There's a bootleg recording of The Magnetic Fields from about 1997 where Stephin Merritt plays a couple of lines from the chorus of the song The Damned Don't Cry and then says to the audience,
You don't know that song. Pathetic. Everybody knows that one. OK, brief lesson in record buying: one buys Visage records, and one buys the second Visage album, or the Greatest Hits album, and either of these has The Damned Don't Cry on it, which is one of the major songs of the twentieth century. It's like: Will You Love Me Tomorrow, The Damned Don't Cry, The Book That I Wrote, Da Doo Ron Ron, Be My Baby, The End of the World, The Street Where You Live from the My Fair Lady soundtrack, The Fantastics, Irving Berlin… You have to know these things, or why do you bother buying more records?
Ever the dutiful student, I ordered this greatest hits album in October 2001 from Cheap or What! for £6.20. The Damned Don't Cry (the song) is OK — I can hear the Stephin Merritt DNA in it, though Fade to Grey is my favourite. The album feels to me a bit like an historical curio; in places it sounds like the missing link between early Ultravox and New Order (though you could argue that that link wasn't missing in the first place), while the unexpected Beat Boy is Mantronix-lite.
My friend Tim has a story about when he went to the Crackerjack studios with The Specials, towards the end of their career, and the other acts on the show that week were Visage and Roger de Courcey with Nookie the Bear. Visage were performing Love Glove, a song which Tim and his mates thought might be about fist-fucking (and thus an interesting choice for a kids TV programme). They walked past de Courcey's dressing room, through the open door of which they could see an unattended Nookie. They toyed with the idea of kidnapping Nookie. But they didn't. Sorry for the anti-climax.
 MusicBrainz entry for this album
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