REAL GONE
Dave Ball
Soft Cell’s sonic mastermind
BORN 1959
Electro de luxe: Dave Ball pushed Soft Cell’s buttons.
AS A YOUTH, Dave Ball DJ’d around his Blackpool hometown with his Smile Disco Show, which he self-built with electrical and technical advice from his Post Office employee dad. Attuned to the dancefloor, his other formative musical experiences included the Northern soul played at the Blackpool Mecca ballroom and encountering Kraftwerk’s Autobahn in 1974.
These influences would converge when he formed Soft Cell with vocalist and fellow art student Marc Almond at Leeds Polytechnic in 1978. Eschewing guitars for electronics, their confrontational output initially soundtracked Almond’s outré performance pieces, but in time the duo’s desire to provoke would be channelled into huge commercial success.
In 1981 their dramatic synth-pop reinvention of Gloria Jones’ soul oldie Tainted Love was a UK Number 1 and Top 10 US single. With Almond’s emotive, verge-of-breakdown performances and the pulse and neurosis in Ball’s circuitry, their next four singles would also reach the UK Top 5, while debut album Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret and its pioneering remix companion Non Stop Ecstatic Dancing – the latter made under the influence of legal MDMA in New York – both went Top 10, despite being flavoured with the transgressive frisson of the clubland demi-monde. “We were deliberately seeing how far we could push it,” Ball told MOJO in 2021. “It was all part of the fun. We wanted notoriety. Notoriety lasts longer than being nice, I think.”