Marc Almond,
self-confessed Judy Garland of the garbage heap, and Dave Ball, the big
moody one at the back, formed Soft Cell in 1980, having met at art college
in Leeds. The duo went on to become one of the most influential electronic
bands of the early eighties after their international hit Tainted Love
became Britain’s biggest selling single of 1981. Their debut album, Non-Stop
Erotic Cabaret documented a bittersweet world of bedsits, sex dwarves,
frustration and pink flamingos. An ecstatic album of remixes followed before
1984’s The Art of Falling Apart confirmed the band’s honest approach to
music-making by marking their split. Dave Ball went on to form the
successful dance act The Grid, while producing and remixing artists ranging
from Happy Mondays to David Bowie. Marc Almond formed two successful groups
before launching a career as a solo artist that led to the number one single
Something’s Gotten Hold of My Heart. This September, following a series of
rapturously received live performances, Soft Cell returned with a new
single, Monoculture, and Cruelty without Beauty, their first album for 18
years. (MR)
Dave Ball
Mark Rappolt: How do you think the new material differs from your previous
work?
Dave Ball: It takes the same kind of ideas but later down the line.
Something off the new album, like Whatever it Takes, and the line ‘I’m
having a mid-life crisis’ has a direct link to a track Frustration off the
first album, Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret. You always have certain themes that
you go back to. You are always trying to perfect those. I think that’s true
whether you’re a painter or a filmmaker or a musician.
Do you see yourselves as part of the current vogue for
eighties retro?
We don’t see it as a retro thing, like one of those eighties revival tour
things. We were around in the eighties but we were not a quintessential
eighties band. Even then we were always seen as outsiders. The other bands –
Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, ABC – they were just traditional bands. But who
were these two weird guys? I think that has stood us in really good stead.
And also we very publicly committed commercial suicide, which I think always
gains you immense respect. We started off as an art school band, but some
way or another we ended up having the biggest selling record, number one in
17 countries. But we thought, hang on, that’s not what we meant. People
misunderstood us. We were suddenly being interviewed by puppets on kids’ TV
shows. So gradually we went back to our art school roots. But now we have
had time to do our own thing and perhaps it’s semi-ironic that a lot of the
tracks on the new album are quite poptastic. In a very Soft Cell way. When
you consider all the Thatcherite stuff that was going on when we were first
around, and the bands like the Spandaus and Durans celebrating this
champagne lifestyle – lots of playboy pin-up girls on yachts and stuff. We
were singing about bedsits. We were the grim Northern realists. I don’t
think we were vacuous and I think a lot of that stuff was vacuous.
So do you think your early art school experiences
informed the concepts of the band?
Massively. I think because all our music and the themes that run through it
musically and lyrically are always very visual. We have always been very
aware of art and film. Take someone like Warhol, who we did actually get to
meet. That was the most amazing thing. Being influenced by Warhol as two
kids at art college, and the next thing, three years later, you’re in The
Factory with Andy Warhol. You watch the people doing his paintings while
he’s on the phone. We have always been influenced by people who were
slightly subversive. Even though Warhol was mainstream, before he started to
get big, before he was doing all those portraits of German industrialists,
he was very subversive. It was always ‘Who is this weird guy?’ Everything
becomes mainstream eventually and he’s a good example of that.
Do you think the changes in technology over the last
18 years have changed how you work?
Technology allows people like me to make amazing sounds with very little
knowledge of what it’s about. It’s like you do a drawing, but you didn’t
invent the pencil. If it wasn’t for the guy who invented the pencil… In my
case I met Bob Moog and I remember thinking if it wasn’t for him I wouldn’t
be playing the synthesiser. I was such a fan. I was saying ‘Bob, Bob, can I
get your autograph?’ And he wrote ‘Dave – keep on synthesising. Bob Moog’! I
think it’s really important always to be a fan.
Do you think that there are less fans and more
celebrities these days?
That’s another thing that we talk about on the album. That track Desperate
is totally about the cult of celebrity. Everyone knows Warhol’s quote
‘famous for 15 minutes’, but the other Warhol quote that people should
rediscover is ‘famous for being famous’. That guy was so switched on; he was
famous for being famous despite being amazingly famous as an artist. But I
think that quote is more relevant now. ‘Famous for 15 minutes’ is so
overused, and it’s not even 15 minutes anymore, it’s more like 15 seconds.
But ‘famous for being famous’ captures that whole celebrity thing.
Are you very aware of there being a Soft Cell image?
We just keep it the same as it always was, really. I’m the moody big bloke
who just wears black. Marc’s the flamboyant one who has costume designers.
Everyone makes a statement by the way they look. I have my statement: I’m a
big guy, I don’t look much like I should be in a pop group…
Are you conscious of how a pop group should look?
I don’t think we are a pop band. We’re just two guys. As I said on a TV
interview, if we were on Popstars, we’re not the guys who would get picked.
Because that is so superficial. There is something about Marc… a lot of
people find him repulsive. When we were doing stuff in the eighties the
switchboards would be jammed with people saying, who’s that freak in my
living room. (They never said anything about me; I was just the bloke in the
background.) But other people find him very appealing. I could almost
imagine him being in The Rite of Spring or something by Stravinsky. He
almost should have little horns… He’s got that slightly demonic,
naughty-but-nice look. And then he’s teamed up with this bloke who’s a Blank
Frank. There’s no way there could be two of him. There has to be this blank,
a total opposite. I’m very static and Marc’s running around all over the
place. I think it’s that dynamic that makes the difference.
Do you have visual pictures in mind when you are
designing sounds?
If you think of the nature of synthesiser sounds – a square wave, a
saw-tooth wave, a sign wave – they are visual anyway. They are sounds you
almost shape with your mouth. I do sometimes think: that sound is green, or
that sound is blue. I do see it as much as hear it.
Do you get the reverse happening when you look at
paintings?
I’d like to do some music to paintings. I get a feeling off paintings. Mark
Rothko definitely gives you the idea of a mood. It’s not that you want to do
a soundtrack to the painting, but the idea in the painting generates a mood
and you say: ‘I think I know what that painting is about.’ You use that as a
starting point.
Did you ever want to be a painter?
Yes. Very much so. Since I was a child. I used to paint every day, all the
time. That’s all I cared about. I was absolutely obsessed with it. The music
took over from the painting, but it kind of blurred into it.
So was there a moment when you thought you would stop being a painter and
start being a musician?
There was a conscious moment when I left
art school. When I thought, what do I do now I’ve left art school? Marc came
up with a great expression about this, he said: ‘the point is I’m a
communicator.’ And I think that’s where me and him are very similar. We’re
communicators. Whether it’s as a painter or a musician, we’re communicators.
Marc Almond
Mark Rappolt: Your new single Monoculture seems to
talk about a world that has changed considerably since your first album,
Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret. How do you think it has changed?
Marc Almond: I think Monoculture was me writing about a world in which
wherever you go you see the same streets with the same shops, the same
chainstores and the same clothes. People listening to the same music because
they watch the same MTV on the same channels. And they are all the same
people because they look the same and eat the same fast food from the same
fast food joints. We are all, as people, in danger of loosing our individual
identity in a way. And I think it is all part of the culture of ‘famous for
being famous’ as well. Because we are loosing our identities so much, people
feel as if they don’t exist unless they see some concrete proof of their
existence – whether it’s a picture in a magazine or themselves on the TV.
They need to say: ‘Look! There I am. I exist.’ I think this is me just
looking at myself at my age and comparing myself to when I wrote the first
Soft Cell album and saying where do I fit into this world? Shall I just give
up and give in to it? Shall I just hold onto my individuality and the
passion that I feel for things? It’s a cynical culture where we are somehow
content with mediocrity and banality.
Do some of the things that you experienced at art
school still inform the way you create music now?
Art school taught me to be a very self-motivated person. I still write from
the point of view of that person living in that bedsit. I still very much
have that bedsit mentality. Doesn’t matter where I’ve lived through my life,
I always still live in that bedsit world. I seem to make everywhere I live
look like a bedsit. I think I do write in a very visual way as well. I try
to imagine my songs like little films. When I was at art college I liked to
make films and do performances. I was always interested in a very theatrical
side of things, and so I do think in visual terms. For every song I write I
always think: what kind of video would go with this? What does it look like?
What kind of colours does it have?
You also seem to be inspired by quite an eclectic mix
of artists.
I like all kinds of things, although quite honestly I don’t like a lot of
modern art. I much prefer more classical art. I like figurative things. I
love a lot of Russian art because it’s so iconic and religious. I think my
favourite painting in the world is a painting in an art gallery in Moscow.
It’s of the moment when Ivan the Terrible has just killed his son. His face
is full of madness and grief and sorrow. He’s covered in blood and it’s just
the most fantastic picture. I also love Goya, Titian and Michelangelo.
Gustave Moreau is one of my favourite artists; I love going to visit his
house in Paris. In terms of modern art, as modern as it gets is probably
people like Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons. I like Koons a lot because I find
his work very witty and very amusing. He’s very, very funny with that look
at a kind of kitsch culture. I don’t like conceptual art at all. I hate it.
I’m not the kind of person who can find joy in installations and things like
that.
You have been the subject of a number of portraits,
both those by fans and those by people like Pierre and Gilles.
Pierre and Gilles are, of course, two of my favourite artists and I’ve
worked with them a lot. I think they are people who are in time going to be
looked on as very classic. I can’t stand photographers like David LaChapelle,
who are very transparent and who clutter their photographs with lots of
kitsch images to make something that’s very decorative. Pierre and Gilles
pictures really get inside and bring the icon out of the person. I think
their pictures will pass the test of time, transcending something that is
just current fashion or current culture.
At your last concert at the Brixton Academy, the audience seemed divided between those people who no longer fit into their PVC trousers and those young enough to still look rather good. Is it important to keep capturing new audiences?
I think you always want to capture a new audience. When I look at my audience I see a very varied cross-section of people. I see the people who have grown up with me, maybe when I first started they were at the front of the stage giving me jewellery or a rose or something. Now they may be standing at the back. Maybe some of them with kids, or married or whatever. Or maybe they’ve got a job or something now. But I see the front taken by younger people now. And I think that’s really refreshing to me. I don’t go pursuing a young audience saying, ‘I am young. I want a young audience. Make me young again by being a young audience.’ I write songs initially for people more my own age than anything else, facing the same dilemmas in their life, problems with the world around them – ‘Why don’t I just give up and do myself a favour. What is this current culture that I find myself in? It’s fascinating, it’s horrible, it’s despairing. It’s bewildering but it’s also bemusing as well.’ I think usually people shy away from writing things about middle age, because most rock musicians, pop musicians and singers are very vain – myself included.
Do you think a certain degree of unhappiness is something that fuels your work?
I think that’s very true. That kind of anger is what inspires you. It stops you from being complacent. It’s good to be angry about things, even if you can’t do anything about them and you do feel a certain sense of hopelessness. Being bitter is a really great feeling. I think it’s there in Soft Cell. It’s the bitterness and sweetness, the uplifting qualities of some songs and then the bitterness of other chords and melodies that make Soft Cell songs what they are. I don’t like perfection. I don’t like people who look perfect; I don’t like things that sound perfect. To me that’s sterility. That’s another kind of bland ugliness.
Are there any contemporary bands that inspire you then?
Not really. I’m the kind of person who buys
lots of CDs and then they end up left in the cellophane for three or four
months before I get round to listening to them. I’ve been listening to a lot
of the new electro-clash stuff that’s been happening. I like the attitude
and theatricality of it but I’m too song-orientated and there seems to be a
lack of songs in that music. Therefore, for me, it won’t last. I’m really
old fashioned that way. I’m an old-fashioned person with old-fashioned
values.
So who were some of your icons?
Jacques Brel is someone who I always go back to as a great icon. I love
early Elvis, I love a lot of the early fifties crooners and singers. I
suppose that when I grew up and was in my teens, the person who was most
influential would be David Bowie. David Bowie turned me on to lots of art,
to writers like Jean Genet, to different kinds of music like the Velvet
Underground, to Lou Reed. I didn’t learn a lot at school, but I learned a
lot that was useful to my life from David Bowie.
You live in Moscow part of the time.
Well as much time as I can bear to. You come back to London and breathe
fresh air in comparison to Moscow. It can be a fantastic, scary place. It is
difficult to get something to eat there and you do breathe lead fumes all
the time. So you’re constantly tired and sick when you’re there. They
haven’t heard of lead-free petrol yet. But it is a fantastically
inspirational place. I love Russian music and Russian art. I’ve been working
there for about a year on a Russian musical project, with orchestras, soviet
singers and a naval choir. I’m really glad that I was given the opportunity
to do that. I’ve loved Russia for many years really. I would live there a
lot more if I could just breathe and I could eat.
Mark Rappolt is Architecture Editor for contemporary