In a moving tribute to his late Soft Cell bandmate Dave Ball, who died this week at the age of 66, Marc Almond remarked that the two were “chalk and cheese”. When I interviewed several dozen of the musicians’ collaborators, associates, friends and occasional foes for my book on Soft Cell, Bedsit Land, it was telling that almost all of them remarked, in one way or the other, on the same thing. Almond was the flamboyant, magnetic frontman, Ball the reclusive mastermind, buried in the shadows with his synth. Almond was slight and wiry, garbed in tight leather, bangles and makeup. Ball was tall, broad, and more partial to a dapper blazer and tie. That juxtaposition was central to the band’s genius, the way the former’s dark, cracked glamour was set against the latter’s everyman charm. Ball himself once remarked that he looked more as if he was Almond’s minder than his collaborator.
When I spoke to Ball on several occasions for my book, it was that everyman I encountered. He was unerringly funny in the way that people with his northwestern English roots often are, possessing a great mixture of self-deprecation and sharp, mischievous wit, revelling in an innate ability to elicit a gut-busting laugh out of nowhere. On Soft Cell’s formative years in a grotty Leeds bedsit, for instance, his main recollection was decapitating a rat as it ran across a kitchen counter while slicing bread. “I’m not proud of myself, but it was trying to nick my bread. Survival of the fittest!”
He was also affable and warm – even when asked to tread back over moments that a thousand writers and fans before me would have badgered him about, or when peppered for what felt like endless follow-up chats and fact checks. When I would whinge about those who were resisting my requests for interviews, on several occasions he offered to harangue them on my behalf himself – and then delivered.
As I pieced the story together, Ball often cut a solitary figure; he was so happy to work quietly in the background that he was able to send a friend who looked vaguely like him to mime keyboards in his place behind Almond for a European TV appearance so he could stay in the studio. While Almond surrounded himself with the scenesters and club kids of early 80s New York as they recorded Non Stop Erotic Cabaret, Ball was often found amid a more low-key circle of his own. And yet, this image of Ball as the relatable anchor to Almond’s mercurial presence is only a portion of the picture. Just as Almond wasn’t just otherworldly, but a figure whose art was rooted in the faded glamour of the North West, Ball wasn’t just a bloke from Blackpool – he, too, was a radical, as bold and as forward-thinking as any of his contemporaries.
This energy was there from Dave Ball’s youth. His adoptive father, who died just as he was reaching adulthood, worked for the GPO and built fruit machines for a friend’s arcade on the Golden Mile – his son was often to be found tinkering with them and soldering spare parts in the garage. Though Almond’s love of northern soul, its mixture of heartbreak and joy, led to their recording of ‘Tainted Love’, it was a young Ball, who had snuck into the Blackpool Mecca’s Highland Room underage to see the scene up close, who caught on to the transgressive power of seeing amphetamine-fuelled working-class dancers given the space to flamboyantly leap and windmill to the music. And it was Ball who, when played a Kraftwerk cassette by a colleague at a beachside ice cream stall, saw the potential in combining that scene’s raw energy with the icy cool of elektronische. At Leeds Polytechnic, where he encountered Almond on his first day as an art student, Ball fell under the spell of the sound artist John Darling. Even in a faculty that then prided transgression in art above all else, Darling was pushing the boundaries, setting up a makeshift sound laboratory he named Radio Hessian (“the station with the dark brown sound”), from which manic sound collages and tape loops would reverberate around the students’ studio space.
It was by channelling this radicalism beneath the veneer of chart hits and dancefloor fillers that Soft Cell made some of the most enduring pop music of the 80s. And yet, for me, it’s telling that the Soft Cell album that stands up the most after all these decades is the one where Ball was let off the leash. While on their first two studio LPs, Non Stop Erotic Cabaret and The Art Of Falling Apart, Ball had clashed with label-appointed safe-pair-of-hands producer Mike Thorne, growing increasingly frustrated with the press’ frequent jab that his contribution could be reduced simply to the ‘da-dun-dun’ synth hook in ‘Tainted Love’, by the time of their third album This Last Night… In Sodom, relations between Soft Cell and their paymasters had deteriorated to the point that they were left entirely to their own devices. Holed up in Islington’s Britannia Row studios, pushed to breaking point by the pressures of fame and by drinking and drug-taking that had grown out of control, they produced a record of staggering self-destructive splendour – Ball providing a glorious cacophony of thundering rhythm, deranged breakdowns, and blasts of sparkling melody.
Soft Cell had effectively disbanded before that LP was even released, and while Almond went on to a prolific solo career, Ball married the violinist (and frequent Soft Cell and Marc and the Mambas collaborator) Gini Hewes, who gave birth to their first child around the same time, and stepped out of the limelight.
In the 1990s, he would once again perfect the combination of progressive sonic instincts and an ear for mass appeal with The Grid, his duo with Richard Norris, ushering in a renaissance that would see him work with Kylie Minogue on Impossible Princess, among others, before 21st century reformations with Soft Cell allowed the pair to finally bring a level of equilibrium between their warring impulses for both pop and experimentation. And yet, once again, it’s only by also acknowledging what went on away from those two periods of mainstream attention that you get a proper picture of what made Ball so brilliant – his near-forgotten but excellent solo album In Strict Tempo for instance, where he set the eerie vocals of Genesis P-Orridge and Gavin Friday to bristling slow-burning instrumentals; his hi-NRG stompers with the shortlived project English Boy On The Loveranch; his sole single with Hewes as Other People – the wonderfully manic ‘Have A Nice Day’.
We are saying goodbye, then, to not just ‘one half of the ‘Tainted Love’ hitmakers’, as many reports have already put it, but one of music’s most relentless forward-thinkers. It has been reported that just days before his passing, Ball had finished work on a new Soft Cell record, while just weeks ago the pair had played what will now go down as their final gig together. Almond lamented that after a long period of poor health, Ball had been “in a great place” of late, and that his output was “better than ever,” taken “to a different level.” Though this makes it all the crueller that he should leave us now, it is also proof that he was a radical to the end.
Patrick Clarke’s book Bedsit Land: The Strange Worlds Of Soft Cell is published by the Manchester University Press
