The world’s actually on fire. So indulge me for a second.
You don’t need me to tell you that we are living in unprecedented, scary times. I think we’re all on the same page there. And if you’re anything like me, it all seems a little futile, doesn’t it? How many times have you started working on something in the last few day — working from home, uni work, the ironing — and just thought ‘The world’s on fire, who the fuck cares?’ I hear you. Therefore, the content below is an entirely selfish exercise that will hopefully give me the kick up the bum I need, but maybe you’ll glean something from it as well.
Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret was Soft Cell’s debut album, released in 1981 off the back of their monster hit Tainted Love. It is, and will always be, my favourite album of all time. It is also, in my opinion, the ultimate teen-angst record, the ultimate queer record, the ultimate record for anyone who enjoys the camper and seedier sides of life. So below I’ve attached a track by track blow of this phenomenal album, and maybe then I can get onto the things that actually need to be written (my MA thesis for example — which I have spent maybe an hour staring at blankly this week, without adding a single word). Right, let’s get into it.
A Little Bit of Backstory
First of all, look at the cover. The rubberised backdrop, the cheap leather jackets, the brown paper bag Marc Almond is slyly sliding out from under his arm (the obvious insinuation is that it’s a ‘top-shelf’ magazine from a newsagents — in reality, it was a copy of Vogue. The true Soft Cell duality summed up). The whole thing drenched in blue and pink neon like a Soho back alley. Anyone who only knows Soft Cell for their monster hit Tainted Love should know right off the bat that this is not your run of the mill early 80’s pop group. In fact, Marc Almond and Dave Ball, with their background in performance art and experimental, proto-industrial electronica, were the missing link between the DIY irreverence of punk and the slick, stylish posturing of the New Romantics. Though Soft Cell were propelled into the stratosphere by Tainted Love, they operated in a completely different league to their contemporaries. Whereas Duran Duran sung about dancing on the beaches of Rio and sailing around the world on yachts, and previously experimental acts such as the Human League blunted their more experimental inclinations in order to achieve chart success, Soft Cell retained the squalid subject material of their Leeds Polytechnic output — suburban dissolution, housewives spaced out on Valium and freaky sex — and grafted it onto stunningly simple electropop. Though all of Soft Cell’s albums are required listening, Non-Stop… is perhaps the greatest synthesis of all their disparate influences — a synthetic pop-opera, starring Judy Garland and directed by John Waters. Here’s a little bit about each track, with a smidge of personal reflection too:
1.Frustration
“I was born, one day I’ll die. There was something in-between, I don’t know what or why”
Frustration should win an award for being the ballsiest opener for a pop-album in history. Over a synth line that sounds like a swarm of bees trapped in a Tupperware box, Almond growls, yells and screams a tirade of regret as a run of the mill suburban businessman who has come to the realisation that his 9–5 life is completely meaningless. A re-recording of one of the band’s earliest songs, the track should be any listener’s first taste of the true Soft Cell, beyond the Smash Hits covers and Tiswas cameos. Though Almond decided to cut some of the original tracks’ more graphic lines, his delivery is still delightfully scathing. This is a man who works for ‘a firm’ (which he’d like to burn down), does the garden and ‘watches girls’, yet admits that he really wants to experiment with hard drugs, run a harem and ‘set a bad, bad example’. By the time David Tofani's screeching tenor sax explodes over the track and Almond begins his repeated screaming of the line ‘I wanna DIE!’, the hair around your ears should be scorched right off. For anyone who’s considering settling down into an uneventful life of white picket fences and parent-teacher meetings, this should serve as a stern warning. Welcome to the Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret.
2. Tainted Love
*dink dink*
Does this song really need any introduction? We’ve all been to a wedding/school disco/stood in a post office, so I need not describe the song itself in any great detail. Almond infamously loathed it for years, and even when the band did like it, they didn’t see it going anywhere. The magic comes from the combination of the cold, repetitive musical motif and Almond’s flat yet impassioned vocal delivery. Many a Soft Cell fan would suggest that Tainted Love is not a true reflection of their body of work. I would agree that it would be far, far down my list of favourite Soft Cell tracks, but in many ways it is the ultimate synthesis of all the vital Soft Cell components — stylish, slightly unnerving, yet still undeniably pop, a slight whiff of quiet desperation and sadness even amongst all the camp.
3. Seedy Films
“Sleazy city, sleepy people. Down in your alleys, seems that anything goes”
‘Sleazy’ is a word that is bandied about a lot in discussions around Soft Cell, and although that’s a gross oversimplification of their ethos, it’s easy to see how they came to gain the reputation with songs like Seedy Films on their debut. Over a cool, breezy 5 minute run time that errs on the side of smooth jazz, Almond is the archetypal wide-eyed sex tourist, — drinking in the debauchery on the neon-soaked streets of Soho, before hopping into a porno cinema with a date, only to realise his date is the star on screen. This is the first track on the album that proved that Almond could not, in any technical sense, really sing yet — his caterwauling over the tracks end clambers towards notes that may or may not exist. But that said, that’s what makes this track so delightful. Soft Cell would get much darker in their explorations of sex on their following albums (see Baby Doll and Surrender to a Stranger), but here they were just a couple of doe-eyed innocents revelling in a bit of cheeky fun. The calm before the storm. And the clarinet solo is equally lovely and seedy, it’s wonderful.
4. Youth
“I’m on my own, and don’t think I really mind…after all, the years have been fairly kind”
Marc Almond was 24 when he penned one of the most heartbreaking odes to lost youth ever known. It’s a sharp warning to the New Romantic generation — ‘beauty is skin deep’ — and a painful rumination on lost years and distant memories, written by someone who was barely out of university. This is where Almond truly cemented his chops as the synth-pop era’s de facto torch singer. It’s also where Dave Ball really began to flex his musical chops. The song is expansive and all encompassing, vast in its scope compared to the sometimes thin production on the rest of the album. It doesn’t make sense that a pair of young twenty-somethings could so perfectly encapsulate the tragedy of life slipping you by. It makes even less sense that 12 year old me found it so entirely moving. The desire for camp was in me, even then.
5. Sex Dwarf
“Isn’t it nice, sugar and spice, luring disco dollies to a life of vice?”
I knew this was something special when my Mum said that I wasn’t to play this song with my my brother in the room, the first song she had ever even come close to banning in our house. I wonder why? Could it be the sounds of panting, spanking, shrieking and giggling peppered throughout? Could it be Almond’s vocal delivery, slithering over the track like a greased up pervert? Could it be the lines he was delivering — about putting his ‘sex dwarf’ on a leash, and parading them down the high-street? Probably a bit of all of that. This is easily the most notorious Soft Cell song and, after Say Hello, Wave Goodbye, the ultimate fan favourite. It’s ludicrous, crass, so completely perverted — but it’s also got its tongue lodged so firmly in its cheek it’s in danger of poking a hole. So much attention is given to the song’s lyrics and embellishments that Ball’s soundtrack often goes unaccredited, even though it is also up there with the best he ever created — a fittingly ludicrous acid-techno dance track complete with all sorts of shrieking, gurgling and wailing synthetic flourishes. It’s the ultimate song for a dance party, or an orgy, or you could just put in on repeat and use it for both.
6. Entertain Me
“Entertain me, I’m as blank as can be, and I’ve seen it before, and I’ve done it before”
Music critics hated Soft Cell when they first landed on the scene. Given the descriptions of their early gigs given in Almond’s autobiography, that may be slightly justified. Some of those early experiences obviously inspired some of the lines on the track — ‘playing the wrong tune, hitting the wrong note…it’s falling apart, why did we ever start?’ But if early 80’s era Almond did anything well, it’s take the piss. With plenty of whooping and hollering from their backing singers The Vicious Pink Phenomena, a rattling, carnivalesque score from Ball, and plenty of sneery put downs from Almond, Entertain Me is an energetic take on failure and disappointment from one of the most successful (at the time) pop bands in the world.
7. Chips on my Shoulder
“I should have told you I’ve chips on my shoulder — I’m making a stand while I sit on my arse!”
This may be the most prescient song on the record. In a world of left v right online posturing and armchair activism, Almond was taking privileged do-gooders to task way back in 1981. On perhaps the album’s most overtly pop-friendly backing track — complete with more whooping and hollering from Vicious Pink and a synth line one might describe as ‘squibbly’ — Almond berates the kind of people who’ll tell you all about starving millions around the world whilst cooking their dinner, and not really do anything else about it. The repeated refrain — ‘Misery, complaints, self-pity, injustice!’ — was undoubtedly pulled from the band’s time at a liberal arts college, where swastikas and nailing mice to wooden planks (look it up — thought we’d forget about that didn’t you, Leeds Beckett?) was passed off as serious social commentary. For all the band’s reputation as purveyors of sleaze, Chips on My Shoulder is a different kind of perverted. In a year of rising social tension, social unrest and political upheaval, here was a ‘fluffy, poncy’ pop band writing a joyous party track about people who couldn’t keep politics out of general conversation. And I feel similarly perverted for enjoying it so much.
8. Bedsitter
“I’m waiting for something, I’m only passing time”
My decision to live on my own in a bedsit in Leeds has its roots entirely in this song (you should have guessed by now that my Soft Cell obsession was unhealthy). Almond made it sound so glamorous, in a depressing sort of way. Now that I am a bona fide ‘bedsitter’, I can confirm that this is easily one of Almond’s most painfully accurate observations. From the having no food in the fridge, to having to look out the window for any sort of entertainment, there has never been a better depiction of suburban isolation in pop. At the dawn of the glittering 80’s — or that is, the years of glamorous pop stars, Maggie Thatchers ‘no society’ and mass gentrification and privatisation — Soft Cell were peeling back the layers to reveal the loneliness and griminess beneath. Plus, all that, and you can dance to it! Makes eating beans on toast on your single bed feel a little more artsy.
9. Secret Life
“Living life, on a knife edge of life — tell my wife, and she’s just had a breakdown”
Being pitched between the twin peaks of two Top 5 singles is a sorry place to be, and on top of that Secret Life has the audacity to be the album’s most musically breezy, nonchalant track as well. Even Almond’s vocal delivery is languid and breathy — but it hides sinister intentions beneath the fluffiness, as all the best Soft Cell tracks do. Almond portrays a man whose indulgences in the seedier side of life — affairs, secret orgies, who knows — is beginning to catch up with him. His anti-hero pops a Valium, breaks the news to his wife (who promptly has a mental breakdown) and considers running away from all the blackmailing and nosy neighbours to live out the rest of his life in fearful solitude. Perhaps the album’s darkest tale, all wrapped up in a simple and sweet 4/4 electronic plod. When people say Soft Cell are sleazy, this is them at the best kind of sleazy — the nightmare underneath the suburban dream, the patent leather thigh-high boot beneath the white cotton dress.
10. Say Hello, Wave Goodbye
“Under the deep red light, I can see the makeup sliding down”
The ultimate 80’s ballad. Eyeliner stained tears bathed in fluorescent pink light. Soulful, soul-crushing and sweeping grandiosity. All of these things are true of Say Hello, Wave Goodbye. But Soft Cell’s pièce de résistance is also wonderfully bitchy, and as always, really rather seedy. Almond’s tale of dumping the prostitute he’s been having an affair with is shot through with equal parts pathos and catty cruelty, and all set to Ball’s most accomplished musical arrangement — soulful, yet deceptively simple, electronics, the greatest example of Ball’s ability to conjure epic levels of orchestration from his tiny little Moog synthesizer. These are perhaps the best lyrics Almond ever wrote, and his performance is the best he ever committed to tape. This withering put down from the second verse really sums up why I’ve dedicated my life to being a rather pathetic Marc Almond obsessive:
“What about me, well, I’ll find someone
Who’s not goin’ cheap in the sales,
A nice little housewife, who’ll give me a steady life
And won’t keep going off the rails”
It’s pure camp. It’s heartbreaking. It’s the perfect song. In my own moment of twisted perversion, I want this song of defiance and betrayal, good-bye’s and good riddance to be played as they're carrying in my coffin at my funeral - take your hands off me, I don’t belong to you.
…
So there we have it. The best album ever made, dissected track by track. When I started writing this I intended to throw in a lot more personal reflections. But given the current state of the world, we don’t need some homosexual on the internet talking about their angsty teenage years (I’ll get there one day). For now let’s all find time to return to old favourites, and maybe try something new. Or write that bloody literature review for uni, if you’re me.
