NO ORDINARY WHIPPER SNAPPERS: SOFT CELL'S SOFT SELL

NO ORDINARY WHIPPER SNAPPERS: SOFT CELL'S SOFT SELL

by

John Mendelssohn

You report to the Ramada Inn in Beverly Hills at the agreed-upon hour of a drizzly afternoon between Halloween and Thanksgiving to ask Soft Cell hard questions, but they were expecting you earlier. Singer Marc Almond, who's doing all the talking for the duo while Dave Ball suffers from a cold, is on his way out to look at graves of the stars. He suggests that you return later. You agree. You're not being paid by the sentence, but you thought it might be a diverting change of pace to write as though you were.

You do return later. Marc Almond still wears the slept-in-looking black shirt, black jeans, and black pixie boots he wore earlier in the afternoon. He wears the same earrings. There's the same lurid red streak in his long black hair. His flesh is pallid but his handshake firm and his smile affable. He offers you no refreshments. He offers you a disclaimer instead.

"I hope you'll forgive me," he says. "A mixtue of nerves for the show tonight and fatigue from the one last night has got me in a sort of limbo-ey state at the moment." You forgive him. You don't have a choice. What you do have is a list of neatly typed questions. You ask one, then another. The early evening races by.

You ask him about if it's true that he is, as you've read (or claim to have read), a keen practitioner of black magic and sadomasochism.

"I'm interested in all the darker subjects," he giggles. "There's a great difference between being a voyeur and a participant, and which one I am I'm not going to say. What I will say is that I don't dabble." He smirks cryptically. It's no one's business but his own.

"If you see an S&M strain in my writing," he suggests, "it's more the emotional sort than the spank-spank/rubber suit sort, which is just a giggle, and superficial, and so tired."

You ask him about The Incident. He's probably been asked a jillion times.before, but he doesn't seem weary of recounting it. "A guy in Record Mirror had written a very sort of silly, very sort of stupid review of an album that had taken me a long time to do," he tells you, "One that took a lot of sweat and blood and heart and soul. If people have to criticize me, I ask that they do it so that I can learn from it, or at least that they do it with a bit of wit and a bit of spark. This guy hadn't, and he'd just totally got the whole thing just totally wrong and said that the album is full of black leather S&M imagery, which is just rubbish. So I thought I'd give him something that would live up to his expectation."

What he gave him, depending on the version you choose to believe, was anything from a look at to a merciless flogging with anything from a riding crop to a bullwhip. You neglect to get these specifics. Maybe you're feeling a little limbo-ey yourself, Mr. Big. " 'So you think I'm about S&M?' I asked him. Well, that isn't what I'm about at all.

"I've certainly written about the darker side of love relationships and sex, because the love relationships that are most interesting to me are the ones that have the most violent arguments and rows and each person trying to get one up on the other and all the tearing apart that goes on and both parties loving it—the kind where you love to get hurt because it makes you love the other person more. But to call what I'm about S&M was just ridiculous."

The album in question, Torment And Toreros, wasn't by Soft Cell, but by Almond's other band, Marc & The Mambas, which he tells you is acoustically based, with a string quartet and a classical piano player. "It was a project I'd been working and working and working on for months and months and months, 'til I was ill from it. It's quite a dark album, made while I was coming out of a severe depression. I called it what I did because there's a lot of very sort of Spanish flavor to a lot of the music. I did Jacques Brel's 'The Bulls' on it. A lot of it does have to do with cruelty, but not the S&M sort."

There was another Mambas album before Torment. "It was called Untitled, and it was very much a sketchbook of my ideas. I'd like to get WB to put out a compilation of my favorite tracks from both albums in this country.

"S&M," he tells you, "is a tired image." Once on the subject, you wonder, is there no getting him off it? We did that years ago in 'Sex Dwarf,' which we don't do anymore cause it's so tired and boring."

You don't like the Ramada Inn, and neither does he. He prefers "places with a bit of grime, places where I can meet outsiders and losers, people who are pushed under the carpet and behind doors." Born in Southport, near Liverpool, he is the scion of a middle-class family that "wanted me to speak nicely and have manners." His stepfather's a perpetually struggling architect. He gets along much better with his mother now that he no longer lives with her. His biological father's a lunatic whom he hasn't seen in years.

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"I see L.A. and New York," he tells you, "as Sodom and Gomorrah. There's real Underlying sickness in L.A., which I've come to appreciate and be fascinated by." He himself lives in Soho, the tawdriest section of London. He doesn't approve of the "gaudy shops on Rodeo Drive [Beverly Hills's most opulent commercial street]He doesn't approve of "the cosmetic surgeries and pet graveyards and Forest Lawn." He doesn't approve of Charles Manson.

Telling you that what he likes best about his success is "being able to revel in selfindulgence," he begins to babble. "The whole of pop music is grossly self-indulgent. When 1 sort of do a cover of a song because I want to do it because I happen to love the song, 'cause I happen to like it and I like the lyrics and 1 feel an affinity with the lyrics 'cause I feel that the lyrics express something that I want to—which is surely the reason that most people cover a song, or should be (most people in Britain cover a song to get a hit in the charts 'cause it's a tried and true classic)—people say, 'Oh, you're being very self-indulgent.'

" 'Of Course, I am,' I say. 'The whole of contemporary music is self-indulgent.' Anyone who's his own boss is self-indulgent, anyone who does what he wants to do in the way that he wants to do it."

He doesn't tell you that wealth is one of the things he likes best about his stardom. "Money," he says, in fact, "sucks. Money is a disease. If I ever have any I just throw it away or get rid of it or put it back into work. I've lost an awful lot because I don't know anything at all about business, and don't want to. 1 just put it all back into projects. I don't wait for the record company to sort of say, 'Well, you can do that and this for such and such a budget.' I just do it. The important thing is to be doing something all the time. When I don't work I crack up.

"I have an apartment in New York that I've never lived in. I was advised to get it for the future. I'll probably sort of sell it and put the money back into other things. I'd rather have just enough to pay my rent. The important thing is to work, not to sit rotting by a swimming pool surrounded by cocaine. I find cocaine fascinating, actually—at least as long as I can stay detached from it. Not that I'm being moralistic about it. It's just that there's something about cocaine that's really sick, I suppose because I associate it with people from record companies."

What he likes least about his stardom is "people trying to put me in brackets and bags all the time. That's infuriating, but it's also a motivation to try to smash them down again."

You unveil your best—and most neatly typed—question, the one inspired by George Orwell's 1984, in which Big Brother's boys had on file the mode of dying that everyone in the state dreaded most. You ask Almond what someone who wanted to torture him with music would play. He answers without hesitation. "The music that you hear on American FM radio most of the time, bland rock, and a lot of the British music that panders to that."

You ask him why Soft Cell has announced plans to cease to be while they seem to be doing so well. "We didn't want to fall into the quagmire of groups constantly releasing seven, eight, nine, ten albums just because they're safe within their cell, as it were," he says with a merry sneer. "We didn't want to become one of those groups that says, 'Oh, it's August now. We'd better record an album in time for Christmas.' We wanted to end when we were still at a creative peak. I don't want the millstone of a group's name hanging round my neck and neither does Dave."

You've read all of your neatly typed questions. You turn off your cassette recorder, tell Almond, "Thanks, man," and disappear into the night, or at least into the elevator. Until Adam Ant comes to town later in the week, Mr. Big, your work is done. ^