SOFT CELL

SOFT CELL’S DEBUT ALBUM – INFORMED BY CLASSIC SOUL, JACQUES BREL, HI-NRG DISCO AND VOYEURISTIC TOURISM – TRANSFIXED MUSIC LOVERS WITH ITS SEEDY GLAMOUR AND DARK ROMANTICISM, A WORLD AWAY FROM THE COIFFED DAY-GLO GLAMOUR OF SO MUCH EARLY 80S POP…

MARK LINDORES

As Britain throbbed to the sounds of synth-pop at the dawning of the 80s, the emergence of a pair of no-frills Northerners who had more in common with Sparks than Steve Strange injected the genre with a gritty realism. Romanticising Soho’s murky underbelly, Soft Cell shared its neon-tinged spotlight with the hookers, hustlers and degenerates whose work usually nestled under sex-shop counters, discreetly distributed in brown paper bags.

“We were basically two young lads living in Leeds who suddenly found ourselves in Soho,” Dave Ball told Penny Black Music. “We would go to places like the Naked City Cinema just to get the vibe of it. We were like sex tourists, but without doing the sex! We were kind of like:

‘Wow! This is really exciting.’ We loved the imagery and the sleaziness. It was more an artistic thing than a sexual thing.”

Dave and Marc Almond had met in 1977 at Leeds Polytechnic: Dave was enrolling, Marc was a second-year Fine Art student. He was also well-known on Leeds’ performance-art scene, thanks to onstage antics that included stripping naked in front of a full-length mirror and smearing himself with cat food. After overhearing Dave’s work while he was putting a show together, Marc asked if he could use some of the music in the show.

“He used to go past and hear these weird electronic noises I was messing around with, and one day he came in,” Dave recalls. “My idea of pop music was very bleepy, minimal songs about Tupperware parties and mundane things. Marc heard some and said: ‘Can I sing some of them?’ and I said: ‘Yeah. Why not? You’ve got a better voice than me.’

That’s how Soft Cell came about.”

Marc and Dave began writing prolifically, soon establishing their roles within the band. “Marc was like a lyric machine as well as a great singer,” Dave says. “Eventually I said: ‘Why don’t you write all the words?’ and that took it to a new level. We both just worked constantly, that was all I did, all day. I would get up in the morning, switch on my tape recorder, start my synthesizer and I would write five or six tunes a day, even just rough ideas.”

“We shared a similar taste in music and art and a sick, twisted view of the world!” Marc told The Independent. “We wrote about the darker side of society and emotions and explored underworlds… but I don’t think there was anything new about that. We were following in a tradition of bizarre music-hall songs, or French chanson where they sang about life in the gutter and the prostitutes on the street… it’s real life, and there’s something very passionate and very seductive about it.”