In this month’s Low Culture podcast we remember a time when Soho wasn’t full of over-priced coffee shops and guffawing advertising executives as musician, Croydon evangelist, and saviour of electronic music twitter Dale Cornish joins Luke Turner and guest presenter Jennifer Lucy Allan to discuss Soft Cell’s sleaze pop masterpiece This Last Night In Sodom. Never mind ‘Tainted Love’, this is Marc Almond and Dave Ball’s finest moment. As Dale puts it, “this sounds like Soho, everything is slightly too near your face… whatever that might be”.
We discuss why the record sounds like Throbbing Gristle’s Andrew Lloyd Weber musical, a sleazy Starlight Express, or the theme for a gameshow – “You could imagine Matthew Kelly leaping out,” says Dale, “like Going For Sodom”. Dale explains why Soft Cell are more exciting than most contemporary “press release electronic music”, and why the shonky production is what makes it such a brilliant album, and how "we could go out for dinner / but we’re always on drugs" is one of the best lyrics in pop. And then, of course, the sleaze, which makes it a curiously British record that never got anywhere commercially in the USA. “Marc Almond and Dave Ball were the pervs on Top Of The Pops, but by the time this was released music had caught up with them, and the thing that they did – that they said they borrowed from Suicide, the dodgy duo, had gone mainstream”.
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