The Herald - The Herald Magazine
Dave Ball reveals the agony of his early home life, the guilt that his children knew he was a drug addict and how it took years to clean himself up
TEDDY JAMIESON
THESE days Dave Ball, the other one in Soft Cell, is 61 years old, and living with synths and keyboards and a heart condition in south-east London. As he has chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, he is having to shield himself in these pandemic days.
“I’ve not been to a supermarket for about 10 weeks, which I don’t miss. The corner shop is more expensive, but my health is more important, I think, than risking getting this bloody virus.”
It is now more than 40 years since Ball first met Marc Almond on his first day at Leeds Polytechnic in 1977. Four years later the duo would be number one in 17 countries with their synthpop cover of Tainted Love.
Both events are covered, among many, many others, in his new memoir Electronic Boy. “It’s the usual rags to riches and destruction,” he says, summing up the book’s narrative. “I come from humble beginnings. I’ve always been quite a humble person, but I’ve had an interesting life. I’ve always been catholic in my tastes.”
Well, indeed. He’s worked with both Genesis P Orridge and Kylie Minogue, after all (not at the same time, mind).
“I think all sorts of music and art are valid. I’m not very judgmental about that. There’s good really left-field music and there’s great pop music and I’m very much into pop art.”
Soft Cell managed to be both left-field and pop, driven by Ball’s synth lines and Almond’s naked emotionalism. There is a danger from the distance of nearly 40 years that we forget how big the duo were because of the ubiquity of Tainted Love, overlooking the fact they had other top 10 hits, as well as inspiring obsessive devotion among their fans.
They were loved and hated in equal measure, I think it’s fair to say. Almond, kohl-eyed, braceleted, in particular.
“A lot of people hated Marc. ‘Who’s this little bloody poof,’ you know,”
Ball admits. “And then they thought I was the boyfriend who looks like Freddie Mercury. I think they thought ‘weird gay blokes’.”
Ball’s own onstage demeanour was detached for the most part, idling in neutral in comparison to Almond’s full-blooded commitment. But he loved pop and wanted the duo to be big. “There was a desire to be successful,” he admits.
When it came, though, with
Tainted Love, it was unexpected, disorientating and in its own way, expensive.
“It took everyone by surprise. One of the biggest career mistakes of Marc’s and my career was we didn’t write the B side. Back in the day when you had vinyl singles with an A side and a B side, if you’d written the B side you got 50 per cent of the publishing. And no one, including our manager our publisher and our record company, said you should write your own B side. Because they didn’t think it was going to be a big hit. That record has sold God knows how many millions.”
Dave Ball grew up in Blackpool with a disciplinarian father and the knowledge that he was adopted. He still thinks fondly of Blackpool at least. “It was a great place to grow up. At that time, it was a big influence. All the funfairs and the craziness and the entertainment industry. There was always a showbizzy thing there. That rubbed off on me a lot. I found that quite exciting.”
His father had an influence too. He was, Ball says, “very authoritarian, but he was also an engineer. A crucial thing. That’s what got me interested in electronics.”
There were more negatives than positives in that relationship, though. And it left its mark.
“Initially, I was quite repressed. I was quite sexually repressed. It wasn’t until he died that I had my first full-on sexual experience. I was terrified of him really. I didn’t really like him that much. I think he always resented the fact I wasn’t his own son. I was much closer to my mum. I think there was a resentment that my mum couldn’t have his kids. He would have much preferred to have his own offspring. He liked my sister more than he liked me. There was always some resentment there.
“When he died, I thought, ‘Right he’s gone now’. And with the money he left me I bought my first guitar, realised I wasn’t good enough playing it and traded it in for my first synthesiser.
Who was the teenage Dave Ball who went to Leeds Poly? Someone eager to start again, it seems.
“I had this horrible year of my dad dying of cancer. My poor mum caring for him, and him in agony, taking stronger and stronger medication until
he was admitted to hospital. And when he died, I couldn’t stand being in that house with my mum, who was becoming more and more alcoholic and my sister … We just didn’t talk to each other. It was a horrible atmosphere.
“And I always had aspirations for art school anyway. I was just desperate to get away and start creating my own life. It was just very tragic. I just needed to escape really. It was a turbulent time, a very emotional period of life.”
When he got to Leeds, he gravitated towards Almond straight away. “He was the most interesting looking person. Everyone was wearing brand new Wrangler’s and Levi’s denim and Doc Martens and then there was this guy with bleached hair and a leopard skin top, like the one my mum wore, and spandex trousers. I thought, ‘He must be in the fine art department. Let’s go and have a word with him.’
“And I’m not gay, but there was something about Marc. He is a very attractive man, he’s a very handsome guy in his own way. He had a look about him. I saw him and I thought, ‘He’s a star.’ He just looked like a pop star. The moment I saw him I thought, ‘He looks like someone famous already,’ which, obviously, he now is.
“Marc was obviously destined to be a male diva. It was that mixture of machines with the passionate voice. He was really into Scott Walker as well, and Gene Pitney. He was into the sixties soully, ballady thing and I was into machine music, and the two things found a new formula. Giorgio Moroder had beaten us to it, but we were definitely in the zone.”
Success then took them to New York. Soon they were hanging out in Danceteria (“our favourite”), the Mudd Club, Paradise Garage and Studio 54 and inviting their drug dealer to appear on their single Torch.
“We just loved it. It was a party. You’re young and rich – and we suddenly were – we were young and famous, and we suddenly had a bit of money in our pockets. It was the best place to be.
“But there’s the excess of New York once we got into the drug scene. That’s where we got into the darker stuff. We were taking on darker American influences.”
In the book, Ball writes candidly that, by the age of 24, he was a father and a drug addict. The band was beginning to fall apart and so was he.
“It was tearing me apart. The worst thing in the world, I found, was the innocence of children. You know you’re on drugs and you think no one knows, and a little kid four or five years old … They don’t even know what drugs are, but they just give you this look, and it just makes you feel so guilty. They know. ‘What’s the matter with daddy?’ It’s the most horrible look. It makes you feel so guilty. That was probably the worst experience. I was still high on something, whether it was acid or coke, and they just look at you. Oh my God. I couldn’t look at them.”
SOFT Cell split in 1984 and it would take Ball years to clean himself up. “I went through a wilderness period,” Ball admits. Eventually, though, he met Richard Norris and they formed dance outfit Grid in the late eighties, which led to Ball returning to the top 10 with Swamp Thing in 1994.
In that time Ball also co-wrote Kylie’s 1997 single Breathe and worked on an ambient EP with Billie Ray Martin. “We had a good stream of chart success and did loads of remixes for everybody. Yeah, it was a very fruitful period for me, that.”
In the years since there have been reunions with Almond for another
Soft Cell album, Cruelty Without Beauty, in 2001, and reunion gigs. But there is also new music. And now the book. Writing it has, he admits, been cathartic.
“I thought it would be quite good to write a book when I was 50. I’m now 61, so I was 10 years out there. It took a while.”
What’s obvious is that Ball is not the man he was. He’s better than that, he hopes. “I still like a drink, but I haven’t even smoked for nine years and I certainly don’t do drugs any more.
All my drugs are prescribed now. You don’t really get a buzz off inhalers and steroids, to be quite honest.”
Electronic Boy: My Life In and Out of Soft Cell by Dave Ball, is published by Omnibus Press, £20.
After two highly rated albums as singer with Savages – both Mercury Prize nominated – which followed two underrated ones as John and Jehn, not to mention a Gorillaz collaboration, Jehnny Beth finally goes it alone.
The inspiration for To Love Is To Live came on the night David Bowie died, listening to his last album Blackstar, while the fragmented tracks on Beyonce’s eponymous fifth solo album freed her from traditional verse-chorus songwriting.
First track I Am starts with her declaring “I am naked all the time” and rises to a crescendo of tortured synths, while
Flower is less fractured, simple beats and minimal guitar, and We Will Sin Together is the most conventionally catchy.
A Place Above is a 73-second spoken word introduction by Cillian Murphy to I’m The Man, and subverts power balances with Beth’s distorted vocals repeating the title between interludes of woozy piano.
The vocals are variously whispered, chanted and screamed but it’s the quieter tracks - minimal piano-led ballads The Rooms and The French Countryside - that make more impact along with final track Human, the longest at over six minutes.
MATTHEW GEORGE
ORLANDO WEEKS
A QUICKENING Orlando Weeks’s debut solo album marks a big shift in his musical style from his days as frontman of indie group The Maccabees. A Quickening sees the singer ditch the band’s upbeat guitar riffs and throwaway lyrics in favour of a much more reflective and downbeat tone.
The album is about Weeks’s experience of becoming a father, he has previously said, and it does seem to show a musician who is mellowing with age.
His haunting voice is frequently accompanied by gentle piano and trumpet playing.
The album’s singles Milk Breath,
Blood Sugar and Safe In Sound are richly textured with an intense yet calming sound.
All three are powerful in their own right. However, the album offers little in the way of shifts in tone and many of the songs feel similar to each other.
Only the track All The Things appears to be doing something different thanks to its high tempo electronic backing music.
While the album contains some strong songs, when taken as a whole it verges on becoming repetitive.
TOM HORTON
AND relax. At a time when everything is seething fury, is that even possible?