10 Perfect Hit Songs That Are Insanely Long
9. Tainted Love/Where Did Our Love Go - Soft Cell
Every original goth probably has most of the lyrics of Tainted Love etched onto the side of their brain. Though synthesizers may have been fairly primitive at the time, the icy sound of these keyboards mixed with the shaking emotion coming out of Mark Almond’s throat beat acts like the Cure to the punch in terms of putting goth on MTV. The original is a classic, but hearing Tainted Love is only giving you half of the story.
If you go back and listen to the album version, the whole track is twice as long, working as a mashup of Tainted Love and The Supremes’ hit Where Did Our Love Go. Looking at both of these songs beside each other, they feel like they shouldn’t really work, especially with Diana Ross’ show stopping voice on the latter song. When they sync up on the back half of the song though, it almost makes too much sense, as Almond’s voice gets even more emotionally dense as he talks about his heart being shattered into a million pieces.
If anything, this whole thing practically acts as its own mini contained soap opera, with Tainted Love being the jaded lovers and Where Did Our Love Go being our boy trying to pick up the pieces of his shattered relationship. So next time you go through this song at ‘80s night, just remember where our sad sap ended up on the proper version.