Credit: Dangeous Minds / Album Covers

There’s a moment on The Stars We Are – Marc Almond’s lush, decadent 1988 solo album – where the hairs on your arms stand up. It’s not one of the charting singles, nor is it the dramatic duet with Gene Pitney that hit number one. No, it’s buried deeper. A torch song wrapped in gauze, smouldering at the edges: ‘Your Kisses Burn’, a duet with Nico, and her final-ever studio recording.

There are three amazing duets on the album that I want to bring to your attention. First is, of course, ‘Your Kisses Burn’, an astonishing number performed with Nico, in her final studio effort. Being a big Nico fan and a big Marc Almond fan, I was awestruck by the infernal power of this song when I first heard it. It’s scary! I can vividly recall playing it over and over again at top volume the day I brought the CD home.

It cannot be said that Nico didn’t go out on a high note, but according to Almond, interviewed by The Quietus, she had difficulty singing that day. He said: “Nico was a mysterious figure, enigmatic with that great musical and artistic connection to The Velvet Underground and Warhol, which were things I was obsessed about at school. And of course that wonderful intriguing voice, icy and remote yet warm at the same time. She made a sound I’d never heard before – maybe some sort of a gothic punk Marlene Dietrich. The first time I heard her music was with The Velvet Underground, but I bought Desertshore, The Marble Index and The End and liked them more. There was also her musical association with Brian Eno, which made her more intriguing”.

“When I became a musician, she was always at the top of my wish list for a duet of some sort,” he added. “I was so nervous to contact her and EMI were not really for it at all, as you can imagine. I wanted to make sure that she was treated like the legend and the star I felt she was. EMI baulked at her demands, but I was insistent. It turned out she was lovely if fragile, and we played pool and drank tea and talked for ages. The song was a problem, it turned out to be a bit too complicated, too orchestral for her and she began to deteriorate as the day went on and the methadone took effect. She still managed to deliver that wonderful Nico voice. We left on warm terms with plans for a better track more suited to her”. 

From there, we’re quickly lured in by the album’s big hit, ‘Something’s Gotten Hold of My Heart’, Almond’s duet with Gene Pitney on a remake of Pitney’s own top five song of 1967. The Stars We Are was originally released in late 1988 with a solo Marc rendition of the number, but the duet, with the same backing track, went to number one on the UK pop charts and stayed there for an entire month. Marc really gives it his all here, while Pitney’s vocal takes the song to a new height. There were TV appearances galore – the pair were even invited to be on Wogan – and this charming music video was shot in Las Vegas.

Finally, there’s ‘Kept Boy’, a B-side and CD bonus track, featuring the Berlin-born chanteuse Agnes Bernelle, a sort of real-life Sally Bowles-type whose family fled Germany in 1936. Bernelle was a fascinating characte—I’ve read her autobiography The Fun House—who, in addition to being a cabaret diva, worked during WWII for the British Special Operations on black propaganda radio broadcasts meant to fool the Germans into thinking they were listening to radio from back home and offering morale-zapping news (such as congratulating a U-boat captain—who had not seen his wife in  two years—on the birth of twins.) These radio programs emanated from the headquarters of the Political Warfare Executive in Woburn Abbey, also the location of the top secret Enigma spy code project.

Bernelle, who lived in Dublin as a well-loved local artist, would go on to a long and esteemed career as a performer, including a memorable stint as the first “non-stationary” nude to appear onstage in a West End production of Oscar Wilde’s Salome. She also worked with Tom Waits, Elvis Costello (who put one of her records out on his IMP Records label) and performed the work of Bertolt Brecht in New York in the late 1970s.

Looking back, The Stars We Are plays like a séance. Each duet feels like an invocation, summoning ghosts, glam, and forgotten glamour into Almond’s velvet-soaked world. Nico, all worn edge and ruined elegance, sounds like she’s singing from some distant threshold. Pitney brings old-school showbiz sincerity, polished but aching. Bernelle, ever the subversive, slips between satire and tragedy with a wink.

And ‘Your Kisses Burn’ – that eerie, narcotic waltz – remains its most haunting moment. Not just for the finality of it, but for what it captures: two voices, circling each other in the dark, one fading, one holding on. Almond doesn’t try to overpower Nico, and Nico, though fading fast, still cuts through like smoke in a theatre. It’s a goodbye, but not a clean one, more a lingering trace, a kiss that scorches long after the song ends.