Dave Ball on Soft Cell

 

From 808s to MDMA, dancefloor remixes to transgressive videos, Soft Cell were ahead of a lot of the UK electro-pop pack in the early eighties. I spoke to synthesizer player Dave Ball about their avant-garde origins as students in Leeds, creating the perfect sonic combination of high-tech and dirt-cheap, flouting gender norms and enduring homophobic reactions, and the wonders of ecstasy and nocturnal New York. He also spoke about how everything fell apart for the duo – and how the emergence of acid house offered him new creative possibilities.

Something that’s interested me while doing research for my book is that after the Second World War, there were all these ex-military oscillators and other pieces of electronic equipment being sold in secondhand shops, which were used by some of the innovators to create new music...

My dad was in the Signals Corps in the RAF at the back end of the Second World War, and he became an engineer, working for what was then the GPO [General Post Office], that's where I kind of first started to learn about electronics, from my dad. And he used to build fruit machines, he used to have a load of fruit machines in the garage that he would build to make some extra money. So I used to nick bits off there and build my own amplifiers and stuff.

There's so many people I’ve spoken to who've got this background of kind of tinkering with electronics in this very British way.

Yes, exactly. In the shed down the garden, faffing around with little bits of electrical equipment. And sort of reappropriating them, you know?

Did you ever read [hobbyist] magazines like Practical Electronics?

Oh yes, my dad used to always have them. And we used to get these catalogues of valves and transistors and capacitors and god knows what and order them, we used to get them mail order. And I built my first amplifier, which took me about a year just to save up for the components because I'd get them delivered in batches. Eventually it worked for about two weeks.

Chris Carter of Throbbing Gristle used to build equipment out of magazines too.

I think Barney [Sumner] out of New Order, he built a Transcendent 2000, it was a kit synthesizer that was the first synthesizer that Joy Division had, apparently - you'd buy it in kit form and you just built it yourself, you know, because otherwise to buy a synthesizer back in those days was thousands of pounds, which was out of most people's range.

At the point where you started out musically [in the late 1970s], it was when the first relatively affordable synthesizers were coming onto the market.

You say relatively affordable, but my first synthesizer was secondhand, it was a Korg 800DV. I bought it in a music shop in Blackpool and it used to belong to the drummer of Jethro Tull and even then it was £450.

When you started Soft Cell did you always intend to be a duo?

Yes, because we started with Marc doing his performances [as an art student at Leeds Polytechnic] and me just doing the soundtrack for them. There was never any intention to form a band as such. It never occurred to us, “Should we get a guitarist or a drummer or something?” We were just quite happy with what we had. So I think that we were basically the first successful British pop synth duo, but it was totally by accident.

Were Suicide important to you?

Yeah, we liked the fact that they were from New York, we liked the CBGBs thing and the Velvet Underground and we just thought they looked really, really chic, they had a kind of dangerous look about them. So that always appealed.

Suicide had a Seeburg drum machine that they used, which is one you get in those old cabaret bars, and then Martin Rev had a Farfisa organ, with various distortions and stuff. They weren't really a synth duo to start with. Sparks had been like a five-piece band and then became a duo once they got [Giorgio] Moroder involved, so I suppose the duo idea really was American before it was British.

Tell me about your early performances when you were art students at Leeds Polytechnic.

Well, we'd always been recording because at art college there was a recording room, it was very basic with a couple of Revoxes and an old Tandberg tape machine. So my work was always based on tape. I'd been playing those at Marc's performances, sort of press play and stop when required as per scene for these bizarre performances. And then we just started writing little songs with Marc singing and so we carried on with a tape machine onstage and me onstage rather than being sort of backstage.

And we had another guy, [visuals operator] Steve Griffith, who used to do projections on a couple of screens. Live, we had Super-8 films and slides projected behind us, which The Human League were also doing; it was quite a common thing at that time, I think because the nature of a synth band makes you quite static. If you’re stood behind a synth, you don’t really move that much, unless you’ve got one of those stupid synths that look like a guitar.

What would you say were the key components of Soft Cell’s sound, this kind of sleazy, neon-lit but also futuristic kind of sound that you developed? You can hear a bit of industrial music in there, a bit of Northern Soul.

I had a Korg SB-100 Synthe-Bass, it had a very dirty sound, a very distinctive bass sound, and [producer] Mike Thorne had the Synclavier, so we had a kind of collision of cheap, dirty, analog sounds with what was then a state-of-the-art drum machine, the 808, and then these mad digital sounds from the Synclavier which no one had ever heard before, including us. I think that was the classic Soft Cell early eighties pop sound – a mixture of this very expensive digital technology and a very cheap and dirty bass end.

But it wasn't just all-out pop, there was an element of sleaze and subversion to it.

It was more than just pop music. We were definitely influenced by the punk attitude, as well as by Kraftwerk, who were like the electronic Beatles to people like us. I mean, Marc was a mad fan of Siouxsie and the Banshees, and I used to love The Ramones and The Clash and The Damned, and when Wire  came along that was fantastic. And Mike Thorne had produced Wire before he produced us. So there was a kind of lineage there, you know.

Marc once described Soft Cell as an industrial futuristic seaside cabaret act.

Yeah, that's not far off, because another influence was that kind of whole Throbbing Gristle thing as well, who we were both massive fans of, and luckily I've got to work with various members of them. In fact, Chris and Cosey did a remix for us just recently of one of the new tracks which will be coming out soon. I worked with Genesis P-Orridge on a lot on stuff, and Marc worked with Sleazy and Coil too.

How much do you think Soft Cell’s songs were a kind of social commentary on your own lives and how you were living at that time?

Obviously, something like ‘Bedsitter’ was totally autobiographical. I mean, I didn't have anything to do with writing lyrics but Marc was writing from our kind of collective point of view. And that was, that was actually written while we were living in bedsits in the same council block .

He once said the songs were about the secret seedy life that went on behind the mask of Thatcher's conservative Britain.

I think we were transgressive and a bit naughty, poking fun with a tongue in cheek. We were always quite intrigued by political scandals – the Profumo affair, [disgraced MP] Jeremy Thorpe – and the whole idea of the hypocrisy behind the veneer of respectability of the establishment, who were basically the most corrupt and sleazy of all.

We were always quite intrigued by the trash media too. ‘Sex Dwarf’ [on ‘Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret’] was fantastic because I remember we used to buy the [tabloid] News of the World and I remember Marc pointing out this headline, “Sex dwarf lures disco dollies to life of vice”, and we just nicked it verbatim for the song.

Then we did the video for it, which is quite saucy to say the least, and we got raided by the Vice Squad, who seized copies of the video. And then that story ended up back in the News of the World a year later. It was fantastic, it was like art imitating life imitating art.

Did you did you feel that Soft Cell were transgressing gender norms at the time?

I’d never met anyone like Marc. I’d never known a guy that wore make-up. I just found him fascinating. He approached me because he’d heard me playing my synthesizer at college and asked if I want to do some work on his performances and I just really got on with him. We used to have the same sense of humour.

I think that Marc helped a lot of people. A lot of young gay men said to me that listening to Soft Cell, I knew I wasn’t the only one. I mean, I'm not gay, so it never really kind of crossed my mind until people said that to me.

I mean, people used to think I was gay too. Freddie Mercury – not that I want to drop any names – the first thing Freddie Mercury, said to me was, “Well, Dave, so are you and Marc lovers?” But I was with my  girlfriend. People just sort of assumed. I also don’t think it helped that I had a moustache and then I started wearing leather… I looked like one of the Village People.

Marc has talked about how there were quite a few homophobic reactions to Soft Cell in the music press. Being a mixed straight and gay duo in what was quite a homophobic society at the time, there was an implicit sexual politics going on there, don’t you think?

We didn’t really talk about sexual politics in any of our music. Well, on the track ‘Numbers’ there is a reference to the John Rechy book of the same name [about the underground LA gay scene of the 1960s], but mostly it’s kind of non-sexual. The record company press department would always specifically say, “Don’t discuss sexual politics. Don’t discuss any of that.”

How did going to New York and experiencing the clubs there affect Soft Cell musically?

I think just the rhythm of the music. We were really into all that sort of punky disco stuff that was going on. There was all the stuff on Ze Records, Was Not Was, and the CBGBs thing was still alive and kicking. So you got a sort of disco and punk crossover, which appealed to us.

We used to mostly go to Danceteria, that was the hip club at the time and they used to have some really quite radical stuff on there for a disco, you wouldn’t expect to get the Swans playing in a disco normally, would you? Or James White and the Blacks.

Then there was the Mudd Club, another brilliant venue. I saw Glenn Branca during an amazing multiple guitars thing there, absolutely brilliant. So yeah, a lot of experimental stuff went on as well as the disco. It was experimental with a disco beat. So that rubbed off on us. We were always absorbing what was going on around us. And the chaos of it, really - I think we always liked the chaos.

The remix of ‘Memorabilia’ was a groundbreaking moment in British electronic music – now it’s being described as proto-house.

I think the original is more house than the Daniel Miller mix. He was using synths and we wanted to work with him. But it was the record company that said we should get a producer to do something a bit more mainstream but also still electronic, which was Mike Thorne.

In retrospect, I think it was a good move. I mean, Daniel was more machine-based, and I think we would have ended up sounding more like Depeche Mode.  I think ‘Memorabilia’, a lot of that was down to Daniel's sequencing and my dirty bass synth on it which was the main groove, just basically a sort of James Brown-type funk groove with these repeated echoed-out vocals and that one-note synth. I think that's kind of what makes it kind of proto-house.

And how did the Cindy Ecstasy rap on the ‘Memorabilia’ remix come about?

That was somebody that Mark had bumped into in Studio 54. She was obviously known for something else, but she had a great Brooklyn drawl. She lived in Brooklyn and she aspired to be a singer. She actually did go on to do some music with one of the guys out of [British indie band] B-Movie.

Marc just said, “Let's get Cindy on it”, and it just kind of worked. And she was on ‘Torch’ too. So that was just fortuitous from being in New York at the time. It would have been rubbish if we'd just got some English person trying to sound like an American rapping.

Your experiences with ecstasy in New York came so long before acid house hit the UK.

I think ecstasy had been around for while, I think it was used to try and get married couples having difficulties reunited. And it was quite underground but it wasn't actually illegal, so it made its appearance on the New York club scene in the late seventies, early eighties. It wasn’t actually illegal to possess or consume it at the time.

When acid house started, did you think, “I did this years ago, I can't believe this has finally made its way to Britain”?

It was only a matter of time. Because more and more people had been going over to New York and coming back telling stories of this stuff. And once they figured out to make it, because it's only a chemical, they start making it over here.

And unfortunately, that’s when the sort of gangsters start realising how much money they can make out of it. And I think that's when it all turned a bit nasty and some of the stuff that was getting made was dodgy and people started dying and it all got a bit horrible, you know? I never bothered with it over here. I think I tried it once and it was nothing like what we used to get so I just never touched it. But we used to be doing it every weekend in New York. It was a totally different thing.

By the ‘Last Night in Sodom’ album, your sound and Marc’s lyrics had become a lot darker. How did that happen?

Well, I think it was just a general sort of disintegration where I think we were getting more and more fed up with the record company. I think we were probably both doing too many substances. I mean, I know I was, I was sort of taking a lot of cocaine and amphetamines. I was very underweight. I didn't even drink back in those days. I was living on a vitamin pill and a Mars bar. And lots of coffee. We were both a bit fucked up and didn’t really know what the hell we were doing. It was sort of like being in a car with a foot on the floor and no steering wheel – it was bound to end.

We'd actually decided we were going to do this album and then we're going to have a break or one of us is going to die, you know. So we announced it and then did two farewell shows and did that album, which amazingly got in the charts. There's a lot of people loved that record, I think. And I think also with age as well, when people listen to that they go, “Bloody hell, that's quite radical!” There's actually some quite nice tunes on there.

But it's not a [pop magazine] ‘Smash Hits’-type album is it?

No but I think it ‘Art of Falling Apart’ wasn't either. We never set out to be a pop band. It’s just that first album just happened to sound like pop with very catchy songs, but then after that, we didn’t really want to be pop anymore because we hated doing those stupid pop programmes like [children’s TV show] Tiswas and those stupid pop magazines, and we just deliberately, wilfully wanted to sound dark in order to get away.

I think Depeche Mode did the same thing. Suddenly they’re wearing leather jackets and sounding much more industrial and dark. When they first started they were even more poppy than we were. I mean, look at Depeche Mode in the early days and look at them now.

I want to ask you about how you got involved with [1988 album] ‘Jack the Tab’ with Richard Norris and Genesis P-Orridge of Psychic TV.

That came through Genesis P-Orridge. Soft Cell had been disbanded, I'd sort of got married and had a couple of children at that point and was sort of partially in domestic bliss but kind of hankering to be back in the studio and thinking the moeny's running out, I need to do something. And then the phone rang and it was Gen. And he said, “I'm doing this project and met this guy from NME called Richard Norris.” He said, “Do you want to come to the studio, we're just going to record it really quickly.”

It was a little studio in Chiswick and I just turned up with an FZ-1 Casio sampler and an Alesis drum machine and a sequencer which I'd just got. Great, perfect chance to use them for the first time. So I just went to the studio for an afternoon and put down three tracks.

And what was the idea – it was intended to be an acid house record?

Richard said to me that when he was interviewing Gen, they were talking about original psychedelic music and a new term that people were using, it was happening in America, this thing called acid house.

As they hadn’t heard any acid house records, they just tried to imagine what it would sound like. They thought it’s probably going to have psychedelic samples with dance beats. I don’t know what genre that album really is – it’s not acid house, although it is psychedelic dance music, kind of.

It was about that period when you started getting the Happy Mondays, the Stone Roses, all those kind of psychedelic dance rock bands. And after that, we formed The Grid. There was still some experimental stuff, but it was mostly kind of dance and ambient.

First we did two promo singles, ‘On the Grid’ and ‘Intergalactica’. ‘On the Grid’ was a cover version of a Lime [hi-NRG] track, and then what it I did was effectively remixed it and just changed the top lines and put on a vocoder saying “Intergalactica” and got some different vocal samples. So ‘Intergalactica’ was kind of almost like a continuation of the Lime track and that was the second promo single. And then we did ‘Flotation’ as the first proper single, which we got Andy Weatherall to remix, which never did that well in the charts unfortunately, but it was a sort of Ibiza classic.

Since my early days of [going to] Northern Soul [clubs], I've always been into club music and I like a lot of the disco stuff, particularly Giorgio Moroder, so I kind of got quite into doing our version of Giorgio Moroder, four to the floor.

Do you think there's a certain piece of equipment or synthesizer that defines the sound of the eighties?

The Fairlight, which probably came just slightly after Soft Cell. That was very distinctive. But earlier in the eighties was one of my favourite synthesizers, the [Sequential] Prophet-5, then there was the Oberheim, there was the [Roland] Jupiter-8, and obviously the [Yamaha] DX7 was obviously very influential because it was the first time digital synthesis was available for less than £2,000, because before then if you wanted a digital synth, you were looking at Synclaviers and Fairlights, which were bloody ridiculous amounts of money. Whereas the DX7, I would say that was a very important instrument in terms of accessibility to people with a normal sort of amount of money available. Even so, it was still two grand, you know? Back in the eighties, that was still quite a bit of money.

You were an early user of the Roland 808 drum machine as well, weren’t you?

I think ‘Bedsitter’ was the first record in the charts with an 808 on it. Because [‘Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret’ producer] Mike Thorne, when we were in New York, he just got the first one in Manny's music store in New York. We used a [Roland] CR-78 on ‘Tainted Love’, that was the sort of predecessor, the one that looks like a cube. And the 808 had literally just arrived in America. I don't think I'd ever heard an 808 up until that point on a record. So yeah, we used it all the way through ‘Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret’, all the drum sounds.

808s and ecstasy, you really were ahead of your time.

We never used 909s though, because that was a bit later. But we were definitely in the 808 state before anyone else.

Interview by Matthew Collin for ‘Dream Machines’, January 14, 2022.

Photo: sleeve for the single ‘Bedsitter’, 1981.