“I’m a jazz musician first,” Bilal says, laughingly, of choosing the English band’s synthy 1982 track, which spent an amazing 43 weeks on the Hot 100. “So I can pretty much do a rendition of any thing I hear.”
Like Soft Cell, Bilal has been no slouch on the Billboard charts himself. Though his career took off a decade after theirs did, Bilal’s 2001 single “Soul Sista” spent 23 weeks on the R&B/Hip-Hop songs chart. Still, the Philadelphia-native singer worked hard to make “Tainted Love” his own. “[My] band, we fashion ourselves as some type of blues rock R&B kind of vibe, so I was just jamming on [“Tainted Love”] at home and I brought it to the band,” He says. “We played around with the bridge, we changed the chords… We made it real straightforward, guitar-heavy.” Indeed they did.
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