Going solo is a big step. ROBERT SANDALL puts the spotlight on the boys who made it without the band.

Boys who form bands often grow out of them, or fall out with each other over what are politely termed "musical differences", at which point many try to go it alone - a perilous path with, as most of them discover, an alarmingly high career-mortality rate. This week's CD features a selection of the lucky few who made the grade as male solo artists, and in some cases actually outshone their previous group efforts.

Top of that list is Marc Almond , an irrepressibly flamboyant - not to say camp - young man who reinvented himself as a hermaphroditic disco crooner in 1984, following the demise of his successful electro-pop groups, Soft Cell and their short-lived offshoot, Marc and the Mambas. Almond did not have a great voice, but he was a clever vocal stylist with an eye for fetching stage costumes and a flair for self-publicity. With the explosion of gay club culture in the 1980s, he became such an influential figure that from 1986 an official Marc Almond Convention was held annually at London's Heaven club. His commercial sense faltered as the decade wore on, but Tears Run Rings, a minor hit in 1988, was a self-penned composition that again showcased Almond's pleasant, bantamweight tenor and...