Soft Cell

"No sex, we're British"? Hardly. The unsettling, toxic and murky passion of Marc Almond weds the precision of synthesizers and gives birth to the archetype of the synth duo.

What happens when the most theatrical, impassioned side of Scott Walker meets the Kraftwerk of "Autobahn" after a ride on the post-punk train, leafing through the latest issue of Penthouse all the while (best hidden inside a bread bag, just in case the ticket inspector walks by...)? The answer is easier than it sounds. What emerges is the alchemy, the magic formula that brought such success to a duo of art-school students from Leeds, Peter Mark Almond from Southport and David Ball from Blackpool, destined to send more than a few shockwaves through the television and radio establishment of an Albion perhaps not so perfidious as it was entrenched in a smugness that was, more often than not, hypocritical and purely superficial.

By then several years had passed since Marc Bolan of T. Rex performed on "Ready Steady Go!" and David Bowie split the mainstream audience with the unforgettable, grandiose staging of the alien Ziggy Stardust: "Let's turn on and be not alone/ Gimme your hands, 'cause you're wonderful", he sang in that "Rock 'n' Roll Suicide" which changed forever the life of the restless young Almond, son of a British Army officer with a nasty drinking habit, still searching for his place in the world. Once the punk hangover had worn off, early-Eighties England had discovered and embraced hedonism, new romanticism, and the danceable rhythms that mark out reassuring tales of boys meeting girls and, more often than not, living happily ever after.

It seemed there was no room for an eccentric storyteller who, in his lyrics, told of the squalor carefully hidden behind the glitter, who pointed the finger at the double life and the double, triple standards of the average English man, singing about the boy who meets the girl and pushes her into prostitution, and about the loss of innocence, drawing inspiration from stories of everyday life — perhaps captured with a 35mm camera, like a good voyeur — or from books such as Joris-Karl Huysmans' "À Rebours" and Texan writer John Rechy's "City of Night".

In 1981, after a single that worked well on dancefloors but poorly in the charts, Phonogram gave Soft Cell one last chance, and the duo staked everything on a northern-soul cover. Initially the pair would have preferred to rework Frankie Valli's "The Night", but in the end they settled on a minor Gloria Jones hit, "Tainted Love", destined to become one of the best-selling singles of all time (the following year it would sit steady on the Billboard chart for forty-three weeks, overtaking Bill Haley And The Comets' "Rock Around The Clock" in the Guinness Book of Records) with ten million copies sold worldwide and countless covers to follow.

Almost a gamble, the last card to play to break through in a music business that the young Almond was at once drawn to and repelled by, since he had no desire whatsoever to play the sycophant with journalists or the fool on television, to become a caricature of himself. He was wounded by the invented stories that Phonogram's press office fed to the public to build him an image as a doomed figure, a dandy of ambiguous sexuality permanently dressed in black — yet he also wanted the world at his feet. To redeem himself. To finally be somebody, whatever the cost. And his ideas didn't always meet with the approval of a record label that was anxious and on edge, begging him in every way possible to tone down the eyeliner, to behave, to play the part of the perfect star for "Top of the Pops" (then a genuine institution).

It was thanks to "Tainted Love" that the pair landed on the famous BBC show. Dave Ball didn't bat an eyelid and delivered the track with clinical precision, while his partner writhed around the stage like a ferret in heavy make-up, sparking the outrage of the respectable types "who pay their licence fee and don't want to see certain things at the dinner table with their kids". "From that moment on, it seemed like all the girls wanted to marry me, the mothers wanted to redeem me, the grandfathers wanted to have me locked up, the lads wanted to smash my face in", the singer recalls — and he would soon find himself managing a career (and a public image) without adequate support from his manager, Stevo Pearce, a man of great talent but still terribly immature and unprofessional.

Certain naïveties surfaced right away: Marc and Dave never imagined "Tainted Love" would become a hit, and didn't bother putting one of their own compositions on the single's B-side — the decision to stick another cover on the flip (Diana Ross and the Supremes' "Where Did Our Love Go?") cost them dearly. Curiously, Almond made the same mistake again when his version of Gene Pitney's "Something's Gotten Hold Of My Heart" (a duet with Pitney himself) once again shot to the top of the charts. A blessing and a curse, the song soon became a genuine nightmare for the rebellious small-town torch-singer, who went so far as to refuse to perform it live for years.

How do you strike while the iron's hot in cases like this? Phonogram had an idea, and shipped Almond and Ball off to the Big Apple to work with Mike Thorne, who had already worked with Wire and owned the extremely expensive Ned Synclavier, an instrument that was truly cutting-edge at the time and is still regarded today as the "Rolls Royce of vintage synthesizers". The two artists soaked up the atmosphere of New York, and of Studio 54 above all, absorbing the moods and sounds in vogue and pouring all of it wholesale into their music, which stood out for its attitude, its themes and its unusually warm sound compared to the synth-pop of the era: the ten songs that make up "Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret" are the perfect soundtrack for a stroll through a red-light district, the sonic accompaniment to the most lascivious high-end porn show, where sex manifests itself in all its many forms. There's no posturing here: sure, there's no shortage of exaggeration, of fictionalised stories (Marc Almond loves bringing characters to life to voice his view of the world) and a good dose of irony — not always picked up on by a press that went after Soft Cell whenever it got the chance.

In the duo's sophisticated "erotic cabaret" there's a bit of everything: besides the multi-million-selling single there's "Frustration", the story of a typical ordinary man and his longing to escape a routine made up of a wife, his favourite pub, work, a mortgage to pay off and hobbies as ordinary as he is ("nothing special, I do the garden, I watch the girls"). You only live once, and behind the mask lies a mad urge to break the rules, to experiment with cocaine, with LSD, "to be a tiger, to meet Bo Derek and be her Tarzan".

Shortly after comes the cottaging at the porn cinema described in "Seedy Films", which plays on the line between reality and imagination ("isn't that you up there on the screen?") and on the idea of the clandestine encounter with a partner never seen before ("I've got no address, just the phone number... go on, call me in the night and maybe we can talk dirty to each other" anticipates the chat-lines still to come). Rounding it all off are contributions from Josephine Warden of Vicious Pink Phenomena — who provokes in the background like a cat on heat — and David Tofani's clarinet, which worms its way into the arrangement while Marc, by the end, indulges in a series of androgynous moans of pleasure.

"Youth" is the climax, perhaps the most touching track in the collection. Ten years later Marc Almond would perform the song live at the Royal Albert Hall, accompanied only by pianist Martin Watkins; a few years ago rumours circulated about a possible re-recording of the track with the involvement of the much-admired Kate Bush ("If only", the singer would later comment). "Sleep in a deep, deep sleep. Beauty is skin deep".

But that's merely the antechamber to the show's real centrepiece, "Sex Dwarf", which takes aim at the tabloid press and draws its very title from a headline in "News Of The World" — though the same paper would later take the lyric far too literally, going so far as to accuse Almond of drugging young girls and locking them in a hotel room, together with a dwarf, refusing to let them leave until they submitted to his wishes. The video, meanwhile, has gone down in history: directed by Tim Pope (as was the whole innovative video-album "Non-Stop Exotic Video Show", recently reissued on DVD) and now kept safely locked away in Universal Music's vaults, it didn't seem all that excessive to the duo, who were already used to performances that were, to put it mildly, bizarre back at art school (ranging from simulating sex acts with mirrors to smearing dog food over their bodies) — but it scandalised the press and the record label, who considered it obscene, sexist (though the video features transsexuals and drag queens, without a woman in sight!) and politically incorrect towards minorities, with the dwarf serving as an emblem to be mocked.

The show carries on with "Entertain Me" — featuring a narcissistic, boastful Almond who has tried everything sex has to offer and is already bored of it — and with a scathing dig at privileged rich kids performing ostentatious social concern ("Chips On My Shoulder"), which boasts an insanely catchy chorus, chanted like a cheerleader's anthem.

Proof that Soft Cell were anything but one-hit wonders, the album contains two further singles that easily crack the UK Top 5: "Bedsitter" describes the sense of emptiness, of loneliness, felt on returning from a night out at the club, when you take off the "glamorous" mask and go back to your own refuge, that cash-strapped student bedsit with the creaky wooden floor, while "Say Hello, Wave Goodbye" tells of the end of a love affair between a prostitute and a client who can no longer manage his double life ("keeping you secret has been hell, now let's act like strangers meeting for the first time") and masks his own insecurities behind the pretence of being better than her. "Take your hands off me, see, I don't belong to you now. Look at my face one last time", is his pathetic farewell. "I never knew you, you never knew me".

To record the album, Thorne used cutting-edge equipment and a synthesizer owned by Mute boss Daniel Miller (already known for "Warm Leatherette"). It all came together within the space of a single month. Marc Almond and Dave Ball remain proud to this day of the results and of a sound that, bar a few obviously dated effects, has held up remarkably well over time. Marc, however, feels that his voice here is still somewhat flat and not always expressive, with some real difficulty hitting the higher notes (up to that point he had never taken a singing lesson); it's no coincidence that he would re-record the vocal tracks of some songs in 1991, for the release of "Memorabilia: The Singles", though fans still prefer the original versions, flaws and all. The two often turned up at the studio completely wrecked — the whole album was recorded under the influence of acid and ecstasy, a drug still unknown at the time and tried for the very first time right there in New York, thanks to a girl (Cindy Ecstasy, fittingly enough) who would go on to play no small role in several songs and in more than one video.

The promotion of "Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret" lasted a year and took them back to America to put together a mini remix album (it was meant to be the first of its kind, though Human League beat them to it), featuring rap inserts and sounds resembling vinyl scratches, actually produced with a sampler. The single "Torch" also worked brilliantly, climbing to number two on the UK chart, but in 1983 the darker, more self-destructive side of the duo began to surface, after a run that up to then hadn't put a foot wrong. Even "What", now considered too kitsch and lightweight even by Almond himself ("we were sick of covers, it was probably a decision made under the influence..."), sailed effortlessly into the Top Ten.

A "seminal" album for synth-pop as a whole, "Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret" charts a course and introduces the wider public to the complex personalities of its creators — Almond above all, who would keep returning to certain themes throughout his solo career and in the brief but intense chapter of the Marc And The Mambas collective. A dark, blood-red, passionate and perverse poetry that would have few equals in the decades to come. Dave Ball recorded a solo album, "In Strict Tempo", and later threw himself into a new dance project of mixed fortunes, The Grid, with Richard Norris. The rest, as they say, is history.

Soft Cell's debut remains an album worth rediscovering, because it continues to influence hundreds of young artists now crowding the new electro scene. If certain taboos are no longer such, thirty years on, perhaps it's also thanks to the courage of this nervy, skeletally thin, heavily made-up young man, destined to become something of an icon for losers, the misunderstood, the marginalized, and anyone cruelly and carelessly labelled a "weirdo" – whatever that word actually means.

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25/12/2011