Who recorded it first

Tainted Love

Not a Soft Cell original — a 1964 Gloria Jones single

It is one of the most complete cover-eclipses in pop: almost everyone takes ‘Tainted Love’ for a Soft Cell original, but Soft Cell’s 1981 version is a cover. The song was written by Ed Cobb and first recorded by Gloria Jones in 1964 — released as a B-side that never charted. Soft Cell picked it up seventeen years later and took it to No. 1.

The record

Who recorded it first

Original recording
Gloria Jones, 1964
Written by
Ed Cobb
First released
May 1965 (Champion / Vee-Jay) — B-side, never charted
Made famous by
Soft Cell, 1981 (UK No. 1)

How we traced it

The song was written by Ed Cobb, a former member of the vocal group The Four Preps, and first recorded by soul singer Gloria Jones in 1964 for the Champion label Wikipedia ↗.

Jones’s original was released in May 1965 as a B-side and failed to chart on either side of the Atlantic. It later found an audience on the UK’s Northern Soul scene, which is where Soft Cell’s Marc Almond first encountered it.

Soft Cell’s synth-pop cover, released in July 1981, reached No. 1 in the UK and became the best-selling British single of the year — so dominant that the 1964 recording it came from dropped out of public memory almost entirely SecondHandSongs ↗.

SecondHandSongs — the original and every cover
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Fact-check

The attribution problem

This is the cleanest kind of music misattribution: nothing about Soft Cell’s record is wrong or fake. The only error is believing they originated it — a 1981 cover mistaken for the source.

The beliefcover, not original

‘It’s a Soft Cell song’

Soft Cell’s 1981 version is a cover. The song was recorded seventeen years earlier, in 1964, by Gloria Jones the history ↗.

The originalfirst to record it

Gloria Jones, 1964

Released as a B-side in 1965, it never charted — which is exactly why the cover could eclipse it so completely. There was no famous original standing in the way.

The writerneither performer

Ed Cobb

Cobb wrote the song; he is neither the original singer nor the famous one. Performer credit and authorship are different things, and here all three belong to different people.

Written by Ed Cobb, first recorded by Gloria Jones in 1964, and made famous — but not originated — by Soft Cell in 1981 the record ↗.

Context

Why the cover ate the original

A cover eclipses its original most completely when the original never had its moment. Gloria Jones’s ‘Tainted Love’ sank on release; there was no hit record occupying the public’s memory of the song, so when Soft Cell’s version arrived it simply became the version, with nothing to displace.

The irony is that the original was not lost so much as relocated: it survived on Britain’s Northern Soul dancefloors, which is precisely where Soft Cell found it. The cover that erased the original was only possible because the original had quietly kept playing somewhere else.

The three creators, in order
  • Ed Cobb writes the song (early 1960s).
  • Gloria Jones records it, 1964; released 1965 as a B-side; it does not chart.
  • The record becomes a Northern Soul favourite in Britain through the 1970s.
  • Soft Cell cover it, July 1981 → UK No. 1, best-selling British single of the year.
  • The 1964 original all but disappears from public memory.
The cover erased the original only because the original had quietly kept playing somewhere else.

The original recording artist

Gloria Jones

b. 1944 · American soul singer and songwriter

Gloria Jones (b. 1944) is an American soul singer and songwriter who recorded the original ‘Tainted Love’ in 1964. Though her version flopped, it became a Northern Soul favourite in Britain — the route by which Soft Cell found it. She later joined T. Rex and was the partner of Marc Bolan. It is a quiet irony of pop history that her name is attached to one of its most-covered songs, and almost nobody knows it.

Popularly credited as the original

Soft Cell

English synth-pop duo · formed 1977

Soft Cell — Marc Almond and Dave Ball — released their cover of ‘Tainted Love’ in 1981, and it became so definitive that it eclipsed the original completely. Their version is genuinely theirs and genuinely great; the only error is chronological, the assumption that a 1981 No. 1 must be where the song began. It began in 1964, on a B-side that sank.

The songwriter

Ed Cobb

1938–1999 · American songwriter and producer

Ed Cobb (1938–1999) wrote ‘Tainted Love’, along with ‘Every Little Bit Hurts’ and ‘Dirty Water’. A former member of The Four Preps, he is the third figure the song’s fame obscures: not the famous performer, not the original singer, but the writer whose royalties outlived every act that recorded it.