Chart entered : 2 July 1973
Chart peak : 49
Number of hits : 24
(* as Marc and the Mambas )
Strictly speaking this was a hit for Marc's side project Marc and the Mambas but as the Mambas ' line up changed with every recording they can't really count as a group and this charted on Marc's star power alone.
Having driven away a substantial part of his pop audience with Soft Cell's attritional second LP The Art of Falling Apart , Marc then decided to retreat even further towards the margins with another double LP by his less commercial side project Marc and the Mambas.
"Black Heart" was the trailer single for the album "Torment and Toreros" and was co-written with pianist Annie Hogan, after Soft Cell's Dave Ball, his most enduring musical partner. It's fairly typical of his style , a melodramatic torch ballad in a vaguely Latin style influenced by Jacques Brel and addressed to a cruel, suffocating partner. In other hands it could work quite well but here you have to contend not only with Marc's increasingly wayward vocals - no two choruses have the same tune here - but also quite possibly the worst drum sound ever heard on a hit record which bashes away remorselessly without regard to the rhythm of the song. I remember Simon Bates apologising for playing it and you do suspect that Marc was deliberately setting out to aggravate here, the provocative performance artist finally winning out over the pop star.
No comments:
Post a Comment