2018 marked the 40th anniversary of Soft Cell, one of the most colourful
and charismatic bands in the history of popular music. To celebrate
this landmark, singer Marc Almond and musician Dave Ball reunited for an
emotional, sold-out, farewell concert at London's O2 Arena that
September.
With unprecedented access to Marc and Dave, this film follows the
build-up to that gig and provides an intimate retrospective portrait of
one of our greatest bands and most iconic singers. It shows rehearsals
and preparations for the O2 show and footage from the actual concert
itself, woven in with period archive and music videos.
The film covers Marc's formative years growing up in Southport and
Dave's in nearby Blackpool and how the two met as art students at Leeds
Polytechnic in the late 1970s. We filmed Marc and Dave in The Fenton pub
in Leeds, where they went as students, and they perform an early Soft
Cell song, A Man Could Get Lost, on Dave's original keyboards especially
for the BBC Four audience at The Warehouse Club where the band did
their first-ever paid gig.
Soft Cell burned brightly between 1981 and 1984, after their gritty but
stunning cover version of Tainted Love became a massive hit, the
best-selling single in the UK of 1981 and a number one hit in 15 other
countries, including the USA. Dave plays from the master tapes of that
era-defining song for us.
But Soft Cell were always more interested in using their success to
subvert the mainstream than in becoming pop stars, as they tell us in
relation to Marc's groundbreaking, androgynous debut on Top of the Pops.
It was the beginning of a controversial career that deliberately defied
and flouted convention. Soft Cell were influenced as much by punk as by
Northern Soul and Kraftwerk, and refused to be pigeonholed by anyone,
bringing a punk ethos to synth-pop while busting taboos along the way.
In their heyday, even while refusing to compromise on their musical
vision, the pair produced numerous top ten singles and three classic
albums, selling 10 million records overall.
Soft Cell's approach was wittier and more sophisticated than the press
gave them credit for. Their first album, Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret, saw
them labelled as sleazy and perverted, when in reality it deliberately
used the setting of London's Soho to explore the social and sexual
undercurrents of British society at the time. The single Bedsitter laid
bare the glamour of escapism from the grim realities of Thatcher's
Britain for many, while the Soft Cell anthem, Say Hello, Wave Goodbye,
was actually about a powerful man, perhaps a politician, breaking off an
affair with a call-girl. The video for that album's most controversial
track, Sex Dwarf, was inspired by a real headline in the News of the
World. It resulted in their management's offices being raided by the
Vice Squad and the band being criticised by the very same paper.
Soft Cell's second album, a deliberately darker work called The Art of
Falling Apart, was recorded in New York and we will see how the duo's
immersion into the underground club scene and subculture informed songs
such as Heat and the single Numbers, a song that spoke about promiscuity
in the gay scene and proved prophetic about the coming AIDS epidemic.
Despite the prejudices of the time, it managed to reach number 25 in the
UK charts.
But the pressures they felt to produce more commercial music began to
take its toll on them and Marc and Dave talk candidly about how they
began to drift apart and slip into the sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll
lifestyle, with both becoming addicted to a variety of drugs. By 1983,
before the recording of their album, This Last Night in Sodom, the duo
had already decided to go their separate ways as otherwise, as Dave puts
it, 'one of us wasn't going to make it'.
Even at the height of their addictions and near breakdowns, Soft Cell
still produced a classic album with a harder, more industrial electric
sound that has been cited as hugely influential by artists such as
Marilyn Manson and Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails.
After their separation in 1984, we see how Marc Almond has gone on to
become one of our greatest performers, selling an estimated 20 million
records as a solo artist in a huge variety of styles, from mainstream
pop to experimental ventures. The film includes sequences with Marc at
the Moulin Rouge in Paris, exploring his love of Jacques Brel and French
chansons, performing one of the Russian folk songs he loves - a genre
in which he recorded two albums of music in the early 2000s - and with
Jools Holland and His Rhythm & Blues Orchestra with whom he has
recorded an album, A Lovely Life to Live, in 2018. We also look at
Dave's solo career with successful dance duo The Grid.
The documentary ends with the duo's rousing performance of Say Hello, Wave Goodbye at the O2.
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