scar on his brain. And in 2004 Almond was almost killed in a motorcycle accident near St Paul’s, after which he had to teach himself to sing and remember lyrics again. Last year he had to cancel some concerts for surgery unrelated to the accident.

“I have a liver disease, a progressive sclerosis, which I usually keep controlled,” he says. “But I had to have a spleenectomy and my gall bladder removed over the course of last year, which put me out of action for about three months. I had been ill before that. My health was quite depleted and I was kind of swollen. I was very tired and anaemic. The past few years have been a bit of a struggle but I have never stopped working. I’m a great believer in getting on with things. I actually felt with Ten Plagues I had finally conquered the motorbike accident: that I wasn’t a victim of it or defined by it any more.”

Almond has also said he doesn’t want to be defined by his sexuality, pigeonholed as a “gay artist”. Is he surprised, though, that homosexuality is still so contentious three decades after his first Top of the Pops appearance caused outrage? “Not really,” he says. “We’ve seen so many gay characters on film, in television, in comedy and music recently, and when there’s a big explosion like that it seems there’s always a backlash. People do feel very threatened by it. Homophobia is always there.

“Cases of gay assaults have gone up. We are going through quite strange and sinister times. People are confused, frightened and a bit hysterical at the moment, and they are looking for things to lash out at.”

He doesn’t discuss his “very settled” private life: most interviews claim vaguely that he’s been with the same partner “for years”. But he does tell me he has not entered into a civil partnership (“I haven’t felt the need”) and certainly feels no desire to get married, much as he likes “the theatrics” of church and sometimes sits in Southwark Cathedral, listening to the singing.

“I think a civil partnership or a register office marriage is a modern, sensible thing to do,” he says. “So you have something in law that means that when you die some greedy relative doesn’t come out of the woodwork and grab your chattels. But I’m not an advocate of marriage. I grew up as a child of an unhappy marriage so I know it is not always best for children. And why, as a gay man, would you want to get married in the house of a religion that doesn’t welcome you with open arms, that thinks you are a sinner? To be blessed by a supernatural deity?”

He also thinks it’s a mistake to expect religion to modernise: “It is what it is, a set of rules, and you either adhere to it or you don’t. You can’t say, ‘Well, I want to invent a new kind of Christianity where you invite all sorts of other people in’: that’s a different sort of cult.”

Besides, he’s not at all sure he’d want a utopian future, where everyone rubbed along together happily. “We should live in a world where everyone is allowed to get on with their own thing, as long as they’re not hurting anyone, whether they are religious, or gay, or like dressing up in women’s clothes,” he says. “But that’s an idealised view of society and unfortunately there is always turmoil. But there is turmoil in the world, struggle and war, that creates great art, great writing: that give us soul in our existence.”

He grudgingly admits that hating the Shard makes him sound fogeyish and that it has “earned its place” as a symbol of our current culture, alongside the Georgian buildings that he and Prince Charles love. He tries not to get sentimental about London or the music business: both thrive through change and reinvention.

Is it too much of a stretch to see Almond’s life as one constant process of adaptation in response to turmoil? He’s survived his unhappy Northern childhood, health problems, homophobia and substance abuse to become one of the capital’s fixtures, like Wilton’s.

And like Wilton’s, he’s constantly changing. After Ten Plagues, and his appearance in a rock opera, Poppea, at Châtelet in Paris last year, he’s got another London song cycle with composer John Harle in the pipeline, plus an album of “shiny pop tunes” with David Bowie’s producer Tony Visconti. “I wanted to do this before I really am too old and undignified to do another pop album,” he says. “Carl Barat has written a song for me, and Jarvis Cocker, and I’ve written some myself. If the pop songs are dark, they will be dark in a light, poppy sort of way.”

Marc Almond performs Ten Plagues at Wilton’s Music Hall from Apr 24 to May 18 (wiltons.org.uk)

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