| 02 August 2011
A terrible accident changed Marc Almond from the confident singer of Soft Cell back to the awkward boy he’d been at school, but Ten Plagues is helping him to overcome his fears. A renowned torch singer, lamenting the poor souls excluded from life’s feast and fortune’s favour, few can articulate a survivor’s emotional journey with more empathy than Marc Almond. Bullied at school, he would hyperventilate and black out in order to avoid being attacked, while as Soft Cell’s frontman and as a solo act, his debauched lifestyle saw him narrowly cheat death on several occasions. Famously, he survived a horrific motorcycle accident in 2004 that left him with memory lapses, his childhood stutter resurgent and having to learn to sing anew.
The thought of acting always caused him dread. And yet, in rehearsals at London’s Menier Chocolate Factory, preparing for his Edinburgh Fringe debut in Mark Ravenhill and Conor Mitchell’s one-man song cycle Ten Plagues, his fears about delivering its breadth of classical, opera, musichall and showtune have been surpassed by the puckish singer’s delight in the challenge.
“In concert, I’m very organic and different every night,” he explains. “But with a director I have to hit my marks.
I always thought I’d be wooden, having to sing and act at the same time but I’m really enjoying the surrender, the freedom of being told what to do.”
As his albums reflect, the 54-year-old has always been fascinated by London’s history, its alternative cultures, the marginalised, the dispossessed and the alienated. After seeing Mother Clap’s Molly House, Ravenhill’s 18th and 21st century-straddling exploration of gay awakening, he approached the playwright about collaborating.
And so it was that Ten Plagues came to pass. Written specifically for Almond and based loosely on the eyewitness accounts of Daniel Defoe and Samuel Pepys, the show recounts the year the narrator spends travelling through London during the Great Plague of 1665, which wiped out a fifth of the city’s population. “He’s stuck there and he becomes like a journalist,” Almond explains. “Whether it’s morbid fascination, vanity or selfishness, he wants to see all this death.
“It’s about hysteria and the absurd behaviour patterns people go through in times of pandemics, say the AIDS crisis, e-coli or bird flu. So there are lighter moments, cynical and sarcastic moments, with contemporary allusions. I hope people come out feeling very life affirmed. But I most relate to when he loses people, when he becomes solitary, when he becomes a survivor.”
Survivor’s guilt weighed heavily on Almond in hospital following his bike accident. “A young lad came in, hit on the head with a brick and with head injuries not a million miles away from mine” he recalls. “He died and I could hear his grieving parents. You just think how amazing and dreadful that one person lives and one doesn’t.
“You go through this weird feeling of thinking ‘I shouldn’t be here’ and ‘I’m not a real person’ because you’re in this psychological state of living death. You’re a phantom. You find it hard to relate to even close friends because despite their sympathy, they don’t really know what you’ve been through. And you get that blur of emotions in these songs, that loneliness and terrible feelings of not being able to connect with others.”
His initial misgivings about Mitchell’s 16-song score, that it was “majorly beyond what I’ve trained for”, receded when he realised it was an extension of his previous work.
“When I’ve recorded albums and shows, I’ve often put them into song cycle themes, I’ve imagined it like a film or a narrative” he explains. “Even if it’s abstract, I would look for a beginning, middle and end. Eventually I’ve found myself in them through singing them.”
Moreover, the process helped the flamboyant performer to realise he’s been an actor all along. “I still can’t do phone interviews because of my stammer and I find readthroughs like reading in school, with this fear that if the word starts with a vowel I won’t be able to get it out. But I’ve come to realise that I’ve effectively always acted within my songs, through the personas and characters I’ve created.” Working with Stewart Laing, Traverse Theatre’s artist in residence, has proved liberating too.
Planning to “isolate” himself in Edinburgh – “I’m not good socially with people and with lots of confusion” – Almond maintains he’s looking forward to the discipline of performing the same material every day.
“What I love and want more than anything now is regimentation. Whether that’s part of getting older, whether it’s because of my hectic past life, or coming through the accident, I like routine. You strip all the art away and the pressure, you’re just an entertainer, a vehicle, trying to move people, to make them cry, to make them laugh.
“I prefer the straight and narrow path now. It keeps me from going off into chaos when I’m left to my own devices.”
Ten Plagues, Traverse Theatre,
1-28 August (not 2-5, 8, 15, 22), times vary, From £6,
Tel: 0131 228 1404
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
