For Soft Cell, the synth duo of Marc Almond and David Ball, their greatest hit was both an albatross and an anomaly. Although they would rack up a total of 10 chart hits in their native U.K. by 1984, around the world Soft Cell is synonymous with a single song: "Tainted Love." An electronic cover of an obscure sixties soul record, the track was not only an international number one but also a Guinness Book of World Records–breaking, 43-week fixture on the Billboard singles chart. "Tainted Love" was impassioned and melodramatic, and featured a deliciously overwrought vocal from Almond, but it was nothing like the rest of their debut album, 1981's Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret. That revealed Soft Cell in their true colors—and they were sort of milky white with a hint of faded yellow. Small wonder Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret was so fixated on smut, ugliness, and decay. Almond and Ball came of age in a country where the daily tabloids feature bare breasts on one page and editorials preaching morality on the next, and the prominent television personalities were flabby, grotesque middle-age comics who pawed and leered at younger women paid to tolerate them. While their New Romantic colleagues were painting neon pictures of divine decadence and parties that never ended, Soft Cell were forever stuck out on the street, drunk, depressed, and wearing the wrong clothes.
JB: The difference between pop music now and in the eighties is the difference between stage school and art school. It's the difference between wanting to be successful and wanting to be different. Soft Cell were a total art school band. They were pretentious, they were show-offs, and they wanted to shock. There may have been nothing remotely controversial about "Tainted Love," but the first time Almond minced on to Top of the Pops and gave a camp, eye-rolling, lips-pursed performance of his big hit, he single-handedly extended Britain's generation gap by a good 18 months. Middle-aged dads raised on rock erupted in fury at the sight of him. No other band before, or since, was that commercially astute and that enthusiastic about wallowing in the tawdry. When today's concerned parents wring their hands about the likes of Miley Cyrus prematurely sexualizing their precious offspring, I think back to 1981. In the U.K., Soft Cell were on every kiddie TV show, every preteen wall, and every radio station, and for a lot of that audience, "Tainted Love" was the gateway drug that led to them hearing Almond singing about seedy films and sex dwarves.
LM: The banned video for "Sex Dwarf" makes "Girls on Film" look like something you'd see on the Disney Channel! There are bare breasts, raw meat, chainsaws and, true to the song's title, a little person outfitted in S&M gear. I know because I just YouTubed it. And that was the first time I'd ever seen a Soft Cell music video. Although "Tainted Love" ruled American radio alongside the Human League's "Don't You Want Me," it did it without the aid of accompanying visuals. Still, "Tainted Love" exhibited more than enough new wave–ness to seize my attention: a sinister, synthesized melody on top of an I-dare-you-not-to-dance beat, and pained, angry lyrics sung in an English accent by a sensitive man who'd been wounded by a careless lover. Now if I could only erase the picture of that miniature gimp from my brain!
MARC ALMOND: "Memorabilia" [produced by Mute Records' Daniel Miller and released in 1978] had been a big dance club hit, and a buzz was starting to happen about us. We'd gone through our cold, robotic, electronic music phase; we'd done our songs about consumerism and suburban nightmares. We wanted to bring a lot more passion to electronic music, a lot more soulfulness, and to bring a punk ethic back where it would be wilder. We thought, What's the most un-electronic-band thing we can do? How about a soul song?
Dave was a fan of northern soul music, which was very rare, collectible soul in the North of England in the late sixties. It was very much of the Tamla Motown era—black music for a white audience. People were in competition to get these very rare, obscure records, of which only a handful of copies had been produced. But because these records were very rough and ready, there was a real punky-poppiness to them. We said, "Wouldn't it be great if Soft Cell, for an encore, did a northern soul song?" It was so out there as an idea.
Dave played me a song by Gloria Jones, and another version of it by Ruth Swann. It was called "Tainted Love." I'd been a huge Marc Bolan fan, an obsessed T. Rex fan—I still am—and of course, Bolan was married to Gloria Jones, and she sang backing vocals on all the T. Rex records. So here was a Gloria Jones song, and there was just something immediately infectious about this record. We played it as our encore for a while, and it went down so well that our own tracks became much catchier and more danceable as a result. Myth has it that we based it on the Gloria Jones version, but if you listen to Ruth Swann's, it's much more in keeping with the Soft Cell version. We just gave it our sound: a cold, electronic sound with a passionate vocal.
We recorded all our singles at the time as 12-inch records. We didn't record them as three-minute singles and add to them; we recorded them as 12-inchers and edited them down. We were in the studio messing around with different ideas and came up with segueing into this breathy, sleazy version of "Where Did Our Love Go?" with a breakdown in the middle. We'd hear it in clubs, and it drove people crazy. It was a life-changer for us.
I'd met David Ball in 1978 when I was doing a fine arts course at Leeds Polytechnic. You're given the facilities and told to create your own art, and at the end of the year, you have to present a show. I tried painting and sculpture but was never very good, so I gravitated toward performance art. I made Super 8 films, and that's what led me to working with David.
I was very influenced by trash culture: Warhol and Lindsay Kemp, decadent theatrical stuff but with a punk bias. I did quite a bit of performance art that usually involved films, and I wanted experimentally different soundtracks, so I brought in different musicians to create them. Dave had a synthesizer—which was still an exotic instrument at the time—and we had a lot of musical likes in common. So I said, "Would you do some electronic music to one of my performances?" Dave was writing these songs about consumerism—they were like shopping adverts, great little two-minute pop songs. He said, "If you do the vocals for my songs, I'll do the music for you."
We were quite avant-garde at first. Our early concerts were in the art college and Leeds punk clubs. We got a small following, as well as some quite adverse reactions. We showed films as a backdrop behind us, as did groups like the Human League at the time. Some of them were quite upsetting to people. They weren't pornographic, but they were typical art-student: nudity and cutting up bits of meat. They were very visceral. We were arty and pretentious, but as we went on, the song side developed more, and I started writing lyrics.
We wanted to show the glamour in mundanity. We wanted to sing about things like bedsitters [efficiency apartments] and going shopping and collecting trash and souvenirs. Our songs were about going to supermarkets but imbued with a sense of escaping to a nightlife. When I wrote "Memorabilia," I was DJing at the time, and I was listening to this James Brown record that had this funky repetitive riff. I thought, Let's turn that funk riff into an electronic riff. Then I wrote a list of things that I liked collecting and sang them the way I used to sing, in a very bored and flat kind of way. It was very punk. The first Siouxsie and the Banshees album, The Scream, made a real impression on me. I loved the way they turned these suburban things into nightmares—that was a great influence on the early Soft Cell stuff.
We were signed [to Sire Records] as part of a package deal. [Soft Cell manager] Stevo was really keen on another group called B-Movie, who were much more like a Duran Duran. They were very good, but they weren't Duran Duran. Stevo said, "If you sign B-Movie, you have to sign Soft Cell." We were given an advance of 1,000 pounds and told to spend it on new equipment.
Then suddenly, "Tainted Love" got played on the radio and went up and up the chart, and B-Movie became forgotten. But they still thought we were a strange novelty act. They were panicking that we were so art student–y and unpredictable and had this punk ethic. They thought we were going to mess the whole thing up. I remember, before going on Top of the Pops, I was trying to see how many of these funny bracelets I could get on my arm. I thought it was a great look. The record company was freaking out: "You can't go on like that! Please, please don't!" That made me more determined to go against them. They tried to bring in choreographers to tell me how to move. From the get-go, we were off-kilter with them.
MIXTAPE: 5 More Sleazy Songs About Sex 1. "Relax," Frankie Goes to Hollywood 2. "Can't You See," Vicious Pink 3. "No GDM," Gina X 4. "Turning Japanese," The Vapors 5. "The Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight," Dominatrix
After "Tainted Love" went to number one [in the U.K.], all hell let loose. I was still living in a shared student squat in Leeds, but one day I was on the outside of television looking in on Top of the Pops, the next I was on the inside looking out. I think the record company wanted us to do endless northern soul songs all sounding like "Tainted Love," but Dave and I had ideas of developing and doing something that was a bit more lasting. "Tainted Love" was a double-edged sword: It was great to have the success, but it brought this teenybop attention that we didn't feel very comfortable with. We started to get very, very young fans, yet we were quite strong in our performances—we were aggressive and confrontational. It became a strange situation where we were thrown into this no-man's land between pop and experimental electronic music.
We realized that we could try and put some subversion into pop—depressing lyrics with an upbeat sound so you could dance through your tears. Like "Bedsitter": You're dancing because it's Saturday night, and you're forgetting your mundane life of living in a bedsitter. That became the ethos of what we were about on the first album, Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret. Living in sleazy, eighties Britain, repressed people leading secret lives, frustrated living in bedsits—it was the total antithesis of what Duran Duran were doing, which was singing about this glamorous life, and living in Rio, and sailing in ships on beautiful seas. We didn't see life like that. We were in the backstreets. We were very much children of the seventies; we still had that seventies-going-into-the-eighties culture. We'd lived through power cuts and grim times and glam rock. When we went to New York [to record Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret], we were drawn to the dark underbelly, and that started to influence our sound and our ethos. It became a real war between us and the record company. They wanted us to be these clean-living guys, and we wanted to see how much we could get away with in our lyrics and our videos. It was like, "Let's see how extreme I can be or how camp I can be."
Dave and I have always been very different people, and our relationship had become quite distant when we were doing Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret. We brought very different influences to Soft Cell. Dave brought experimental electronic music. He loved things like Devo, Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire. I brought things like glam rock and Jacques Brel and T. Rex, and chansons, ballads, blues, and a sense of theater. While doing Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret, we were thrust together, put in the same hotel rooms. When we moved to New York, Dave found his own place to stay and his own circle of friends, I found my own circle, and we started to drift. Drugs played a part. We'd both become very, very heavily into the New York drugs scene, which was fun, then the London drugs scene, which was much darker for us. It became very destructive.
THAT WAS THEN
BUT THIS IS NOW
Soft Cell made two more albums, 1983's The Art of Falling Apart and 1984's challenging This Last Night in Sodom. As a solo artist, Marc Almond has amassed a considerable catalog in a dizzying variety of styles, from cabaret to Russian folk songs to rock and electronica dance music. His hits include "Something's Gotten Hold of My Heart," "Tears Run Rings," "Jacky," and "The Days of Pearly Spencer." Ball formed the Grid in 1988. They saw their biggest success with 1994's Evolver album, which included the hits "Texas Cowboys" and "Swamp Thing." Soft Cell re-formed in 2002 for the album Cruelty Without Beauty. Their version of "Tainted Love" has been covered by, among others, Marilyn Manson, the Pussycat Dolls, and Paul Young. Rihanna's "S.O.S." was built on a sample of the song.
ALMOND: When we did The Art of Falling Apart, we knew Soft Cell was falling apart, and we didn't know how much longer we could hold it together. We put a lot of that anger and frustration into that album, which was a hard, visceral record, and that reflected in our live performances, where we'd throw equipment all over the stage. It was the gradual destruction of the band.
We pulled out our final anger with This Last Night in Sodom, which is one of my favorite records. We recorded it in mono just to be bloody-minded, and it brought Soft Cell back to an electronic-punk feel. Then Dave decided he wanted to do studio stuff, and I wanted to do my stuff—I'd already branched out into Marc and the Mambas. There was no animosity. It was just drift. Me and Dave were still friends, but we thought, We can't go on like this, so we split in 1984. We did our final tour of America after we'd split because we were contracted to. We'd so had enough of the whole thing that we refused to play "Tainted Love."
After 17 years, Dave had done some mixes for me, we'd been in touch again, and it felt like the right time to do something again. We wrote some songs, and we thought about calling it another name. But Marc Almond and Dave Ball—everybody's going to call it Soft Cell. So, Soft Cell it was.
It's a great feeling for us that people have covered the Soft Cell version [of "Tainted Love"]. If you have a big record like that, it takes over your life for a while. You have to turn your back on it because it becomes bigger than you. You have to move aside from it for a time. But you fall back in love with it, and you have to embrace it, because people will always associate you with it. You can't fight it, so you have to learn to love it as a record, and I do. I have this real love affair with it now. If my life's a show, then "Tainted Love" would be my theme tune. I can't deny people it; it's the thing that got me on Top of the Pops and on people's minds. When I'm onstage, I give people my new stuff and they're very patient. Then I have to give them a reward and say, "Thanks for listening to my new songs, now here's 'Tainted Love.'"
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