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| Odd pair, but, damn, it worked. |
This single spent 43 consecutive weeks on Billboard’s Hot 100. That record no longer stands. Not even close, really.
The Hit
“We were living in a crummy Housing Association bedsit. The view from my bedroom window was the wasteland where the body of The Yorkshire Ripper’s last victim was found – there was still police tape on the site.”
- David Ball, 2018 interview, Classic Pop Magazine
That introduces the multiple incongruities around “Tainted Love,” one of the few natural pop songs Soft Cell ever wrote. The real/radio single opens with the unmistakable synth blast - three simple chords, the shortest of progressions – before Ball fills in the sound-scape with longer synth tones to ground it and the simplest electronic kick/snare you’re ever likely to hear. Marc Almond’s voice comes in, clear and cool, but also defiantly wounded; the synth blasts pulse into the verses, appropriately intrusive. It’s a little anti-melodic, musically, or rather Soft Cell rely on Almond to provide the melody – particularly in the extended version, which goes out on a reworking of The Supremes’ “Where Did Our Love Go.”
That last detail seems less out of place if/once you know “Tainted Love” is a cover of a largely-forgotten song Northern Soul singer named Gloria Jones. Even that has a whole “circle of life” aspect to it, in that both Ball and Almond were big fans of T. Rex back when, and Jones was romantically involved with Marc Bolan (and driving the relevant car, if memory serves) when he died.
According to at least one source (Wikipedia), “Tainted Love” also represented something of a last chance for Almond and Ball. After making a little noise in the “northern” scene, they signed to the UK label Phonogram and recorded, "Memorabilia" (which video features a certain famous, Cindy Ecstacy) a single that did all right on the club circuit (particularly in the States, oddly enough), but that didn’t impress the label so much. Soft Cell came back with “Tainted Love.” There they were, two lads just out of Leeds Polytechnic and here they had a No. 1 hit in 17 countries, some for nearly all of 1981. Apparently.
The Rest of the Story
The oddest thing about Soft Cell could be where they came up – Ball in Blackpool, UK, Almond in Southport. Both men figured that setting informed their sensibilities, if in expected ways. As Almond recounted to On: Yorkshire Magazine:
“I think being born in Lancashire in seaside towns gives you a Vaudevillian sensibility. It’s the home of cheap showbiz and hard bitten entertainers, lurid cabarets, casinos and pier shows. Seaside postcards, Coronation Street and The Beatles. Being born in the North gives you a tough survival instinct and the humour to deal with it.”
They wouldn’t meet until moving on to Leeds Polytechnic in 1978, where Ball painted and composed “experimental soundscapes” on synthesizers and Almond (who, I forgot to mention, changed the spelling of his name in Bolan’s honor) doing “performance-art theater." From what I gather, it was Almond who made introductions: after overhearing Ball plonking with what Ball called his “weird little songs,” Almond invited him for tea and asked if he could sing over his music for performance pieces. He also asked if he could write his own words for the music. Ball agreed, they both thought each made more of the others’ work, and they started performing as a duo – one of very few, but almost certainly one of the first – in 1979. [Ed. – The Buggles have a shout for first, but, even with both bands putzing around some of the same themes, they’re more prog, while Soft Cell tapped into art/punk sensibilities.] That fundamental creative dynamic never changed, at least within Soft Cell. As Ball put it to On:
“I always think of Soft Cell’s modus operandi in a cinematic way – I write the score and Marc writes the script.”
Members of Soft Cell, though mostly Ball, tell a couple stories about how they got to Phonogram. One version (Classic Pop) has it coming from a music critic/gadfly named Stevo Pearce booking them in a festival called Futurama on the same bill with U2 and Siouxsie & The Banshees; after it ended, he asked specifically about “electronic bands,” someone mentioned Soft Cell, so he put their single “Girl with the Patent Leather Face” on an eponymous compilation put out by Some Bizarre. Another version (Quietus’) has a guy named John Keenan setting them up at Futurama 2, Ball handing the famous John Peel Soft Cell’s first EP (Mutant Moments) somewhere after, and Peel playing “Metro MRX” three times on his trend-setting/-shaping radio show. Either way, that’s how they got to Phonogram/“Memorabilia.”
The success of “Tainted Love” sent them to New York City, and almost immediately. Both men dove in to the heart of several famous New York scenes – e.g., Studio 54, CBGB’s, Andy Warhol’s third stab at The Factory, the gay scene (only Almond is gay, for the record, and he was told to bury it; but also at the beginning of AIDS) – and, literally, all the things around each of them (e.g., drugs). Their debut album, Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret (1981), came out of that hedonistic mess and, unlike they single that made their name, that contained something closer to the essence of Soft Cell. To borrow some impressively efficient phrasing from Wikipedia, the album “further explored the now-trademark Soft Cell Themes of squalor and sleaze.”
The Hit
“We were living in a crummy Housing Association bedsit. The view from my bedroom window was the wasteland where the body of The Yorkshire Ripper’s last victim was found – there was still police tape on the site.”
- David Ball, 2018 interview, Classic Pop Magazine
That introduces the multiple incongruities around “Tainted Love,” one of the few natural pop songs Soft Cell ever wrote. The real/radio single opens with the unmistakable synth blast - three simple chords, the shortest of progressions – before Ball fills in the sound-scape with longer synth tones to ground it and the simplest electronic kick/snare you’re ever likely to hear. Marc Almond’s voice comes in, clear and cool, but also defiantly wounded; the synth blasts pulse into the verses, appropriately intrusive. It’s a little anti-melodic, musically, or rather Soft Cell rely on Almond to provide the melody – particularly in the extended version, which goes out on a reworking of The Supremes’ “Where Did Our Love Go.”
That last detail seems less out of place if/once you know “Tainted Love” is a cover of a largely-forgotten song Northern Soul singer named Gloria Jones. Even that has a whole “circle of life” aspect to it, in that both Ball and Almond were big fans of T. Rex back when, and Jones was romantically involved with Marc Bolan (and driving the relevant car, if memory serves) when he died.
According to at least one source (Wikipedia), “Tainted Love” also represented something of a last chance for Almond and Ball. After making a little noise in the “northern” scene, they signed to the UK label Phonogram and recorded, "Memorabilia" (which video features a certain famous, Cindy Ecstacy) a single that did all right on the club circuit (particularly in the States, oddly enough), but that didn’t impress the label so much. Soft Cell came back with “Tainted Love.” There they were, two lads just out of Leeds Polytechnic and here they had a No. 1 hit in 17 countries, some for nearly all of 1981. Apparently.
The Rest of the Story
The oddest thing about Soft Cell could be where they came up – Ball in Blackpool, UK, Almond in Southport. Both men figured that setting informed their sensibilities, if in expected ways. As Almond recounted to On: Yorkshire Magazine:
“I think being born in Lancashire in seaside towns gives you a Vaudevillian sensibility. It’s the home of cheap showbiz and hard bitten entertainers, lurid cabarets, casinos and pier shows. Seaside postcards, Coronation Street and The Beatles. Being born in the North gives you a tough survival instinct and the humour to deal with it.”
They wouldn’t meet until moving on to Leeds Polytechnic in 1978, where Ball painted and composed “experimental soundscapes” on synthesizers and Almond (who, I forgot to mention, changed the spelling of his name in Bolan’s honor) doing “performance-art theater." From what I gather, it was Almond who made introductions: after overhearing Ball plonking with what Ball called his “weird little songs,” Almond invited him for tea and asked if he could sing over his music for performance pieces. He also asked if he could write his own words for the music. Ball agreed, they both thought each made more of the others’ work, and they started performing as a duo – one of very few, but almost certainly one of the first – in 1979. [Ed. – The Buggles have a shout for first, but, even with both bands putzing around some of the same themes, they’re more prog, while Soft Cell tapped into art/punk sensibilities.] That fundamental creative dynamic never changed, at least within Soft Cell. As Ball put it to On:
“I always think of Soft Cell’s modus operandi in a cinematic way – I write the score and Marc writes the script.”
Members of Soft Cell, though mostly Ball, tell a couple stories about how they got to Phonogram. One version (Classic Pop) has it coming from a music critic/gadfly named Stevo Pearce booking them in a festival called Futurama on the same bill with U2 and Siouxsie & The Banshees; after it ended, he asked specifically about “electronic bands,” someone mentioned Soft Cell, so he put their single “Girl with the Patent Leather Face” on an eponymous compilation put out by Some Bizarre. Another version (Quietus’) has a guy named John Keenan setting them up at Futurama 2, Ball handing the famous John Peel Soft Cell’s first EP (Mutant Moments) somewhere after, and Peel playing “Metro MRX” three times on his trend-setting/-shaping radio show. Either way, that’s how they got to Phonogram/“Memorabilia.”
The success of “Tainted Love” sent them to New York City, and almost immediately. Both men dove in to the heart of several famous New York scenes – e.g., Studio 54, CBGB’s, Andy Warhol’s third stab at The Factory, the gay scene (only Almond is gay, for the record, and he was told to bury it; but also at the beginning of AIDS) – and, literally, all the things around each of them (e.g., drugs). Their debut album, Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret (1981), came out of that hedonistic mess and, unlike they single that made their name, that contained something closer to the essence of Soft Cell. To borrow some impressively efficient phrasing from Wikipedia, the album “further explored the now-trademark Soft Cell Themes of squalor and sleaze.”
 |
| Get it out there, man. |
Soft Cell’s (then-) short career took a very definite shape around the same team: they released songs/visuals that kicked up a stir in one place or the other – e.g., the segment for the single “Sex Dwarf” on the “video companion” to their debut album titled Non-Stop Exotic Video Show, or putting a single like “Numbers” (on 1983’s The Art of Falling Apart), a song about going multiple-partners hog-wild as the AIDS crisis intensified – and got really, really into drugs. Not rehab bad – though Almond started on heroin, while Ball managed “a Herculean cocaine and speed habit”; as Ball put it to Quietus, “There was always that self-destructive, self-imploding agenda because both Marc and I used to be quite self-destructive.” As Classic Pop summed it up the first phase of their career:
“Soft Cell’s third album proper, 1984’s This Last Night In Sodom, is as close as you’ll get to hearing a band splitting up in the studio. It’s a maelstrom of drugs, rough sex and the sense that at least one, if not both, of its wired musicians will die on tape before the final song.”
Despite going their separate ways – and both continuing to make a living making music - Ball and Almond’s relationship only broke into actual animosity after a troubled attempt of a reunion/tour with 2002’s Cruelty Without Beauty (which I ignored, for the record). It sounds like it was mostly separate projects for the two on either side of that – if punctuated by a horrific motorcycle crash for Almond (the man had to “re-learn” how to fucking sing, fer crissakes – but they got together off and on down the years, then finally with focus starting with the release of the absolutely massive box-set, Keychains & Snowstorms (2018), and continuing through the release of 2021’s, honestly fairly good (especially if you’re into that kind of thing), Happiness Not Included.
Fast as it all happened, Soft Cell left an impressive mark on pop music history. One 2:33 song may have defined their U.S. career, but they released 12 UK Top 40 songs between 1981 and 1984, and on four Top 20 albums – some of them pretty damn wild, and hold that thought. Moreover, they established an entirely new “band” format – the synth-pop duo – that opened up the door, not only for later duos (e.g., The Pet Shop Boys, Erasure, and Eurhythmics), but also larger synth acts like Depeche Mode (who Ball and Almond suspect used Soft Cell’s exit to bite their leather/dom aesthetic, if without a hint of bitterness).
That said, if anything defines being a one-hit wonder, it’s the fact that wide swaths of the general public know nothing about the rest of your catalog. Of all the bands I’ve reviewed, Soft Cell might have the best reason for it – i.e., well over half of what they put out wouldn’t fly a fucking inch in middle America. To borrow another great turn of phrase from Classic Pop Magazine:
“That mix of glamour and intoxicants looms large in Soft Cell’s music, which romanticised (sic) London for a generation of misfits.”
About the Sampler
For starters, my Soft Cell sampler includes the rest of their UK hits – e.g., “Torch” (a No. 2, their most successful original composition), “Say Hello, Wave Goodbye” and “What” (both No. 3s), and “Bedsitter,” a No. 4, but also, per AllMusic’s Ned Raggett, “one of the best, most realistic portrayals of urban life recorded.”
As for the rest, and I over-emphasized Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret for a couple reasons: 1) it’s a good-to-great/fascinating album, and 2) the deluxe edition (aka, Spotify’s primary holdings) includes a lot of their earliest material. To wrap up the songs not already linked to, I included “Frustration” (an absolutely delightful riff on alienation), “Seedy Films (“talks of long nights in porno cinemas”), and “Secret Life” (probably the closest aural analog to “Tainted Love”). Another early track – “Fun City” rounds out their early (and, in my mind, most relevant) period (and I think that's among the earliest material).
Given the history, I could hardly pass on a couple from This Last Night in Sodom. There, I went with “Slave to This” (just sounded/sounds apropos) and “The Best Way to Kill” (easier musically, fwiw). Last, but by no means least, I gave Soft Cell’s latest album a few listens and repped it on the sampler with “Purple Zone” (something of a free-form duet with Pet Shop Boys!), the title track, and (MOOD) “I’m Not a Friend of God.”
I’ve always thought “Tainted Love” was one hell of a song – even as a 10-year-old, I listened to it openly (big stretch for southwestern Ohio) – but the rest of it...it’s hard to find words, honestly. All in all, Soft Cell is one of those bands that checks every one of my personal buttons except sound. Incredible, pioneering...another one of the better chapters. Happy they're still going.
“Soft Cell’s third album proper, 1984’s This Last Night In Sodom, is as close as you’ll get to hearing a band splitting up in the studio. It’s a maelstrom of drugs, rough sex and the sense that at least one, if not both, of its wired musicians will die on tape before the final song.”
Despite going their separate ways – and both continuing to make a living making music - Ball and Almond’s relationship only broke into actual animosity after a troubled attempt of a reunion/tour with 2002’s Cruelty Without Beauty (which I ignored, for the record). It sounds like it was mostly separate projects for the two on either side of that – if punctuated by a horrific motorcycle crash for Almond (the man had to “re-learn” how to fucking sing, fer crissakes – but they got together off and on down the years, then finally with focus starting with the release of the absolutely massive box-set, Keychains & Snowstorms (2018), and continuing through the release of 2021’s, honestly fairly good (especially if you’re into that kind of thing), Happiness Not Included.
Fast as it all happened, Soft Cell left an impressive mark on pop music history. One 2:33 song may have defined their U.S. career, but they released 12 UK Top 40 songs between 1981 and 1984, and on four Top 20 albums – some of them pretty damn wild, and hold that thought. Moreover, they established an entirely new “band” format – the synth-pop duo – that opened up the door, not only for later duos (e.g., The Pet Shop Boys, Erasure, and Eurhythmics), but also larger synth acts like Depeche Mode (who Ball and Almond suspect used Soft Cell’s exit to bite their leather/dom aesthetic, if without a hint of bitterness).
That said, if anything defines being a one-hit wonder, it’s the fact that wide swaths of the general public know nothing about the rest of your catalog. Of all the bands I’ve reviewed, Soft Cell might have the best reason for it – i.e., well over half of what they put out wouldn’t fly a fucking inch in middle America. To borrow another great turn of phrase from Classic Pop Magazine:
“That mix of glamour and intoxicants looms large in Soft Cell’s music, which romanticised (sic) London for a generation of misfits.”
About the Sampler
For starters, my Soft Cell sampler includes the rest of their UK hits – e.g., “Torch” (a No. 2, their most successful original composition), “Say Hello, Wave Goodbye” and “What” (both No. 3s), and “Bedsitter,” a No. 4, but also, per AllMusic’s Ned Raggett, “one of the best, most realistic portrayals of urban life recorded.”
As for the rest, and I over-emphasized Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret for a couple reasons: 1) it’s a good-to-great/fascinating album, and 2) the deluxe edition (aka, Spotify’s primary holdings) includes a lot of their earliest material. To wrap up the songs not already linked to, I included “Frustration” (an absolutely delightful riff on alienation), “Seedy Films (“talks of long nights in porno cinemas”), and “Secret Life” (probably the closest aural analog to “Tainted Love”). Another early track – “Fun City” rounds out their early (and, in my mind, most relevant) period (and I think that's among the earliest material).
Given the history, I could hardly pass on a couple from This Last Night in Sodom. There, I went with “Slave to This” (just sounded/sounds apropos) and “The Best Way to Kill” (easier musically, fwiw). Last, but by no means least, I gave Soft Cell’s latest album a few listens and repped it on the sampler with “Purple Zone” (something of a free-form duet with Pet Shop Boys!), the title track, and (MOOD) “I’m Not a Friend of God.”
I’ve always thought “Tainted Love” was one hell of a song – even as a 10-year-old, I listened to it openly (big stretch for southwestern Ohio) – but the rest of it...it’s hard to find words, honestly. All in all, Soft Cell is one of those bands that checks every one of my personal buttons except sound. Incredible, pioneering...another one of the better chapters. Happy they're still going.
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