It isn't easy being Marc Almond

Odd duo. Fitting, though, that Almond should be accompanied by a man who looks like he’s in a Cockney gangland movie. There was always an edge to Almond. Now, he says, we are all so jaded that we are almost unshockable. But back in 1981, when he was one half of the band Soft Cell, it was still possible for Top of the Pops to provoke a nation of fathers to tut from behind their newspapers. Almond’s heavy eyeliner and camp androgyny made middle-aged men, in particular, so uneasy that they suddenly discovered pressing engagements in their potting sheds.

But it was more than simply pushing the boundaries of taste. Almond lived life on the edge of self-destruction, frantically pushing the buttons of sex, drugs and excess in life’s fruit machine, in the hope of hitting the happiness jackpot. He never did, despite feeding the drugs slot with around 500,000.

Strange, then, to sit opposite him now and see a man whose air of danger would only rival Bambi’s. His smile is shy, almost gentle, and his eyes dart nervously around him. He talks at a furious pace, barely pausing for breath, the tumbling words broken only by little barks of laughter or the occasional stutter, the remnant of a childhood speech impediment.

Almond has written a new book, In Search of the Pleasure Palace, which relates a dispiriting trawl around the seedy sex dives of London, New York and the European cities he frequented as a pop star. "It’s about what happens in the later years of a pop star, when the hedonism is over," he says. "It’s visiting the places that meant something to me and saying, ‘Do they still inspire me? Or do I have to move on, find something new?’"

They didn’t bring him lasting happiness back then. Unsurprisingly, they brought him even less the second time around. Perhaps because he now has more insight into why darkness drew him in the first place. "At school I was very much an outsider. I was dyslexic, had asthma, a speech impediment, confused sexuality. I was a geeky, scrawny, underweight kid who liked strange music and didn’t fit in at all. And I suppose when you are an outsider like that you do get drawn to the peripheries of life."

He could have gone in either of two directions. "I think it could have been a life of creativity or a life of crime."

As he grew up, he was drawn to ‘alternative’ things. They made him different. The strange clothes, strange lifestyle, gave him the identity he longed for. They were a mask. "Sometimes I look at old photographs of me and I almost don’t know that person. He’s like a stranger. So often people want you to remain that person, forever dressed in black, and you don’t want to let them down." He smiles. "But sometimes I feel I’m playing the part these days, rather than being the part." He probably always was.

EVEN as a young child, Almond loved masks and assumed identities - Batman, or the beautiful clown Harlequin, with his chalk-white face and sparkling costume... Years later, Almond would perform in deathly pale make-up, just like Harlequin’s, "a ghost of all those yearnings, fearful of revealing who I really was".

He was close to his grandparents, but his childhood was neither secure nor happy. His father was an alcoholic, angry and abusive, blaming Almond’s birth for trapping him into marriage. Almond’s early life was about struggle. "I think that makes you very streetwise. It makes you sort of tough. The public perception of me is that I am camp, effete, effeminate, gay... and I’m not. I’ve always thought of myself as a very sort of tough, streetwise person."

Almond was delighted when his parents divorced, and hasn’t seen his father since he was 17. He begins to stutter very slightly for the first time when we talk about his childhood. He doesn’t want to see his father again. "When I went into rehab, I went through the whole psychotherapy drama thing, where it’s all about forgiving the people you blamed for where you were. I was now an adult and I couldn’t keep blaming somebody else for my actions any more."

Perhaps, he says, he should have understood more that his father was suffering from the same illness as he was: addiction. "But it’s not as easy as that."

He feels no animosity, though. "I don’t think about him." But there is no purpose to seeing him. "My life has gone too far now. We would be like strangers. Because someone is a parent to you, you have this genetic link, but they don’t necessarily have anything to do with you or your life. It just wouldn’t do me any good. But I don’t wish badness to him, whereas years ago I probably would have built a disco on his grave and danced in it."

But if his father phoned him tomorrow? "I wouldn’t want to talk to him. He has tried, and I wouldn’t speak to him, no. Some people find that awful," he says, a little defiantly.

Who could judge? It’s Almond who lived with him. But perhaps he is missing out by excluding the possibility of a different relationship now with his father. "He’s a stranger to me," protests Almond. "I wouldn’t know what to say. I wouldn’t know what to do. It’s too much in the past. There’s going to be no tearful reunion or forgiveness, or anything like that. In fact, it would probably bring out a whole lot of angry issues in me that I have kind of buried or tried to move on from."

I don’t think they are buried too deeply. When I tease Almond about saying in his autobiography that physical beauty was not about perfection, but lies in each individual’s idiosyncrasies, and then later having cosmetic surgery on his nose, he laughs. But then he says his surgery was partly the "genetic thing". "You’re recreating it," he explains. I can only assume he means removing his father from his face. Then he says he wishes he’d changed his name from Almond, his father’s name, even though it’s exactly the kind of distinctive name most pop stars would love to have.

When he left school he spent five years at art college, accepted on the strength of his portfolio because he didn’t have any O-levels. "It was the greatest time of my life because there were lots of other people who felt like misfits too."

He joined up with Dave Ball to form Soft Cell, and their huge number-one hit ‘Tainted Love’, which still holds the record for being the single that remained longest in the American chart, followed.

There were other Soft Cell hits, such as ‘Say Hello, Wave Goodbye’. Later, as a solo artist, he ended the ‘pop star’ phase of his career with a number-one duet with Gene Pitney, ‘Something’s Gotten Hold of my Heart’, in 1989. But Almond could never decide if he wanted commercial success. "I think that has often been part of the battle I’ve had. I want to be mainstream, but I don’t want to be mainstream. I want to be loved, but I don’t want to be loved. Maybe that is what has made me, and my confusion has been my spark of creativity. I suppose that will go on until the day I die. I don’t suppose I’ll ever find a total kind of peace."

Still singing, a hit single seems appealing now that he is an ‘alternative’ artist. "That’s one who gets critical respect for their records, but doesn’t sell any," he says drolly.

Almond is full of paradoxes. "A cynical romantic," he says. "A reclusive flamboyant." One of the biggest paradoxes is that while he became a gay icon, he never really came to terms with his sexuality. "I’ve never felt very comfortable with being an out-there gay person. In a way, I felt I had blurred sexuality and really confused sexuality. I’ve had bisexual times in my life, but probably more gay than bisexual. I’ve had time when I’ve felt very sexual, and times when I’ve just not been very sexual at all."

It made him reluctant to accept any label. "I never wanted to be pigeonholed. I’d seen what happened to other artists who were known only as being gay; gay artists filed under ‘gay’. You are of no interest to anybody unless they are a gay person, and I have never felt like that. I like writing songs for everybody, and I like thinking I have everybody in my audience."

It’s interesting that Almond’s book is called In Search of the Pleasure Palace. He never seems to have found it. Ask him about happiness and he stumbles over an answer. "I think I’ve learned..." he begins, and stops. "I think I’ve reached… It’s strange. I don’t know if I will ever be truly happy. I’ve never felt content. I think I’ve learned a kind of happiness, a kind of balance within myself, but… It’s nice to think you’ll attain happiness, but I also know it will be the death of me, of my creativity."

It helps him write songs if he feels angry or discontented. Or bitter. "It’s wrong to be consumed by bitterness, but I think everybody should have a little. It’s a great relevant feeling of being alive." Such as when he sees an old contemporary with new success."I think I should feel very happy for them, that they have a new hit single after all these years. But really I just wish they’d crash and burn as soon as possible!"

The new book was inspired by an old phenomenon: the midlife crisis. He dislikes the feeling of life’s old grey cardi wrapping around him, lulling him into middle age. "I’ve read my own biography," he says. "It’s not what I’m meant to be about."

Instead, he set out to journey through his old life. And his conclusion? "I can’t be the kind of person I was. You see these pop stars who recreate this image of themselves as they used to be. They try to step into their old shoes and into their old clothes, and they look faintly ridiculous. That’s not for me. I can’t do that. I’m not the person I used to be."

He has no particular affection for the 1980s, a time of Thatcher and Aids and his own unhappiness. "I became obnoxious very quickly," he confesses.

Going round his old haunts, he found his responses were different now. Visiting a London S&M club, he describes how "three of the most emaciated, dead-eyed men perform sex acts on each other - expressionless and dispassionate, and certainly not safe. I suspect that I have finally reached the lower colon of London’s bowels, the final circle of a pleasureless hell as they sodomise and beat the leering, drooling receptacle that lies motionless on the floor."

Once he would have written a song about it. "I felt quite jaded," he admits. "The publisher was saying, ‘We want more sex’, and I went into a couple of places and felt like I was playing a part. I felt sort of detached. Maybe when I first went to New York, at the beginning of the 1980s, I’d have revelled in it. And part of me does; I love the bizarreness of human nature. I hate blandness. But after a while I just felt I couldn’t do it any more. I thought, ‘This is not inspiring me. I’m seeing it through different eyes. Maybe I’m older and mellower and wiser, but I’m not finding this interesting any more. This is miserable.’"

He no longer feels sexually driven, and recognises that it was just another facet of his addictive personality. Another mask. In our culture, he says, the explicit has replaced the erotic. "I think we are becoming very de-sexualised. I was born in the 1950s, and I love sexual repression in a way, that kind of imagination, that tantalising thing. My fantasies are of people with their clothes on, not their clothes off."

And yet he says he is glad these places still exist. He may change the colour scheme of his life, but he wants the furniture where it always was. "I also feel people should have the freedom to express themselves the way they want, as long as they don’t hurt anybody or commit a crime. I like to feel the world is not entirely taken over by Starbucks and big corporations, that there are still some little havens of individuality."

Almond was certainly an individual. But his individuality was, in some ways, just one long cry for attention. "I think you find that a lot of people in the music business are just very flawed people. Very, very flawed; very, very damaged; and I think I am no different to that."

PERHAPS it is not surprising that you can still see the child in Almond’s face. The child has hung around in adulthood like a tiny ghost, a ghost that whispers the cruel taunts of his childhood in his ear. "Your life is forever the school playground, and you are forever trying to prove your place in it," he says.

The insecure child created the flamboyant man. But excess no longer appeals. Life for Almond divides into before and after 1996 - his rehab year. "Drugs don’t hold a fascination for me any more. I could never go back. After 20 years of not feeling clarity, clarity is a fantastic thing."

But he still has an addictive personality. "I’m obsessive about food. I could quite easily go the wrong way. I’m very fastidious about what I eat. I look in the mirror and think I’m too fat all the time." He is stick-thin.

Pleasure was once extreme self-gratification, and he is the first to admit to past selfishness. "I never really thought I was a bad person, though," he says. "I’ve done a lot of bad things and been mean to lot of people, and I try to make up for that. I can be quite hard and cruel sometimes, I know that, but I do feel contrition and try to make amends."

So what temporary little pleasure palaces have replaced the drugs and clubs? The Lord of the Rings or the Coronation Street omnibus, he jokes. "Pleasure palaces to me now are not necessarily places; not a club or a den of iniquity, or a bawdy place of sexuality. They are small things, small moments, flashing things, like snapshots. Something small and fleeting that you can’t really grasp hold of. Something beautiful, I think, something tender."

He has had special relationships in his life, but one of the most important has been with his audience. He picks people out, male and female, to sing songs to. For those few moments he makes love to them in his head, imagines a relationship. "I am a very needy person. I have all the Judy Garland clichs about waves of love over the footlights. I can be all of those clichs - only truly happy when on stage. It’s a terribly cheesy line, but it is true for a lot of performers. You are a very flawed personality and when you are on stage performing, that’s when you feel as if you have some kind of place and some kind of relevance."

The meaning of life, he has discovered, is that there is no meaning. "When you are gone, nobody is really going to remember you, and nobody is going to care that much in the grand scheme of things. You are here, existing and making the best of it, and getting through life as best you can."

Each person, therefore, must decide on their own little pleasure palaces. "There should be something for everybody in this world," says the lifelong outsider. "All the misfits, all the strange, the lost and the lonely… the everything." u

In Search of the Pleasure Palace (Sidgwick & Jackson, 12.99) is published on Friday