I've decided to do a special series of posts for one of my all-time favorite songs (?): Tainted Love. I didn't know this was one of my all-time favorite songs but since I just wrote that it was, I'm going to go with it. Enjoy.
In the beginning there was Gloria Jones... She recorded the song as a B-side in 1964 and nobody cared.
Then she recorded it again in 1976, after it began getting underground attention, but again, nobody cared.
Then, in 1981, Soft Cell released their version and it became a number one hit in the UK, where the Gloria Jones version had originally found its underground popularity in the Northern Soul scene. It reached #8 in the US.
Next, the industrial/goth-y group Coil released a version of the song which was the first AIDS benefit music release and the video starred Marc Almond, the singer of Soft Cell. The video was banned for being weird or something.
According to Wikipedia, the song didn't really resurface until the 90s. Soft Cell did a remix in 1991, then a British a cappella group called The Flying Pickets who apparently had "radical socialist politics," covered the song in 92. Yeah. Here they are doing their thing in Croatia that same year:
Also in 92, the band Inspiral Carpets, who happen to be one of my favorite teen-angst bands, (see espcecially Two Worlds Collide) recorded the song which appeared on an NME 3-disc collection, Ruby Trax. How crazy is it that one of my favorite songs when I was 15 has "what have I done with my life" as its main lyric? Seriously, I was 15, what was I supposed to have done?
In Part 2 I'll pick up with David Benoit's 1994 cover and we'll go from there. Stay tuned, won't you?
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