Marc Almond’s Shadows & Reflections sounds like the lonely ghost of a doomed crooner, perched on a velvet curtain somewhere between the Sgt. Pepper sessions and a forgotten BBC orchestral special. It’s a covers album — but don’t dare call it predictable. “I didn’t want just standards,” Almond says. “I wanted songs people might’ve heard somewhere in the back of their memory, but they don’t over-know.”
The original idea came from a new deal with BMG. “They said, ‘We’d love you to do a covers record — and orchestral.’ So I thought, what era do I love? The Sixties, obviously. That decade was a golden age for melody, maybe because everything was so new and all you could really do was experiment.” You can almost see the eyeliner smudge on that statement.
Teaming up with producer Mike Stevens (ELO, Annie Lennox), Almond set out to balance tribute and reinvention. “You can’t totally reinvent these songs. You’ve got to pay homage to those arrangements — that’s what makes them. But I wanted to bring a modern twist. So it sounds like a film soundtrack, or torch songs for lost love — ‘Where have you gone? I’m lonely without you.’ Very me.”
He calls himself a “curator,” a word that suits the man who plucked “Tainted Love” out of the soul crate and made it his forever. “I look for songs that I wish I’d written, but couldn’t have. So I take them, make them mine, and bring them to my audience. I’ve always done that — I’m not the most natural songwriter. I need collaborators. Some people, they play an instrument, write naturally. I don’t. I have to work at it. So I go digging.”
He didn’t stop at the covers either — two originals sneak onto Shadows & Reflections, slotting in so seamlessly you’d think they were lost Scott Walker cuts. “There’s No One to Say Goodnight To, which I wrote with John Hall — very filmic, sets up the whole album’s theme. Then Embers, with Chris Braide, who’s my regular co-writer. Big strings, big ballad, big Walker Brothers energy.”
Marc Almond, still the eternal romantic with a black-gloved hand in the dustbin of pop, finding the songs you forgot you needed. “Sometimes I just want to do songs that feel like they’ve always been there. I think that’s what a good cover does — makes you remember and makes you think it’s mine.”
Listen to the interview above and then check out his cover of The Young Rascal's "How Can I Be Sure" below!
