Soft Cell are reborn four years after their ‘last goodbye’
Twenty years after their last album, Soft Cell are back with a new record. Duncan Seaman spoke to singer Marc Almond about their reunion and the album’s themes.
SYNTH POP duo Soft Cell’s history has been interrupted by more than one break-up, but four years ago their show at the O2 Arena in London appeared to be Marc Almond and Dave Ball’s last hurrah.
“There was every intention that it would be the last show,” the singer tells The Yorkshire Post in an interview via email. “It felt the right time, honestly, and when I sang the songs there it felt like a line being drawn under it, knowing I wouldn’t sing them again as Soft Cell.”
What changed everything was Covid. For the last two years the pair have been working on a new album, *Happiness Not Included. Almond says: “I found myself with time on my hands and in the bizarre dystopian world of Covid and panic, real tragedy and sadness, coupled with everyone going crazy, I think Dave and I thought, hell why not?”
The pair worked on the songs separately. “Dave sends me ideas and tunes, then I write lyrics and record vocals and send them back. Dave and I have drifted creatively towards each other over the years – written some great songs (and not always for Soft Cell). I just keep returning to these two worlds, both pre and post-Covid, and now it seems to me that all bets are off.”
Almond says he writes from a different perspective for the group, which he and Ball formed while they were art college students in the late 1970s.
“I put my Soft Cell hat on and everything is Soft Cell focused,” the 64-year-old says. “Dave sends me tunes which are almost always great in some way and relatively easy to write lyrics around. So none of the songs are from Marc Almond’s world.
“It is that distinction between Soft Cell and my solo work that I find comes naturally. My solo work is what I can do to stay sane and active, and express myself as an individual.”
The album’s title encapsulates much of how Almond feels about the modern world.
“I think you deal with themes that are meaningful to you when you get to a certain age and find that everything you hoped for or imagined has come true, but only in part,” he says. “A kind of warped and disappointing view of the future.
“But in the end, if indeed this is the end, there is a thread of optimism that comes with accepting who we are and where we are in the world. There is so much madness presently in the world that it all feels out of kilter.”
Purple Zone, a collaboration with the Pet Shop Boys, came about “painlessly”, he says. “Neil (Tennant) and Chris (Lowe) came to see the Soft Cell show at Hammersmith Apollo last year and liked the song.
“It was sent to them and, the next thing I knew, this brilliant version came back to me: they had mixed the track and Neil had laid vocals down. It was such a surprise.”
The album’s cover features a haunting image of an abandoned fairground near the site of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Almond says it has become even more poignant given the terrible events now occurring in Ukraine.
“The daily images of misery and suffering in Europe are unbearable,” he says. “It is well known that I have spent a great deal of time in Russia, and the Russian people – the ordinary people – have opened their hearts to me for three decades. They too are also caught up in this madness.
“But what is happening in Ukraine is one of the greatest catastrophes of our age. Europe needs to take action and not just sit on the sidelines commenting – or are we just going to go on living under this threat, regretting how little we did when the Ukrainian people needed us the most?
“The choice is where shall we fight World War Three – in Ukraine now and everything we stand for, or in our own country when it comes to us? Because it seems he will not stop.”
■ *Happiness Not Included is out tomorrow. www.softcell.co.uk