MUSIC REVIEW: Stalin Goes Pop!

Marc Almond is best known as the singer for Soft Cell, a duo that had a huge hit many moons ago with ‘Tainted Love’* although metal-oriented readers may be more familiar with the version recorded by the mediocre Alice Cooper impersonator Marilyn Manson. But whereas Manson’s interpretation was characteristically both overblown and juvenile in its attempt to conjure up an atmosphere of depravity, Soft Cell’s clinical electronic backing and smooth vocals were effortlessly decadent.

Tainted Love was the beginning and the end of Soft Cell in the USA as far as I’m aware, although in the UK the group had a string of hits while Marc Almond acquired a reputation for mind-bending excess. After that, he went on to pursue an eccentric/eclectic solo career that saw him duet with Gene Pitney, record the songs of Jacques Brel and join the Church of Satan, founded by tedious baldy Anton LaVey, AKA the most boring man in the world.

And yet in spite of that last affiliation (shared with Marilyn Manson) Almond is a genuinely bold artist, willing to take great risks, even if they don’t always pay off. A few years ago he released the hardly commercial Heart on Snow, an album of English versions of popular Russian songs. Almond knew the subject matter well- he had been performing regularly in Moscow since the early 90s, perhaps attracted to the city’s atmosphere of 1920s Weimar style madness. Even so, Heart on Snow is an uneasy mix of rock, folk, pop and soviet ballads, of electronic arrangements and military choirs. As Russian music emphasizes lyrics over melody the songs also seemed a bit amorphous, even though the translations were not terrible. Heart on Snow is certainly an interesting curio, but hardly necessary.

Recently however Almond released a sequel of sorts: Orpheus in Exile, a collection of songs made famous by the Stalin-era crooner Vadim Kozin and this really is a remarkable record. Kozin was born in Saint Petersburg in 1903 into a family of merchants- not a good pedigree for anyone hoping to make a career in the aftermath of the 1917 Bolshevik coup. He eventually found work as a pianist accompanying silent films, and then started singing. His repertoire of gypsy songs soon made him a megastar in the USSR, with massive crowds lining up to buy his records.

Kozin survived the repressions of the 1930s, perhaps because Stalin was a big fan. He met the tyrant on numerous occasions, even though he never sang the kind of sycophantic ode to the supreme leader that was then in vogue. In World War II he performed at the front, travelling in an armored train carriage to entertain troops in dangerous zones. He even performed for Churchill and Roosevelt at the Tehran conference in 1943. Then in 1944 disaster struck: according to legend, Lavrenti Beria, the head of Stalin’s secret police pulled Kozin aside and asked why he never sang hymns to Stalin. Apparently Kozin responded that songs about the Leader didn’t sound good in a tenor voice. He was promptly dispatched to the Kolyma Gulag in the Russian Far East and his songs disappeared from the radio. (Some English critics have suggested that Kozin’s homosexuality might have had something to do with his sentence; Russian media usually draw a veil over his sexuality).

Delighted to have a superstar in their frozen hell, the local Gulag chiefs gave Kozin a comparatively light regime and sent him on tours around the camps where he sang for prisoners and guards alike. Released early, he performed in the Musical Theater of Magadan, a city which at the time was a remote, grim outpost of the soviet empire (and it’s not all that great these days either)- so it was rather as if the US government had exiled Elvis to 1950s Alaska, multiplied by ten. Kozin resumed touring, but at the end of the 1950s he was thrown in jail again. After his second release he continued to perform in Magadan into the 1970s. He never returned to Moscow, and died aged 91 in 1994, just as Marc Almond was playing his first concerts in post soviet Russia.

Orpheus in Exile is certainly fascinating as a cultural/historical artifact, for it allows us to experience a style of music totally unfamiliar in the West, even if electric bass and drums have been added to give Kozin’s repertoire a contemporary sound. Almond delivers the romantic songs and gypsy ballads in a parallel universe Russian cabaret style, and ‘outs’ the homoerotic subtext of a hymn to a Red Army soldier in Brave Boy. However whereas his cabaret versions of Brel tend towards the histrionic, here he is subtle and restrained- except for a chant of DEATH!DEATH!DEATH! in the WWII era song Day and Night that is both alarming and amusing coming as it does on the heels of Kozin’s melancholic, nostalgic ballads.

However my favorite songs are those which date from Kozin’s period of exile in Magadan, in which Almond sings the praises of a grim hole in the arctic. Never before in English has socialist construction been hymned with such passion. In the Boulevards of Magadan the ‘beautiful and spacious’ arctic city built with slave labor is compared to Paris and not found wanting:

‘Parisian splendor doesn’t make me jealous

For me my frosty land is fair and fine

But if one day I get to go and visit…

I will pass them warm and hearty greetings from all the boulevards of Magadan.’

In Autumn he denies the ‘malicious rumors’ that the Magadan region is an uninhabitable hellhole, singing the amazing lines, unimaginable in an English language song:

‘The lights of the construction sites are blazing!

New towns and cities growing all around!’

And then reverses the contemporary desire for conservation by extolling the extinction of the old ways of life (listed earlier as bears and Shamen):

‘And what was here before us

Has long since become history, my friends!’

In an interesting English review the critic suggests that these songs constitute bitter, ironic attacks by Kozin on those who had exiled him to this wasteland. Well, it’s a nice idea but highly unlikely. Kozin was working a theme that was very popular in the USSR in the 1950s and 1960s: the construction of new cities in the remote and hitherto unsettled regions of the country. Many poems, films and songs from that era strike the same optimistic tone as Kozin does here. However listening to Almond’s take on the material, performed in full awareness of Kozin’s tragic destiny, these naïve hymns from a dead empire become impossibly melancholic, their lyrics a thin, desperate veneer over deep wells of suffering, and not only Kozin’s. You see, Magadan, the city he praised, and for which so many lives were sacrificed, is now a half abandoned post-industrial monster crumbling in a frosty wasteland. What, we may ask, was all that death and suffering for?

If there is an irony in these songs, and there is, then it comes courtesy of Marc Almond and not Vadim Kozin, who would have been forbidden to express such sentiments openly, no matter how bitter he felt. And here’s another irony: the English language arrangements, which are frequently drenched in balalaika and accordion, sound much more “Russian” than the originals which were accompanied either by solo piano or a 1920s style ‘jazz orchestra’.

But that’s not a bad thing. Orpheus in Exile is a fascinating record. The songs are well constructed and easy to appreciate in spite of the passage of time and shift in culture. It is an alien, mutant, beautiful, bizarre and yet deeply moving record. And I admire the audacity of Marc Almond, who fearlessly pursues projects of the highest artistic integrity. He does whatever he finds interesting, and in the process has refashioned 1930s Stalin era pop for a new generation- which is not exactly what the new generation was asking for, but then again- who cares?

*NB: For all you Internet pedants out there, I am well aware that the Soft Cell Tainted Love was a cover of a Gloria Jones song.