SOFT CELLS NON-STOP EROTIC CABARET

SOFT CELLS NON-STOP EROTIC CABARET

TAINTED LOVE, TAINTED DREAMS:

by Chris Salewicz

Even the delighted Soft Cell duo themselves will admit to their surprise at having had 1981s best-selling English singly with Tainted Love," a record which went on to enjoy major chart success world-wide.

Its been a major victory for singer Marc Almond and synthesizer player Dave Ball, a pair of art school lads from Leeds in the North of England. Prior to this huge hit and the subsequent gold disc for their NonStop Erotic Cabaret album, they had been dismissed by the British media as being little more than sub-Suicide-like dregs of New Romantic electro-pop.

They still live up in Yorkshire in Leeds, Victorian industrial city of a million inhabitants, to which each moved to acquire degrees in Fine Art at the beginning of the 70s. Marc and Dave each had been brought up in separate seaside resort towns on the Lancashire coast, some hundred miles to the west.

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I came to Leeds art college because it was a very free place," remembers Marc, as he sits with Dave Ball in the luxuriously kitsch coffee lounge of an incongruously modern new hotel near the city center. The degree course they each took was completely unstructured, he says.

But in my first year at college," explains Marc, I became very disillusioned with painting and drawing. Id originally wanted to act or be involved in the theater. But I wasnt particularly interested in being taught someone elses methods. So I used the art school facilities for doing performances, writing songs and making films.

One day I heard a lot of noises coming from the sound room. I checked it out and found Dave working away in there. He wanted a vocal side to what he was doing.

So basically our Fine Art degree courses consisted of forming Soft Cell."

A permanent stench of chemical effluence hovers about grimy, damp Leeds. This smell serves to remind that the city was established in the Industrial Revolution as little more than a setting for vast profits to be screwed out of exploited labor forces. According to popular local mythology, its setting bang in the center of the British Isles had Leeds marked out by Adolf Hitler to house his seat of government on the UK should his World War II invasion plans have succeeded. Accordingly, it contains many particularly vicious members of the neo-Nazi National Front and the similarly fascist British Movement. Such extremity requires an equally bigoted opposite force to counteract it, which explains the nature of the hard left in Leeds.

It is also the nature of the quasi-political groups thrown up by the citys large student population—Gang Of Four, Mekons, Delta 5.

We were hated," says Marc, because we didnt want to be in that clique and that crowd.

I felt that the bands that were being political were being very hypocritical, because they all came from very nice backgrounds with nice houses and often very rich parents. The song, ËœChip On My Shoulder, on the album was written about these people.

Theyd come up to us and say, ËœYour music sounds as if youre having such a good time, and music shouldnt be fun. You should be more serious musicians and more serious-minded, and be writing about the terrible situations were all in.

Id reply, ËœBut youre not in terrible situations at all. If youre ever broke you know you can ask your mum to lend you a few pounds. Youre being very condescending." I really felt they had a big chip on their shoulder about something.

So I insist on only singing about things that have an actual effect in my life, or that I feel an affinity towards, or that I have a right to sing about—whether its something as bland as love or about having a good time or a bad time.

Personally, I think the reason the Leeds scene didnt go very far was because it was so hypocritical and moaning."

Soft Cell first presented onstage their electro-pop in November, 1979, as a bottom-of-the-bill act at the Leeds Polytechnic Christmas Dance.

Mych of their sound is rooted in Northern Soul. This dance crazy movement sprang in the late 60s out of the dying embers of Mod. Though its musical catchment area eventually became bizarrely broad, Northern Soul initially was based around dance marathons to the sound of esoteric soul records. Its temple was the recently closed Wigan Casino, between Manchester and Liverpool. It was there that Dave Ball heard for the first time in the late 60s original of Tainted Love" by Gloria Jones, who went on to become Mrs. Marc Bolan and was tragically at the wheel of the car that killed her husband.

Marc Almond was himself a DJ for much of the latter half of the 70s at the Leeds Warehouse, one of the first clubs outside of London which started playing American disco music. In late 1978 the Warehouse began to play an increasing amount of electronic music—that of Kraftwerk and Giorgio Moroder, for example.

The synthesizer music of Dave Ball himself was most influenced by Brian Eno: Somehow going to art college and listening to Eno went hand-in-hand for a lot of people."

A paradox about much of the new music coming out of England is that so much of it is made on synthesizers, an instrument so insistently rejected in 1977 that it became something like a punk equivalent of a smashing of The Golden Calf.

Dave Ball is aware how reactionary only a short time ago his choice of instrument would have seemed. I think," he says in his lugubrious Lancashire accent, that was because of the way synthesizers had been used up until then. People like Rick Wakeman gave them a bad name. Theres no need for the instrument to sound like a medieval orchestra. It was so out-of-reach for the ordinary kid, who just couldnt afford a massive console with about twenty moogs. But now you can buy one for the same price as a guitar.

I hated synthesizers before punk. But the early New Synthesizer groups like early Human League and Cabaret Voltaire were really like electronic punk groups. I think that now the synthesizer has become as accepted as the guitar."

Even ËœTainted Love was a bit consciously electronic in some ways," adds Marc. But when we got to working on numbers like ËœBedsitter on the album we didnt use a sequencer or anything like that. We were just using the synthesizer as an instrument, as a means to sounds. We didnt think it had to sound consciously electronic, or consciously robot-like.

The disco in our imagination was a much more low rent, sleazy place than the chrome High-Tech, gloss-white painted disco. Ours was more the sort of jazz cellar."

There is much black humor in the dark lyrics of Marc Almond and the music of Dave Ball. The insistently garrulous Marc, whose slight stammer seems due more to his tripping over the clumps of words he throws your way than to any nervousness, sees the universally applicable absurdity of life all around him. His slight, mincing persona gives him the appearance of being a camp Stanley Laurel to bulky Daves Oliver Hardy.

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Yet both musicians are aware that the huge success of a non-original song provoked doubts amongst those unfamiliar with their stage-work or previous record output like the Memorabilia" 45 as to their abilities to follow up Tainted Love." But with both the self-composed ËœBedsitter single and Nonstop Erotic Cabaret LP also becoming large sellers Soft Cell no longer neded to justify themselves to their detractors.

Personally," says Marc, I thought ËœTainted Love would just be a successful cult record and maybe scrape into the Top 75. We did take the song and give it our own style and make it our own. Its nothing like the original, which is very stompy.

So I felt pretty confident that if people liked ËœTainted Love then theyd like our other stuff as well.

Actually, the song ËœEntertain Me on the album is about the attitude of the people who say theyve seen it all before and done it all before, and just want to write you off before theyve even heard or seen you. We always said we didnt want to try and impress. We just did what we wanted and felt like doing. There were a lot of people sneering at us as a group whos missed the boat. But weve deliberately always been out on our own, never linking ourselves to a trend and trying to cash in on a fashion. Which is an idea thats particularly nauseating.

ËœSo I laughed and laughed when we strolled in with a number one record and a successful album."

In fact, it was Soft Cells unfashionableness amongst Londons hip elite that led to the duo being taken under the wing of one Stevo. Steve, now 19 years old and a former bricklayer, went along one day a couple of years ago to the Blitz club, the birthplace of the New Romantics in Londons Covent Garden. But they wouldnt let him in—because he was too fat, claims Marc.

Stevos revenge was to set about organizing a series of occasional clubs in London as an alternative to those habituated by the super-elite.

Stevo reckoned there was a lot of electronic music around that was just as good as they were playing, but not as hip," says Marc. He started providing places to play for groups like Fad Gadget, Cabaret Voltaire and Depeche Mode at venues like the Chelsea Drugstore and Billys in Soho. It was an almost deliberate attempt to be unhip and put on bands that were being ignored. It was electronic music without the posers.

Then," he adds, he was asked by Sounds magazine to do a chart of the most popular electronic music, which they termed the Futurist chart. Which is where the term came from."

Marc and Dave first met up with Stevo when they played the vast 1980 Futurama Festival in a converted Leeds tramshed only a few hundred yards from the hotel in which we were sitting. They signed to his Some Bizarre label, licensed through Phonogram, and were included on the Some Bizarre compilation LP put out early last year that also included Depeche Mode.

The rest is history!

Soft Cells sudden transformation from very minor cult figures into pop heroes has so far left them surprisingly unaffected. Fearful that their music could become diluted by the too many disparate influences they find in London, they intend to remain living in Leeds.

Marc also insists that rather than increasing his sense of ego, their large success has made him feel only more insecure.

People who I wouldnt have met if I hadnt have had some success now come up to me with the attitude that because Im somebody them Im wonderful. I find that really quite horrible. I just look in peoples eyes and realize that all their love theyre pouring my way is a totally superficial thing.

A lot of the people telling you how much they adore you are record companies and promoters. Really they couldnt give a shit if you were run over by a bus as long as you made them some money. It seems such a colossal nerve that record companies should try and tell you what songs you should be doing and how to organize your life. They annoy me so much that sometimes I shout and scream at them and they they say, ËœOh, there he goes, trying to do his pop star bit.

In fact its exactly the opposite. The reason youre aggressive with them is because youre trying to hold on to what is you.

Its all very frustrating." w