(listen)
"Tainted Love" started life as a swaggering, uptempo '60s post-Motown pop soul number, recorded by Gloria Jones, written by Ed Cobb (also involved in writing "Dirty Water" and "Sometimes Good Guys Don't Wear White" for the Standells, among others for others), released on Champion, and going nowhere fast. Or slowly. In the early '80s the Soft Cell duo of Marc Almond and David Ball ran it through the Gary Numanizer for the biggest hit of their (and the song's) careers, spending most of a full year bouncing around the Billboard Hot 100. OK, maybe it's the mix I'm pointing to that has the Gary Numan qualities (or maybe not). Later Marilyn Manson had a turn with "Tainted Love" too, so the thing has been around the block, 50 years and counting. Its resilience has to be counted as a given at this point. I was more relieved than surprised to get the detail on its pedigree, because at some point in the years since it was a hit I had relocated it in my memory all the way back to the '60s. I made someone show it to me in a book that it came from the '80s. As such, perhaps, I think of it now as one of those infinitely malleable songs. I have almost entirely lost track of the "original" Soft Cell version in all the welter of mixes (extended and otherwise), covers, live (clonking) rave-ups, and whatnot. It's a very silly song in many ways, with robot beats and a whole swollen narrative embedded in use of the word "tainted"—very silly but too often a stone winner in the clutch to be written off. Close the loop. Look for the versions that work the Supremes song in, "Where Did Our Love Go," which start with the earliest.
Of course I liked plenty of pop made by gay people b/f this song but this is close if not the first self-consciously gay pop song I liked. And the seedy cheap-casio minimalist bloops and clangs were essential to its subversive appeal.
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