The Art Of Falling Apart
The SOFT CELL story is one of wild, hedonistic success. Here, Marc Almond and Dave Ball confess all to STEPHEN TROUSSÉ – about controversial performance art, New York’s depraved club scene, the perils of having hit records and their own eventual downfall. One bystander claims: “It was sex, drugs and electronic rock’n’roll!”
There was always a darkness around Soft Cell,” says Marc Almond, warming to the story of his band’s relentlessly perverse progress through the 1980s. “And that fuelled Dave’s darkness, and it fuelled my darknesses… Our whole career, really, the whole Soft Cell story, was just a miasma of darkness!” But not today. It’s been quite a year for the man christened Peter Mark Sinclair Almond in Southport, 1957, and on this sunny midsummer morning in Mayfair he’s positively beaming. First, he was made one of the great unlikely obes of modern times in the New Year’s honours. Then, one of the badgers on Springwatch was named after him (“Of course, that’s the thing I’m proudest of,” he smiles), confirming his status as national treasure. And now, 40 years after he first met Dave Ball at Leeds Poly, Soft Cell have announced a 10-disc career defining boxset – Keychains & Snowstorms – and a sold-out gig at the O2 at the end of September.
“‘Tainted Love’ was the beginning of the end” Marc Almond
“We talked about doing the boxset and then I said, ‘Shall we do a one-off show?’” he explains, dressed as always, from dyed hair to pointed boots, in immaculate black. “I can’t do a tour. So let’s do one big show – but where? Someone suggested the Albert hall, but I said, ‘If we’re going to do it, let’s do it massively. So I said, ‘What about the o2?’ It sold out in a weekend! I don’t think we ever had that much faith in ourselves, to be very honest. I always imagined our fans were about 200 people in bedsits.”
nursing a mid-afternoon whisky in a venerable Soho boozer, Dave Ball is still shocked. “I mean, bloody nora!” he cackles, still a Blackpool boy after all these years of city life. “The last time I went to the o2 I saw u2! It’s such a massive place. It’s going to be terrifying! But I hear there’s a whole backstage recreational area they built for Michael Jackson in 2009 and it’s still there. I’m determined to have look round there.”
After all this time, Soft Cell still feel like trespassers, an odd couple of arty, insecure, northern outsiders who walked through the wrong door one day in 1981 and wound up in 20th-century pop art legend. of all the schemers and dreamers who defined the golden age of British pop 1979– 1982, Almond and Ball seem to exemplify more than anyone else the absurd, exhilarating possibilities of the times. “We dealt in extremities, really,” says Ball. “It was either ultra pop or very dark. It was a bit bipolar. We covered the whole range of human feeling… from a very twisted vantage point.”
The new boxset, which Ball has worked on for the past two years, and which diligently charts the career from Leeds Poly performance art, through sensational, accidental pop success, catastrophic hangover and on to the abortive early ’00s comeback, is subtitled The Soft Cell Story, as though it were some classically melodramatic MGM biopic. Who could possibly do justice to such a production? You imagine Fassbinder at his most lurid, working from a devillish script by Joe orton, with assistance from Alan Bennett for the odd dollop of northern sauce.
“A film could be interesting,” admits Almond “but I don’t know who could do it. It’s such a mad story. We didn’t do anything the conventional way. The minute we got a big hit record with ‘Tainted Love’ was the beginning of the end of the band, really. That’s just how it was: it really was the art of falling apart.”
EVen at the start, Soft Cell’s story was informed by a degree of drama. This was 1977, and Dave Ball, resplendent in Doc Martins and Levi’s, enrolled at Leeds Polytechnic. “It was my first day,” he remembers. “I was wandering around, looking for the art department. I saw this guy with short dyed-black hair, leopardskin top, gold lamé jeans and winklepickers. he was so obviously the perfect frontman.” Initially, they came together when Almond heard the bleeps of Ball’s new korg synth and fancied he’d found the soundtrack to his latest performance art piece (naked, smeared in catfood, draped in a swastika: the usual). They soon began writing songs and performing around Leeds, just as new romanticism hit the north. “We got lumped in with that, but we came out of more of a punk ethos,” says Ball. “Punk with synths.” rather than the Blitz kids, the nascent Soft Cell aspired to some of the Ballardian chic of the Sheffield scene – Clock DVA, Cabaret Voltaire, original human League, along with the industrial thrum of Throbbing Gristle, Pere ubu and Suicide. “I was more into supermarkets and car crashes than bloody yachts in the Bahamas,” says Ball. “You can’t imagine Soft Cell doing a video on a yacht, can you? Maybe a sinking yacht.” The Futurama 2 festival, which took place in Leeds in September 1980, was a turning point. on a bill that included Siouxsie & The Banshees, echo And The Bunnymen, The Psychedelic Furs and – naturally – Gary Glitter, the band played to over 2,000 people, and earned an encore. Anni hogan, who had just arrived in Leeds as student, and would go on to perform in Marc & The Mambas, was impressed. “There were a lot of bands playing, but it was Soft Cell who made the biggest impact on me,” she says. “I had seen them around town before – in my head I called them The Men In Black – but seeing them live… I thought the
“We’d party hard – ecstasy, acid, speed, coke…” Dave Ball
songs were incredible. The look was incredible. eventually they had a room going in their house and I moved in. It was sex, drugs and electronic rock’n’roll!
“It was a very vibrant time in Leeds. Awful times in the country politically, but there was an amazing cultural backlash to that. I saw it all through Soft Cell’s eyes. I got a job working at the Amnesia club and eventually I was asked to book the bands. So of course I booked Soft Cell and they did ‘Tainted Love’ for the first time. I remember Stevo was there.”
So much of Soft Cell’s chaotic career path might be attributed to their choice of Stevo as a manager. In an era of magnificent mavericks, he might just have been the most wayward. “There was just something about him,” remembers Almond. “I remember meeting him for the first time: he had this grown-out human League haircut with all the roots showing and the remnants of two-day-old blusher on his face. I didn’t think of him as being like a 17-year-old. he was a barrow boy in a way, with the gift of the gab. he asked us to send him some music. So Dave borrowed some money from his mum and we made a little vinyl record, ‘Mutant Moments’.”
Stevo included “The Girl With The Patent Leather Face” on a sampler for his fledgling label, the Some Bizzare Album, alongside tracks by The The, Blancmange and Depeche Mode. The duo were particularly impressed by the latter. “We played with them in 1980 at Croc’s in rayleigh,” remembers Almond. “They had all these beautifully prepared tracks, and they all looked fantastic. We, on the other hand, sounded awful.”
“We were getting coins chucked at us by Spandau Ballet and Visage,” laughs Ball. “They were shouting, ‘Get back up north!’ rusty egan told Stevo not to sign us. But you know, we were shit. It was a bit of a turning point for us. We knew we had to get it sounding better.”
The wheeling-dealing Stevo not only persuaded Phonogram to sign the pair as part of job lot with nottingham new-wavers B-Movie – he also got Mute label boss Daniel Miller to produce “Memorabilia”. released in March 1981, the single turned around the band’s reputation. It became a club hit – making an impression as far afield as new York – but it failed to chart. hoping to recoup some of their advance, Phonogram put the band in the studio with house producer Mike Thorne and, searching for something more commercial, struck on a cover version the pair had started performing live.
“We decided that we wanted to get a pop edge or rather a dance edge into our songs,” says Almond. “I was always DJing and Dave loved ’60s soul music. So we thought what about if we try a couple of cover versions in our set? The human League had just done ‘You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling’, so Dave said, ‘Why don’t we do a northern Soul song?’ he played me ‘The night’ by
MIke Thorne, a former tape operator for Deep Purple whose production credits included Wire’s first three albums, remembers the first time he worked with Almond and Ball. “Phonogram called me and said, ‘We have a couple of interesting projects for you, but there’s no money,’” he laughs. “They wanted me to do both B-Movie and Soft Cell’s second singles. I thought, ‘I can do two singles very quickly, one after another. But they’re just going to feel rushed.’ So I sent up the two singles in parallel. That might have made them feel like they were on a production line, but I was trying to give them space and perspective. It was exhausting for me – in the end we finished ‘Tainted Love’ at 2am. “I didn’t think about trying to create a hit single, no matter what Phonogram wanted,” he insists. “I never think of any project with a brief. I had the arrogance to think I knew what worked. I’d been round the block several times.” “When the white labels of ‘Tainted Love’ went out to DJs, the vibe in the clubs was good, but it just kept getting bigger,” remembers Ball. “And then when the record was actually released it went straight into the charts. We went to Phonogram’s office on Bond Street and there was this incredibly glamorous woman in an open-top rolls-royce driving round
playing ‘Tainted love’ at full volume. It was a pretty good gimmick.”
The single entered the charts at No 62 in August 1981 and kept climbing. Eventually they were asked to appear on Top Of The Pops. It’s fair to say that neither the BBC nor Phonogram were quite prepared for Soft Cell’s debut on early-evening TV. Inspired by a combination of 1920s socialite Nancy Cunard, existential pin-up Juliet Gréco and Siouxsie Sioux, Almond appeared draped in bracelets, blind with mascara, head to toe in black. “The record company just said, ‘You can’t go on dressed like that!’ It became a battle, really. ‘OK I will put on the biggest false eyelashes I possibly can’… ‘I will perform “Bedsitter” in a leather cap I bought in a New York gay bar…’ It was gender-fluid playing before that was fashionable.” It was to go down as one of all-time great Top Of The Pops debuts.
“All hell broke loose,” laughs Almond. “People either wanted to murder me, mother me or fuck me. Or all three at the same time! It was scary but I felt really excited. It’s about creating a moment, like that David Bowie and Mick Ronson moment, or the first time you saw Alice Cooper. I thought, ‘Well yeah, that’s what I wanted to do at art college: create a moment.’”
The moment led them all the way to New York to record their debut album, Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret. “I really think the worst thing the record company could have done to us at that point was sending us to New York,” says Almond matter-of-factly. “We were taken over first-class. I had hardly ever flown before, let alone been on a first-class flight. It was unbelievable. We got quite drunk. And then we had a limousine to take us into the city. And as we were driving, the first thing we heard on the radio was there’s this new disease been discovered, it didn’t have a name. But it had been affecting Haitians and gay men…
“The first night we were there, we were taken to what was left of Studio 54,” he continues. “Someone put downers in my drink. There were half-naked people gyrating on the bar: boys, girls. People were coming up to me and saying, ‘Hey have this, try this, do this…’ I was out of it with jetlag, culture shock… The whole time there’s literally fire in the streets, you know, bins on fire. It was just like Taxi Driver! I sat on the curb and I just cried my eyes out. A stripper called Janet sat down with me and said, ‘Oh come with me, Marc, I’ll look after you.’ And so we went to an after-hours club, and that’s how it all started: the beginning of the end of Soft Cell! We hadn’t even recorded a note of Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret yet!” “I don’t think it was quite the beginning of the end,” demurs Ball. “But there was a decadence. You could get any drug you wanted and any kind of sexual thing… everything was available. In the drug department we excelled. It was like a big version of Soho. I loved it! We used to hire a limo ’cos it was cheaper than getting cabs. We’d find a few of our lady friends and we had a stack of pills and cocaine and bottles of champagne. We’d drive round from club to club and we’d get in for free everywhere. It was actually quite a cheap night out!” One of the colourful faces they met in New York was Cindy Ecstasy – the band’s sometime dealer who ended up singing on some of their greatest singles. “I think Marc and Stevo found her,” recalls Ball. “I remember them coming back to the apartment one night and saying, ‘We’ve got these capsules from Cindy, do you want one? It’s called ecstasy and it’s fucking amazing!’ It was actually legal then. So we went out and I took one and I had the most amazing night ever. They were only $6 each. I said, ‘Can I get 10?!’” “We had two days to acclimatise before going into the studio,” remembers Almond. “And it was just all too much, you know? I remember Dave saying, ‘Oh great, this equipment is fantastic!’ I said, ‘You just get on with making the record and I’ll get on with having a good time. Just call me when you need to do need to the vocals!” “I didn’t anticipate how New York would affect them,” says Mike Thorne. “I knew they were keen to go there. I just wanted to make the record in the right circumstances, and they were delighted with the prospect. The only thing that would have stopped me taking them was if they hadn’t wanted to go.”
FuEllED by relentless hedonism and art-school impudence, the group embarked on one of the finest singles runs of the early ’80s, from the kitchen-sink psychosis of “Bedsitter” to the pink-flamingo romance of “Say Hello Wave Goodbye” and the magnificent melancholy of “Torch”. “The first track we did in New York was ‘Bedsitter’, because the label needed a follow-up to ‘Tainted love’,” remembers Ball. “In those days, you had to put the tapes on a plane to send back to the label. We got a phone call from london from [A&R] Roger Ames and he just said, ‘I don’t like it!’ We said, ‘Oh piss off!’ But it got to No 4! Then we released ‘Torch’, probably our best song, but we didn’t include it on an album. I suppose you could say it was a strange career path. But there were some amusing moments…” It was an incredible, imperial period of sustained work by a band supposedly mainlining everything New York had to offer. “You can’t make records on drugs,” laughs Ball. “I’ve tried many, many times and failed miserably! Of course, we would party hard. We did a lot of ecstasy, but we also did a lot of acid. And a lot of coke… and speed. But coke was the only drug I did in the studio, if I was flagging. But we didn’t work long hours anyway. Start at 11 and finish at 6, which was good. It gave us more time to party.” Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret peaked at No 5 in the uK charts – alas, they were kept from rising higher by fellow synth champions The Human league (Dare) and Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark (Architecture And Morality). The Art Of Falling Apart – the follow-up to Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret – was recorded in the autumn of 1982, with Mike Thorne again producing in New York. Relations with
“People wanted to murder me, mother me or fuck me” MARC ALMOND
Phonogram – which had begun to deteriorate – soon came to breaking point when the label insisted on promoting the single “Numbers” with a free copy of “Tainted love”. The move so incensed Almond that he and Stevo raced to the Phonogram office, handcuffed a secretary to a radiator, threw a fire extinguisher through a plate glass door and smashed Status Quo’s gold discs.
“I can understand the label were a bit distressed,” admits Ball with wry understatement. “‘Numbers’ is not everyone’s idea of a pop single. A song about a book about a gay man having multiple partners. Especially at the beginning of the Aids epidemic. Probably not the best timing.” The promotional treadmill became intolerable, culminating in an absurd appearance on
Tiswas, the Saturday-morning children’s TV show. There, Almond almost drowned in a paddling pool, sat upon by several members of the Welsh rugby team, surrounded by cheering schoolkids.
“We were both going through mental breakdowns at this time,” admits Almond. “It was too much too soon, you know, doing two, then three albums in New York. Dave hated doing live stuff at that time. I was bored stiff in the studio. And we sat down, when we were recording The Last
Night In Sodom, and I said, ‘I don’t really want to do this any more,’ and he said, ‘I don’t really want to do this any more either.’ I think we had a tour to do in America and everything, so we were just as anarchic as possible and it was just a shambles, as most Soft Cell live things ended up being.
“But we should have just taken a break, we should have not made it so dramatically The End. I should have done Marc & The Mambas, he could have done some things that he was doing. And we could have come back.”
NOW, despite everything, 40 years on, the most perfectly perverse pop act of the 1980s is shaping up for the most unlikely of happy endings. “With Soft Cell, everything just seemed to go wrong, even when we came back in 2000, 2001,” reflects Almond. “But I think what we’ve done now is we’ve finally got rid of the poison. It just had to be me and Dave, together. I’m 60, heading on 61 now. I know I don’t have the same intensity, but I didn’t want Soft Cell to diminish. I wanted it go out in a big blaze of bright light. We get to do a great celebratory concert, maybe a couple of new tracks and just a new single to go with it and a great boxset. I think it’s a great way to keep the name burning bright.” For Record Store Day this year, Soft Cell released new extended versions of “Say Hello Wave Goodbye” b/w “Youth”. Created by Ball using the original studio recordings, these ‘reimaginings’, were essentially Soft Cell’s first sign of renewed activity for a decade. The O2 show, meanwhile, presented a greater risk: “I like going out on those dangerous challenges,” laughs Almond. “Either it’s just 3,000 people down the front all having a great time, but it’s an absolute financial disaster. Or suddenly people who haven’t seen us in 17 years realise this is the last chance they’ll ever get to see Soft Cell on stage together.” He likens the speed at which the show sold out as a “shock… It was like ‘Tainted love’ being No 1 all over again!” “You can look back at all those wrong decisions, but we still made something that worked out,” concludes Ball. “That’s what makes interesting bands, isn’t it? look at the great bands – not that I’m comparing us – like the Stones, how many fuck-ups have they had? The Soft Cell story is pretty classic. It’s almost Shakespearean, isn’t it?” A lot of Shakespeare plays end up with everyone stabbing each other, piles of dead bodies and the stage awash with blood. “Well,” he cackles, with that characteristic, darkly hilarious, northern Soft Cell laugh, “there’s still time for that.” Soft Cell’s Keychains & Snowstorms is released on September 7 by Universal Music; Soft Cell play London’s O2 Arena on September 30