Tainted Love defined synth-pop — but started as a 1960s soul B-side

The opening two notes of the song that helped define the 1980s synth-pop era are still one of the most instantly recognisable intros to any pop tune.

Yet Soft Cell’s enduring 1981 multimillion-seller “Tainted Love”, which marked a guitar-ousting genre that dominated much of the decade, came from a cover version of a 1960s B-side by an American soul singer.

Gloria Jones, a one-time member of the Motown songwriting operation, recorded “Tainted Love” in 1965 for LA writer and producer Ed Cobb.

Jones’s version is a terrific, stompingly breakneck burst of female had-it-up-to-here defiance. But it slipped past unnoticed until the early 1970s, when the mainly working-class British northern soul scene, devotees of obscure or rare black American soul music, fell in love with it. Northern soul clubs such as the Wigan Casino and Manchester’s Twisted Wheel turned it into one of the most enduring, and most bootlegged, anthems of this passionately partisan scene.

But Jones, a preacher’s daughter, said that she “never really liked ‘Tainted Love’”. Talking to This Day in Music Radio, the former church singer recalled: “It didn’t feel like something [that] could really present my style: I was more of a torch singer. And I didn’t like the word ‘tainted’. I felt it was vulgar and just wasn’t proper.”

Jones also felt she should have shared writing credits, arguing that when Cobb brought the song to her she changed the melody. “He never said, OK Gloria that will be 50 per cent, he was like, oh, thank you very much.”

Jones, who later joined the cast of the musical Hair, knew nothing of the song’s underground success until, working as a backing singer for glam rock band in the UK T Rex, Marc Bolan asked her if she was “the Gloria Jones”. The pair went on to live together until Bolan died in 1977, when the car Jones was driving crashed. The year before, Jones had re-recorded “Tainted Love”, though to negligible interest. Bolan himself produced a version of the song for Jones’s 1976 album Vixen.

But it was the northern soul connection that in 1981 was to catapult “Tainted Love” into a near-year-long chart residency. Soft Cell were then a little-known post-punk band, although they did have a recording deal. At the time vocalist Marc Almond was working in the cloakroom of Leeds club The Warehouse.

Warehouse DJ Ian Dewhirst had been a legendary rare vinyl hunter on the northern soul circuit, and put the Jones single on the turntable. Dewhirst later told writer Bill Brewster that “this guy who I’d conspicuously avoided for nine months (he was always getting into fights with women or something) came rushing up . . . ‘What’s this record? I’ve got to know what this record is!’”

The result of that chance hearing was Soft Cell’s third single, its success fast and total. The metallic sound and the brassy electronic signature stabs that punctuate the number came from the duo’s electronica and keyboard player David Ball, the big silent guy at the back (or “the brickie”, as pop mag Smash Hits called him), who was a perfect visual foil to the flamboyant Almond. The first run-through of Almond’s deliberately mannered, thrillingly sinister lead vocal, aimed at merely checking the sound, was the one that was used on the final cut.

American goth-rock singer Marilyn Manson picked up the song for a version in 2001 that was bombastic, trashy and just as absurd as a number on the soundtrack of a parodic film called Not Another Teen Movie should be.

Rihanna sampled the opening notes of the Soft Cell version throughout her 2006 hit “SOS”. But surely the most inspired repurposing of those two notes belongs to Hollywood’s Spike Jonze, director of Being John Malkovich. For a 1996 ad for Levi’s jeans, Jonze set the action in a hospital emergency room, hooking the notes into the “beep beep” of the monitors and setting medics and gas-and-air-addled patient into a delirious song-and-dance version — until the patient crashes. But — hurrah — he survives! Beep beep!

Photograph: Eugene Adebari/REX/Shutterstock

The Life & Arts team would love to hear more from our readers. What are your memories of ‘Tainted Love’? Share them in the comments below