SOFT CELL

WHEN SOFT CELL REFORMED AFTER 16 YEARS APART TO HEADLINE LONDON’S O2 ARENA IN 2018, IT WAS BILLED AS THEIR FAREWELL. INSTEAD, MARC ALMOND AND DAVE BALL ARE NOW BACK WITH A NEW ALBUM ENCOMPASSING EVERY AREA OF THIS MOST COMPLEX OF DUOS. WHAT CHANGED THEIR MINDS? IN THEIR ONLY INTERVIEW THIS YEAR, THEY TELL CLASSIC POP HOW THE GLOBAL PANDEMIC CAUSED THEM TO RE-EVALUATE THEIR BELIEF IN EACH OTHER… AND WHY THEY’RE FINALLY READY TO EMBRACE BEING POP STARS AFTER 40 YEARS.

JOHN EARLS

Marc Almond and Dave Ball, 2021. The pair return with new studio album *Happiness Not Included.

©AndrewWhitton

In spring last year, a week into the fi rst lockdown, Marc Almond became seriously ill with COVID. He wanted to go to hospital, but was warned by his doctor: “Don’t go. If you go into hospital, you won’t come out. If you can see this through, don’t go.” Marc was struggling for breath and felt “worse than I’ve felt for a long time”, which is concerning for someone who suffered serious head injuries in a motorcycle crash in 2004.

Nearly 18 months on, Marc is still suffering from Long COVID, admitting: “I haven’t been the same since. It’s damaged my health quite a lot. Like many people, there’s my life before the virus and there’s after the virus.” The quiet spring helped Marc’s recovery – “I was able to be peaceful and the air was very fresh” – and music also helped his recovery. Part of that was knowing he had some new Soft Cell songs to work on. Shortly after playing their farewell show at London’s O2 Arena, selling all 18,000 tickets in the fi rst weekend that they went on sale in 2018, Dave Ball began sending Marc songs for their first new album since 2002’s Cruelty Without Beauty, which itself had been the duo’s first music together for 18 years. “I didn’t even think of another Soft Cell album at first,” Marc insists. “Things are never planned in Soft Cell. After the O2 was over, I thought, ‘That’s that.’ I hadn’t expected the amount of love we got. Seeing people light up their phone torches for Say Hello, Wave Goodbye, I saw that Soft Cell means something to a lot of people.

But I thought it was done. Then my record label, BMG, asked me: ‘How would you feel about another Soft Cell album?’”

Marc was initially uncertain and said it would depend on the quality of material Ball offered. “And Dave gave me a barrage of songs that were really good,” he laughs. “I’d said to Dave: ‘Make it old-school. Don’t think about making it digitised.’ I wanted old-school references: analogue synths and old electronic sounds, going back to the music we liked when we first started: Throbbing Gristle, early Kraftwerk, German electronica, Brian Eno’s whooshy synths when he was in Roxy Music. It turned out Dave was still brilliant at that, and I thought, ‘I really like this.’”

For his part, Dave was delighted to show that Soft Cell still have something to offer, 40 years after Tainted Love launched them on an unsuspecting nation. Marc has told Classic Pop before that his biggest regret about Soft Cell is that the duo turned their back on pop music too early, with standalone smash Torch their last truly great crossover song before they made the brilliant but troubled albums The Art Of Falling Apart and This Last Night In Sodom.

It’s a theory Dave agrees with. He reasons: “Soft Cell was a whirlwind of success. Our first singles all went Top Five and we were suddenly pop stars, which we never intended to be. We reacted against that, and not in a great way. Torch should have gone on The Art Of Falling Apart as its big pop hit. I sound like a marketing man by saying that, but I do know what Marc means. With this new album, we’ve shown we’ve grown up enough that we can give things a nice tune.”