For an upper-class Victorian lady, a pair of gloves was the embodiment of sophistication, a symbol that she did not have to sully her hands with manual labour. If she were respectable, she would never leave the house without them, and when in company would remove them only when dining.
When that upper-class Victorian lady arrived at the seaside, it is said she would purposefully leave her gloves behind her on the train.
Dr Kathryn Ferry, historian of the seaside: The seaside has always had a certain air about it, a sense that you can get away with things on the fringes of the country, in that liminal space between the land and the sea. The normal rules don’t apply.
Perhaps it was only from the English coast that a band like Soft Cell could emerge. Dave Ball, from Blackpool, and Marc Almond, from Southport, were at their best when they wrote the soundtrack to the fringes. This is usually linked with the surreal bacchanalia of the club scene that they threw themselves into during their rise to fame in the 1980s – the non-stop erotic cabaret for which their debut album was to be named – but really fringe culture had been around them from the start.
Marc Almond, Soft Cell: I think a listener to Soft Cell can get a sense we were both from Lancashire seaside towns. There is an element of seaside postcard trash in our music, terrible variety entertainers and cabaret duos playing in seaside bars singing club songs to a Bontempi organ and a singer out of tune giving it too much in a bad outfit and makeup. A sinister scary camp.
Consider a character like the protagonist of ‘Bedsitter’, skint, alone and unsatisfied, the banal grind of the everyday juxtaposed with the thrilling, financially ruinous parallel world of the night. The bedsitter’s release might be found in ‘clubland’, not the seaside, but he could just as easily be imagined as a worker pining for the days he could let loose on the Pleasure Beach. Clubland and the seaside are merely different regions of the same alternative dimension.
Dave Ball, Soft Cell: ‘Bedsitter’ wasn’t really written about Blackpool or Southport, but it could have been.
The seaside is not the same thing as the coast because it is a concept of human creation. In 1626 a mineral spring was discovered in Scarborough, and the first resort was built around it. By the eighteenth century, rich Georgians would be sent to such places by their doctors for the supposed benefits of a freezing cold, early morning ocean swim. Entrepreneurs began setting up shop in what were then small fishing communities to start catering for these rich visitors and so the focus shifted from health to leisure. As the Industrial Revolution brought both steam-powered trains and an explosion of industry, so too did it bring hordes of holidaymakers from factories, farms and mills. ‘Wakes Weeks’, where industry would temporarily shut down to allow workers to take a break, would be staggered among different industrial towns. All of Halifax would descend on the beaches one weekend, all of Bolton the next.
In 1871 the Bank Holidays Act first designated Easter Monday, Whit Monday, the first Monday in August and Boxing Day as days off. So popular was Sir John Lubbock, the politician who spearheaded the act, that there was a campaign to name the August holiday ‘Lubbock’s Day’.
News of the World, 1871: Blessings on the head of Sir John Lubbock, who invented a decent excuse for holidays to Englishmen […] we certainly did wish that some great inventive genius could discover a reason why the people should not work all the year round.
The seaside had also been an otherworldly place before that. Sixty years earlier the Prince Regent and later King George IV transformed his seaside villa in Brighton into the decadent faux-oriental dream palace that still stands today, and filled it with art and extravagant parties. Now that spirit had spilled over into the masses. On heaving beaches there was a giddy maximalism, hardworking people reinventing themselves as creatures of leisure, free to create entire new personas, if only for a long weekend.
The throngs of entertainers that followed were all too happy to play on that theme. Popular comedy sketches would concern a stuffy or downtrodden character adopting a new and flamboyant persona, only to receive their comeuppance when they ran into someone from back home on the promenade. Humorous postcards would depict young couples exasperated when they ran into the prying relatives they had come to the seaside to avoid.
Dr Kathryn Ferry: On holiday you’ve got a different backdrop. You’ve left your head behind, and you can be a different person. The seaside has always had that element to it. I guess that’s why in films and stories, when people elope, they go off to some dodgy hotel in Brighton and sign in as Mr and Mrs Smith.
By the late 1950s, when Marc Almond and Dave Ball were born, the seaside was booming again. With two world wars still fresh in the memory, a nostalgia for the time before them was emerging in response. Victorian-style music hall and variety shows were still huge, and audiences were large enough to draw the biggest names in the country. Through the subsequent two decades, however, those rich enough started to holiday abroad and the clientele began to grow less affluent. Poorer audiences meant less renowned entertainers and less investment. By the time Almond and Ball were in their early teens, the glamour had begun to fade, and the energy had begun to get stranger.
Dr Kathryn Ferry: There was still this desire among people going to the seaside for their holidays to have that razzmatazz, that bit of old-fashioned drama, the variety shows, the dancers, the comedies.
Almond and Ball were natives, not visitors, to the seaside. As a result, they were intertwined with their towns’ respective spirits, able to observe the holidaymakers as they came and went. For Ball, growing up in Blackpool, even afternoon youth discos were accompanied by scantily clad go-go dancers. As a child he made pocket money from ‘bagging’ – waiting at the coach stop with a cart to carry arriving tourists’ luggage to their guest house in exchange for a tip. Later he sold lottery tickets from a kiosk on the promenade and ice cream on the pier. His musical debut was as a DJ, purchasing a strobe light and hand-crafting a valve amplifier after school for six months, before taking his ‘Smile Disco Show’ across town.
Dave Ball: We’d do school discos and then also play my dad’s masonic dances. We’d play pop, but then we’d also have to play all these waltzes and quicksteps. It was very strange. It was a very homemade effort, really. My dad worked [in telecommunications] for the GPO [General Post Office] so he was in the world of electronics. He used to build fruit machines for a friend of his who had an arcade on the Golden Mile, so in our garage there were loads of machines in different states of repair, all kinds of components which I would borrow. My dad had showed me a lot about how to build amplifiers and how to solder things. I was always very interested in electronics and how electricity works. He was always very insistent. When I wanted an electric guitar, he said, ‘If you’re going to play around with electricity, you need to know how it works.’
My dad had very little interest in music apart from when he’d play his Glenn Miller records at Christmas, but the electronic influence still really came from him. I was always interested in how things worked electronically, and then when synthesisers came into my life I never looked back.
Almond suffered from bronchitis and asthma as a child, and his grandfather would take him on long walks along Southport beach in the hope that the salty air would provide respite – as if he were a miniature Georgian aristocrat. He spent later parts of his childhood in Leeds and Harrogate, but would always return to the coast for the duration of every summer. Around his fifteenth birthday, when his mother divorced his alcoholic and abusive father, they moved back for good, enrolling at a local grammar school, where he met Huw Feather. A year later the two would strike up a friendship at Southport Art College, which they both attended after leaving school; that friendship would go on to be one of the most significant of their lives. As Almond went on to stardom with Soft Cell, it was Feather who was initially the band’s set designer and then their de facto creative director, helping to craft the visual identity that would intensify and solidify their impact.
Huw Feather: From day one, pop was my plug and connection to the world. I used to sing the charts to myself in bed to get myself to sleep, tapping out the rhythms. When I wasn’t listening to records, I was also learning to be a magician, and I was an avid puppeteer and toy theatre enthusiast. My father had opened Southport’s first legal casino in 1961 when the Gaming Act got repealed so he was very much interested in my card magic and sleight of hand. He’d take me to the Blackpool Convention for Magicians, which back then was like my Comic Con. I was nuts about fashion, too. I had a crazy great aunt in London who was a bon vivant and had been a model in the 1940s and 1950s. She used to throw open the doors of her wardrobe and instruct me on which designer was Chanel and which was Dior. She also took me to museums and encouraged me to look at various artists. I knew what I wanted to be and to do from the age of twelve, which was to be a theatre designer. My father dropped dead when I was fifteen. He had been against me being in the theatre, he wanted me to have a pension and look after my mum. But when he died my mum said, ‘It’s totally up to you.’
Marc arrived at grammar school when we were fourteen or fifteen, and then we both ended up at the art college. My friend Andy Dalglish was at the technical college next door, and the three of us were all in a theatre group together where I was doing the set design. I think I can see [the later Soft Cell visual style] in its nascent form in what we were doing there. Neon signs, advertising, musicals, dream sequences and drug trips.
Almond worked on hook-a-duck, then bingo, at the Southport fairground, falling in love with its gaudy décor and colourful characters. When trying to pay back some money he had misappropriated from the theatre troupe for whom he had served as treasurer, he took a job at Southport Theatre where he operated the spotlight (Feather also found work there as a stagehand). His first job was a pantomime.
Marc Almond: The Southport Theatre was a strange carnival world where every day was some sexual assault by some low-on-the-bill pantomime variety act or seaside theatre empresario.
Privy to the debauched afterparties that came along with the local theatre scene, Feather and Almond also began to explore Southport’s queer side – albeit from a distance. There were the sand dunes on the outskirts of town, for instance, a popular spot for gay hook-ups that the teenagers dubbed ‘fairyland’.
Huw Feather: The dunes are a huge part of Southport; people from the town are called Sandgrounders. They’re the only undulation in our landscape; we’re flat as a pancake otherwise. To actually get there you’ve got to go three train stops from Southport Central, so you’re in no man’s land, which is where all the ‘bad behaviour’ happened. We all grew up hearing, ‘Keep away from the dunes, there’s stuff going on there we don’t want you to know about,’ which, we found out later, is gay people cruising for trade.
I’ve always been bisexual, but in those days I didn’t express it as that. I was ‘straight’, I had a girlfriend, blah blah blah, but Marc and I used to camp around with a hairdresser called Phillip who was quite clearly very gay. We’d call by after school, or meet him for a coffee, and just sit around, giggling and being outrageous. Nothing more, nothing less.
Ball, meanwhile, grew up both literally and figuratively in the shadow of Blackpool Tower. It was the tallest structure in the British Empire when it opened in 1894, five years after the Eiffel Tower, which it aped, and an imperious embodiment of all that era’s swagger – a declaration that a northern English holiday town had the glamour and prestige to rival the belle époque. By Ball’s time, however, its main draw was the circus housed in the entertainment block down below.
Dave Ball: Norman Barrett was the famous ringmaster. It was when they still allowed them to have lions and tigers.
Norman Barrett, Tower Circus ringmaster: I’m not knocking them, but a lot of ringmasters are just announcers, whereas I was an on-show director. Being a ringmaster isn’t a job, it’s a lifestyle. I was coming back into Blackpool one night at about three o’clock in the morning, and I had in the back of my Land Rover twelve budgerigars, four ballet-dancing pigeons, a boxer, a Yorkshire terrier and a clairvoyant hen. A policeman stopped me and said, ‘What have you got in the back of the car?’ I said, ‘Twelve budgerigars, four ballet-dancing pigeons, a boxer, a Yorkshire terrier and a clairvoyant hen!’
We used to take the elephants to the sea in the morning, and thousands would come to see them exercising on the beach. Their trainer, Bobby Robertson, used to take the elephants up to the North Pier, leave them in a line, then run down to the Central Pier and shout to the elephants, ‘Come down!’ Then they would charge after him down the beach.
Dave Ball: One Saturday morning when I was on the Golden Mile, selling lottery tickets from a little hut just opposite the Tower Circus, this dishevelled guy walked up to buy a ticket. He said he’d been in the casino all night. He was obviously still a bit pissed, and he said he was taking a stroll along the beach when he saw a herd of elephants coming towards him. I think he thought he was getting a bad bout of the DTs.
Jackie Ratcliffe, ballet dancer and theatre performer: In 1975 I secured my first professional job, told fibs about my age, and then ran away from school. I joined a French rollerskating act and we performed the waterfall finale in the Tower Circus. The clowns would entertain the crowd while ring boys would roll up the matting. Once it was cleared, a circular section of the floor would rise up quite high. The ring would then start to fill with water and small fountains would start. The finale was two of us spinning by our necks as the fountains went up to full speed and height like a huge waterfall. To be honest, I can’t remember how we’d get off stage at the end.
Norman Barrett: The Tower Circus is the most beautiful circus building in the world, and when I worked there everything was the highest standard. We had trapeze artists, great jugglers, acrobats, always had the best going around. Charlie Cairoli was the big name, though. When he was there the place used to erupt. You wouldn’t say you were going to the Tower Circus, you’d say, ‘We’re going to go and see Charlie tomorrow.’
Almond was heavily influenced by clowns of a more historical kind, who he viewed as performance artists. This intensified after he grew friendly with the troupe Clown Cavalcade after seeing a production of Harlequinade at the Southport Art Centre – a chaotic British slapstick adaptation of the Italian commedia dell’arte, and the root of the modern pantomime. He and Feather performed a clown show of their own, too, touring the free festivals of the area.
Huw Feather: Marc was the white-faced clown, the character of Pierrot with a face painted in that mime artist kind of way, and I was Auguste, what we think of as a clown today with big makeup, red cheeks and an outlined lip, the bumbling buffoon.
Marc Almond: For me, the theatrical clowns, as opposed to circus clowns, were always preferable. I loved the whitefaced, beautiful Harlequins, the Augustes with their spangly outfits that never seemed to be comical at all. I wished I could hide behind a face of white pan-stick makeup and wear glittering outfits. Years later, I became one such clown, as I stood on stage or in a television show in the spotlight, my clothes sparkling and my makeup just a little too pale – a ghost of all those past yearnings, fearful of revealing who I really was.
It is no surprise that Soft Cell’s earliest performances, after Almond and Ball met as art students at Leeds Polytechnic, were nothing if not a little clownish. They were essentially performance art shows consisting of tape loops, feedback and sound effects from Ball, and absurdity from Almond. For one piece called Deterioration, Almond donned a white wedding dress with fake blood pouring out of his mouth. He smashed glass photo frames to the floor, swallowed a bottle of pills and writhed around as Ball’s sounds, sampled from a car crash, eventually morphed into Barbara Streisand’s ‘Memory’.
Tom Hardwick-Allen, clown and avant-garde musician: Experimental music and clowning ultimately seek radical presence, which often involves vulnerability. Doing things correctly can get in the way of this, as you fall back on what things should be, rather than what they could be. Experimental music often relies on intense listening, especially in free improv. Likewise, the clown feeds directly off its environment, and often an audience. Yet both experimental music and clowning often have a kind of disregard for the audience. It doesn’t matter that a larger audience will likely not appreciate this or that piece of experimental music, the dialogue is with sound, not so much with the crowd. Meanwhile the clown is seen as an idiot, lesser than the real people watching, but it may well be the opposite way round – especially from the clown’s perspective.
The experimental musician seeks particular material alignments that might offer a glimpse of transcendence. Both share a sideways logic that’s more metonymic than it is intellectual. There’s a sense of seeing things for what they really are, pushing things to extreme or ridiculous places to reveal pretences that we live by.
Huw Feather: I can absolutely see a link between the commedia dell’arte and rock and roll. If you think about it, it’s about telling a story or narrative on stage, using four set characters: Pierrot is the innocent who gets taken advantage of; Harlequin is sprightly, devilish and clever; Auguste is kind of an idiot; and then there’s Columbine, who Harlequin, Auguste and Pierrot all fall for. I’m sure you could use those to view the different characters associated with frontmen, backing singers, bass, lead guitar or rhythm guitar.
Soft Cell were drawing on more straightforward influences too. At a gig at the Floral Hall in Southport, Almond was mesmerised by T. Rex frontman Marc Bolan, and would henceforth use his middle name Mark with an altered spelling, rather than his real forename, Peter, in tribute. Both he and Ball were spellbound when David Bowie (a literal clown turned pop star) performed ‘Starman’ on Top of the Pops in 1972 – Almond so much so that it would provide the direct model for his own performance of ‘Tainted Love’ on the show nine years later.
Dave Ball: Marc always said he wanted to have the same impact that David Bowie had had on him when he saw him do ‘Starman’. Everyone of a certain age remembers seeing that and thinking, ‘Wow, who’s he?’ With his blue acoustic guitar and red hair and no eyebrows, he looked like an alien. Then everyone at school the next day was saying, ‘Who was that bloke? That David Bowie bloke?’ Then by the next week they’ve all got David Bowie haircuts. He made it OK for boys to dye their hair and wear makeup, and I think Marc was in a way a continuation of that tradition.
In general, though, popular rock bands were hard to come by in Blackpool – it was hard for ‘proper’ musicians to get a foothold in the seaside otherworld’s strange, flipped hierarchy, where a budgie trainer might sell more tickets than T. Rex.
Dave Ball: Bands didn’t play much in Blackpool often but the first I saw was Status Quo. That was when I first thought ‘I want to be in a band, I want to do what they’re doing.’ Ten years later I was actually on the same stage. That was quite an amazing achievement for me, actually.
He had better luck with Northern Soul. Every Friday and Saturday night at the Highland Room he would watch DJs Colin Curtis and Ian Levine, whose collection of thirty thousand vinyl records set them apart as rivals to the Wigan Casino.
Dave Ball: I’d been to junior discos at the Highland Room when I was a kid, but I wasn’t allowed to go at that point because I was only about eleven. A few years later I started to sneak in. I just thought the whole thing was great. I liked the clothes, the baseball shirts and baggy trousers and flat shoes. It was really energetic. I’d always liked Motown and this was an extension of that, all these funny little record labels trying to emulate that success.
This music spilled over to the tourist areas too, blasting out from the bass-heavy sound systems on the Pleasure Beach where he worked his succession of teenage jobs. One day, Ball and his colleagues at a beachside ice cream stall were waiting for the tide to go out so that they could set up shop, when he would have a different kind of musical experience. Usually, they would fill the time preparing cartons of orange juice using an ancient machine that burnt their hands, but this time there were no chores left.
Dave Ball: It was raining, and it was high tide, so there was no point going down to the beach. We were just stuck in the staff room at this factory, down one of the back alleys. One of the guys had an old-fashioned mono cassette player, and this cassette with a motorway sign on the cover. It was Kraftwerk’s Autobahn and I was completely fascinated by it. For me, I thought if I was going to do music, there would be the Northern Soul influence and the Kraftwerk influence. I think there’s a pretty obvious link to a certain single that we did later.
In Southport, it was impossible for the music scene in Almond’s youth not to feel like a bust after the boom of Merseybeat; Liverpool is only sixteen miles away, its surrounding seaside towns swallowed up by the movement then spat out again once the industry’s attention moved on.
Ron Ellis, promoter, DJ, long-time Southport resident: Liverpool had an identity of its own, it had its own hit parade, and Southport was absorbed into that. The Beatles would play the Queen’s Hotel, all the other bands making their names would come over here first. There were so many bands and work for them all the time, they could easily play six times a week, until it faded. Even in places where there would be ballroom dancing, at ten o’clock it would switch over to a DJ playing Merseybeat records until two in the morning. It was a very vibrant scene. But by 1967 it had lost the charm. There were still groups coming from Liverpool, but attention had turned elsewhere.
Soft Cell’s seaside was not one in which serious decline had set in – that would come through the 1980s and 1990s – but the paint had begun to peel. Every now and then a darkness would emerge beneath the veneer.
Huw Feather: Because Southport had been quite a nice, middle-class, almost posh town to ‘take the waters’ in the Edwardian period and in the 1920s, it became a place for ill people to either recuperate or die. It’s always had that ghostlike presence of all those people who had passed through the town.
Marc Almond: At Southport Fair I had watched an elderly man climb on to the waltzer. When it came to a halt he was slumped, lifeless in one of those semi-circular chairs. He had died of a heart attack.
Once the holidaymakers left, all the opulence that had been constructed to serve their escapist fantasies began to fade. From September, the Blackpool Illuminations would shine against the gathering darkness of winter, but when they were switched off at the beginning of the new year and the pantomimes closed up shop, the bleakness was left stark and unadorned.
Norman Barrett: The circus only used to run until the end of the illuminations, then when the illuminations closed, everything in Blackpool closed with them. If seaside towns are like another world, then those worlds are like planets that spin on a more extreme axis, where the changes in season are more dramatic and pronounced. It is that sense of contrast, between the on- and off-season, the release of seaside entertainment and the emptiness left behind, that would prove most influential on a band for whom the focus was not only the extravagance of the night but also the melancholy of the morning after. As natives of the edgeland, Soft Cell embraced the winters as much as the summers.
Huw Feather: I come from a town with a fairground that closes for six months of the year. That became a fascinating place to visit both during and out of season; in fact, it was even more interesting out of season. In spring I’d watch them paint the new art, the cartoons and the uber-popped-up Victoriana with metallics and bright psychedelic colouring.
Dave Ball: I still love seaside towns when they’re out of season. If you live by the seaside, it’s nice when there’s no tourists around, you can walk along the beach and it’s empty and grey. Then a sadness when the fun’s over, when the funfair’s closed. I always liked to walk around the funfair when it was shut, take my dog out for a walk on the Pleasure Beach when all the rides closed for the winter. That seaside melancholy rubbed off on Marc and me, the atmosphere of that. It’s a very northern thing, I think. A dour northern-ness. There’s a transience to the neon lights and the candyfloss.
Bedsit Land: The strange worlds of Soft Cell by Patrick Clarke is published by Manchester University Press
