I was seen as an outsider– Marc Almond's new album I'm Not Anyone is out on 12 July on BMG

It's 43 years since Soft Cell's cover of Gloria Jones' Tainted Love turned singer Marc Almond and his synth-playing partner Dave Ball into overnight stars, and 42 years since Almond kicked off a solo career that continues to this day. The nervous kid that we first saw on Top Of The Pops on 13 August 1981 is now one of the longest-performing artists of his generation, with his 27th solo album, I'm Not Anyone, about to land. Addiction and a near-fatal road accident couldn't stop him, he tells Joel McIver, although a nice fruit garden just might...

- By Joel McIver

This writer and Marc Almond have a few things in common, not least the fact that we're both Northerners transplanted to the South of England. But I hadn't expected us to find common ground in the fact that we both have one leg slightly shorter than the other. This allows us to complain, as people of a certain age frequently do, about our respective lifetimes of lower back pain.

"Forty years of wearing Cuban heels hasn't helped the situation very much," sighs Almond, talking to RC in a hotel in London's Soho, dressed in regulation black, apologising for being late back from his acupuncturist.

With our physical ailments taken care of, we can turn our attention to Almond's fabulous new album, a covers collection called I'm Not Anyone. It's about identity, as you might imagine, a theme explored in depth through songs by Neil Diamond, Mahalia Jackson, Paul Anka and others. In case that sounds a bit depressing, it's anything but, with Almond inserting his trademark soaring wails and emotive narration into music ranging from upbeat rock and funked-up pop to the torch songs that built his early career.

It's the dimensions of the songwriting that hit me hardest: the album ends with an eight-minute waltz, Don McLean's Chain Lightning, on which Almond asks life's biggest questions about who we are, why we're here and where we're going. This should come as no surprise given that his old band Soft Cell made their name with songs that questioned the role of society's misfits.