Marc Almond > Quotes

“But you do have to tell people your worth, whatever little it is, and keep telling them over and over or they don’t believe it.”
― Marc Almond, Tainted Life: The Autobiography

“Let me give an example of how bored we were. Mike Hedges felt like sushi, but of course there are no restaurants in Bavaria other than hog rotisseries. So what did we do? We flew back to London for the night to go to our favourite sushi restaurant, and the next morning we flew back to Bavaria. It took four plane journeys, and probably ended up being one of the most expensive sushi meals ever. But when you have to have sushi you just have to.”
― Marc Almond, Tainted Life: The Autobiography

“And it’s often the case that straight men who are completely at ease with their own sexuality have no problem with accepting a differing sexuality.”
― Marc Almond, Tainted Life: The Autobiography

“But if I thought I had experienced insanity at home, nothing – absolutely nothing – prepared me for the two weeks in Russia.”
― Marc Almond, Tainted Life: The Autobiography

“I hated being a pop star. I hated audiences. I hated myself. I loved being a pop star. I loved audiences. I hated myself.”
― Marc Almond, Tainted Life: The Autobiography

“When I eventually was coaxed or coerced into interviews, they would ask me, ‘So, Marc, your new album, Mother Fist – what’s the title about?’
‘Masturbation.’ Silence.”
― Marc Almond, Tainted Life: The Autobiography

“Some people thought this album was all too clearly about suicide – the record company thought it was commercial suicide.”
― Marc Almond, Tainted Life: The Autobiography

“I stood there shaking. I’d been in New York less than an hour and already I’d been mugged. I loved this place!”
― Marc Almond, Tainted Life: The Autobiography

“Stop me if my scepticism is turning into cynicism. It’s not that I’m still trying to be anti-establishment — I’m just realistic. I know that any artist who’s been around for a while automatically becomes establishment. Even the most rebellious artists are tamed with time, or else die. We all sell out in the end. Some of us may struggle and resist that bit longer, but it’s ultimately futile. However anti-establishment you are at the beginning, that becomes just part of your marketability. Whether Germaine Greer or the Sex Pistols, the establishment absorbs you, and eventually you become seen as simply harmlessly eccentric, or emasculated.”
― Marc Almond, Tainted Life: The Autobiography

“Like all Satanists, terrorists, public enemies and the like, he was one of the nicest people you could wish to meet.”
― Marc Almond, Tainted Life: The Autobiography

“My favourite moments are such songs as ‘The Slave’ – a song found for me by Pierre et Gilles, in which the narrator not only dreams of being sodomized by a well-endowed black man but also wishes he was a woman too, and one who wears purple eyeshadow and is displayed in a cage. My kind of song – and great subject matter for radio, as you can imagine.”
― Marc Almond, Tainted Life: The Autobiography

“I found myself on the telephone trying naively to justify it to inquisitorial journalists. ‘This video is sexist filth and deeply insulting to women,’ said one. ‘Actually, there are no women in the video – only men,’ I replied. The journalist was unable to answer that.”
― Marc Almond, Tainted Life: The Autobiography

“Big old Russian babushka took a shine to me and pushed my head into her bosom, stroked my face and talked excitedly in Russian – translator Nick said she wanted to arrange marriage for me. Fell asleep in Boris Yeltsin’s bed.”
― Marc Almond, Tainted Life: The Autobiography

“To me things could be both ugly and beautiful – the paradox of beautiful ugliness. Ugliness was simply inverted beauty: individuals’ flaws and scars are their unique features, their identity: that beauty is my preference – the broken nose, the twisted mouth, the missing teeth. I identified with struggle. This kind of beauty also translated into sexuality, with its idiosyncrasies and conundrums. The freaks in my work were equally special, and I knew too that their missing limbs were sexually stimulating to some people. Their freakishness was the essence of their specialness, and offered validation of the something special in all of us. Personally I have always found conventional beauty boring, aesthetic conventions bland, perfection sexless. I love the broken parts of our bodies and souls, the misshapes, the flaws, the ugly traits of a personality, and so am drawn to the damaged, the displaced, the socially lost. It’s what I was, and what I could so easily have remained (as to some people I have).”
― Marc Almond, Tainted Life: The Autobiography

“It's surprising what you can get just by asking.”
― Marc Almond, Tainted Life: The Autobiography

“while walking down Berwick Street in Soho, I heard a warning shout and then felt a crunch to the back of my head. Blood poured down my back and face. Looking down, I saw I’d been hit by a neon transformer (weighing forty pounds) which had fallen from the third floor of a building. It had caught the back of my head, splitting it open. I collapsed and was rushed to hospital. How perfect it would have been – to have spent a career singing about the world of neons and then been killed by one.”
― Marc Almond, Tainted Life: The Autobiography

“Hedonism can be hard work.”
― Marc Almond, Tainted Life: The Autobiography