First, let's look at the end result. Soft Cell was a synth-pop duo out of the Lancashire area (I think) in northern England. Marc Almond was the vocalist and David Ball the synth musician. The two first got together at Leeds Polytechnic and self-produced some recordings that got them signed to the Some Bizarre label, a subsidiary of Phonogram. Their first recordings gained some club popularity but didn't find enough success to keep the record company interested. They gave them one last chance and they cut two songs from 1964 originally done in America. One was the big Motown hit by The Supremes "Where Did Our Love Go" and the other an obscure Motown-sounding song done by Gloria Jones called "Tainted Love".
1964 was a big year in music. Motown Records and their acts really hit it big that year, the surf craze and bands like the Beach Boys emerged, the "girl group" sound was in full motion, and the so-called British Invasion struck with some British bands getting a lot of airplay in the US. That's a long story in itself that involves control of product and money and visa availability more than great records. There are only so many slices in a pie and a lot of people weren't very willing to hand their share off to someone else. Where Did Our Love Go was the first monster hit for The Supremes and for the next 4 years they were always on the charts.
To unravel how Tainted Love came about, let's go back to the mid-1950's, to Hollywood, USA....to Hollywood High School to be exact, where 4 students performed in a talent contest that was witnessed by someone from Capitol Records which is about ¾ of a mile to the northeast of the school. Capitol signed the young men and named them the Four Preps.
The Four Preps had some hits, like 26 Miles (Santa Catalina)
and Big Man
they backed up Ricky Nelson and appeared in the film Gidget too.
Now the guy on the right in those photo's was the bass singer and his name was Ed Cobb. Ed knew there was more to life than singing and he began to branch out as a song writer, recording engineer, record producer and manager of performers. In 1962 he wrote and produced a song that became a hit for Ketty Lester called Love Letters.
The following year he came up with another song he wanted Ketty to record, but she turned it down. The song was called Every Little Bit Hurts. Ed produced a demo of the song in order to shop it around to record companies, something that cost him a sizable sum of money. On the demo he had a lady by the name of Barbara Wilson sing. In Detroit, Berry Gordy at Motown liked it and told Cobb to go back to Los Angeles where Motown had just started a new west coast operation. They had a singer there named Brenda Holloway that they wanted to record it. Brenda, still a teen, didn't want to record it because she thought Barbara Wilson's demo was something she couldn't match. Eventually, she did record her vocals over the original demo Cobb had made (Motown proceeded to screw Cobb out of production credit) but it became a big hit for Holloway and was also recorded by many people such as Aretha Franklin (pre-Atlantic), Petula Clark, Gladys Knight...over in England it was covered by the Small Faces, The Tremeloes, Spencer Davis Group when Stevie Winwood was still fronting them. Actually, I should have done a blog posting on just that song. Before Holloway's recording was issued by Motown, it seems to have been licensed to local LA label Del Fi and although that record has always been credited to Brenda Holloway, experts in the field claim this is actually the original Barbara Wilson demo.
Barbara Wilson was the wife of Frank Wilson and sadly died not very long after the recording was made. Frank was hired as a writer and producer by Motown around this same time and went on to have a very successful career. In 1965 he thought he'd also do a little singing and cut a record called Do I Love You. Only 400 promos were pressed and reportedly Wilson had a change of heart and the records were destroyed. Supposedly only 2 copies survived (one once sold for over $50,000) and the song went on in later years to be rediscovered and became a Northern Soul classic in England.
So let's get back to Ed Cobb. Around 1964 he had another song in hand, very Motown sounding, and that was called Tainted Love. He offered it to a Los Angeles group he was managing and producing called The Standells, but they turned it down. Ed was then producing a young LA singer named Gloria Jones who had been performing with Billy Preston in a gospel group called the Cogic Singers.
Gloria recorded the song, it was placed on the b-side of a record that failed to go anywhere, and that was the end of that.
Gloria was a pianist and went on to earn an advanced degree is classical music and then was hired by Motown as a composer. One of the songs she wrote, If I Were Your Woman, was a hit for Gladys Knight in 1971. In the early 70's she became romantically and musically involved with British glam-rocker Marc Bolan and his band T. Rex. They had a child together and she was the driver of the car that crashed killing Bolan in 1977.
So where does that leave Tainted Love? In the early 70's a British club DJ was on a record-buying mission in the US and came across a copy of the obscure recording. Back in England it became a favorite on the Northern Soul club scene in the mid and late 70's and that's how it was exposed to Soft Cell.
As for Ed Cobb, The Standells recorded a number of his songs. They appeared in the March 1965 Munsters episode Far Out Munsters (photo below) and also in the film Riot On Sunset Strip.
In 1966 they recorded what is perhaps the song Ed is most known for writing/producing, Dirty Water, which has become a garage punk classic.
Ed was also the producer, and sometime writer of songs for the Chocolate Watchband around 1966-1967. Ed later became a successful horse breeder and had other involvements in horse racing. He died in Hawaii in 1999.
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