‘There’s never enough budget with these one-off things, so you just have to do what you can,” Marc Almond said ruefully during an interview with 6Music last Friday. He was capping off a week of promotion ahead of this lone UK show, which follows the release of his 26th solo album, Chaos and a Dancing Star. Though the gig is plenty dark and gothic exactly as it is, evidently he had a greater vision for it. Perhaps it’s for the best that he wasn’t able to realise it; heaven knows what other disquieting visual and orchestral effects he would have cooked up in service to the show’s themes: mortality and apocalypse.
Though a very youthful 62, he has recently been preoccupied by the “autumnal part of my life”, and the show is more or less a reckoning with death, as well as the impermanence of relationships. Characteristically, he explores the subject with utmost melodrama, fascinated by the putrefaction. Unable to look away, he romanticises it, much as he did the metropolitan night-creatures of his Soft Cell days – only Almond would ask an audience to sing along to a ballad about the movie-star cemetery Hollywood Forever, which he enjoys visiting when working with the new album’s co-author, Los Angeles-based songwriter Chris Braide. He strives to paint the place in an alluring light: “I feel at one with the great stars there – Judy Garland, Rudolph Valentino – but it’s not just older ones; Dee Dee Ramone’s grave is there, too.”
Having been doing this for four decades, Almond needs no more than a big screen and a sympathetic backing band – including Braide on piano and a steely-voiced female mini-choir – to create an atmosphere both erotic and dank. The video accompaniments to the new album, most of which is played tonight, are inspired by another great recent interest, nature. But the slow-motion footage of birds and flowers is unsettling. Take, say, the ballad Giallo, an evocation of stylised Italian horror films: onscreen, we see doves languidly flapping against a pink sky as Almond whispers, “I drew the kitchen knife across you,” drawing an appreciative “Yeah!” from a woman sitting near me. The theatricality is madly camp, but the combination of doves and Almond quietly enunciating every syllable is undeniably unnerving.
A moment later, the tension is relieved by the singer’s giddy introduction of one of his teenhood heroes, Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson. “I loved him on Top of the Pops, but my parents said he was a tramp,” Almond remembers happily. More pirate than tramp these days, Anderson and his flute add a prog-rock frosting to Bedsitter and Tainted Love, not at all to their detriment. For his part, Almond sings the 1970 Tull song The Witch’s Promise, quite the strange-in-a-good-way moment of the whole show.
The partnership of Braide and Almond is puzzling; the former writes for Christina Aguilera and Sia, and his solo songs – he performs two here, halting the show’s momentum – occupy a frictionless, Coldplayish zone. On the other hand, the pair gel like dissolute twins on Damn You, an unreleased Lana Del Rey track co-written by Braide, and his contributions to the Chaos album are full of dark-side potential. Almond, naturally, has spent a lifetime on that dark side, and continues to thrive there. Having reached this autumnal phase, he’s not going gentle into any good night.
