Soft Cell’s Marc Almond Talks About The Duo’s First New Album In 20 Years And The Iconic ‘Tainted Love’

When Soft Cell—the legendary British synthpop duo of singer Marc Almond and keyboardist David Ball—performed at London’s O2 Arena in 2018, the event was initially billed as a farewell show for a group who had been together on and off for 40 years. Two years after that concert, the coronavirus pandemic changed the world and the band as well. “I found myself with time on my hands and in the bizarre dystopian world of COVID and panic, real tragedy and sadness, coupled with everyone going crazy,” Almond recalls now. “I think Dave and I thought, ‘Hell, why not do another album?’ It all felt creatively much more Soft Cell than my solo work would have. I think we fed creatively into the atmosphere of the time.”

Best known for such hit songs as “Torch,” “Memorabilia,” “Say Hello, Wave Goodbye” and “Tainted Love,” which defined 1980s electropop, Soft Cell returned with the very timely and appropriately titled *Happiness Not Included, the duo’s first new record in 20 years. Additionally, Soft Cell will be touring the U.S. for the first time in two decades as well, starting in August, in which they will be also playing their classic 1981 album Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret in full.

“Dave would send me ideas and tunes,” says Almond about *Happiness Not Included, “and then I write lyrics and record vocals and send them back. We have always worked like that. Dave and I have drifted creatively towards each other over the years and written some great songs, and not always for Soft Cell. I just keep returning to these two worlds, pre- and post-COVID, and now it seems to me that all bets are off.”

The themes on *Happiness Not Included appear to sum up the last few years not only about the pandemic times but also the chaotic state of the world in such songs as “Tranquliser,” “Heart Like Chernobyl” and “Bruises on All My Illusions”—all dressed with the classic Soft Cell hallmarks of Almond’s charismatic vocals, Ball’s electronic wizardry, and the duo’s catchy melodies. “I think you deal with themes that are meaningful to you when you get to a certain age and find that if you are lucky things hoped or imagined have come true but only in part,” the singer explains. “A kind of warped and disappointing view of the future. But in the end—if indeed this is the end—there is a thread of optimism that comes with accepting who we are and where we are in the world. There is some much madness presently in the world that it all feels out of kilter and on the precipice. Unquestionably, we all had to stand back and watch the life we knew disintegrate, to question ourselves and what matters. To take stock I suppose of our lives.”

One of the album’s singles that represent that sentiment is the dazzling “Purple Zone,” which finds Soft Cell teaming up with another famous British synthpop duo Pet Shop Boys. According to Almond, the members of Pet Shop Boys—Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe—were in attendance at a Soft Cell show and enjoyed the performance of “Purple Zone.” A previously recorded version of the song was sent to Tennant and Lowe for them to initially remix. “The next thing I knew was this brilliant version came back to me: they had mixed the track and Neil had laid vocals down,” Almond recalls. “It was such a surprise and they took the track to a new place, another level, quite astonishing. They have both been so supportive. We subsequently made the video together and it was great fun. Someone asked me recently what is the “Purple Zone,” and I told them, ‘You are in it.’ It is this madness we find ourselves living through. “Purple Zone” is such a lockdown song.”

The new album’s blistering title track delivers a one-two punch in expressing disillusionment with the current society via such lines as “England was built on sorrow and pain/Slavery and ill-gotten gain” and “Our social media makes us slaves/Like children we have to be told to behave.” Says Almond: “I remember writing this song on one of those days when the news bombards us with images of pain and suffering, endless trivia and misery.

“I don’t feel that I am a person who needs to be exposed to everything, it is too much and too often a burden in light of what can we, as individuals, do about it. And adding to that is the notion that somewhere between truth and lies, lies truth. I suppose finding your own truth is a survival mechanism I have had to live with. It is an angry song, a lyrical rage and a lot of editing was involved in it to find a balance, I suppose, because once I start, well …”

While it reflects on the current times, *Happiness Not Included does offer moments of the past, such as on the infectious “Nostalgia Machine” and the stark electropop of “Polaroid”—the latter track inspired by Soft Cell’s encounter with Pop Art icon Andy Warhol in New York City during the early 1980s. “The song is about my time at The Factory in New York, and meeting Andy Warhol,” says Almond. “He was everything you would want Andy Warhol to be. There was nothing of who he was that he revealed. This strange creation, oddly taller than I imagined. He was polite, guarded and cold but also exactly as I had wanted him to be. The current documentary available on streaming [The Andy Warhol Diaries] is astonishing and heartbreaking.”

The new album concludes with the gorgeous piano-dominated balled “New Eden” that carries a tinge of optimism and sobering realism. “I wrote it for older people who feel lost in this current world, outliers, I suppose, in this polarized black-and-white world. I wanted to evoke that feeling of optimism that comes with at least a belief of a better place, or world, maybe even spiritualism. One of the songs that inspired me into writing “New Eden was the song “Go West” – first by the Village People, as it was filled with such promise of something better, freer, a time before AIDS. And then the remarkable version by Pet Shop Boys that taps into the post-AIDS world, and shifts the location of theme to East/West and political freedoms, and the lovely sadness and melancholic delivery by Neil.”

*Happiness Not Included is a further continuation of Soft Cell pushing the envelope both musically and lyrically that goes back to 1977 when Almond and Ball, who met as students at Leeds Polytechnic, formed the group. The duo’s 1981 debut album, Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret, offered a subversive, gritty and neon-bathed look at the underbelly of British society and youth culture during the Thatcher era. “I think that album is saturated in the feel of New York at that time – the sleaze, the danger, that edginess, and the scariness of 42nd Street,” explains Almond. “It was just thrilling, just pre-AIDS so exciting to be part of.”

Soft Cell catapulted to fame with their now-legendary mesmerizing cover of “Tainted Love,” written by Ed Cobb and first recorded by American singer Gloria Jones in 1964. The song, which appears on Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret, went to number one in the U.K. and later peaked at number eight in the U.S., staying on the Billboard Hot 100 chart for an astounding 43 weeks. ““Tainted Love” will always remind me of that year 1981 in New York, on the cusp of the AIDS pandemic,” says Almond, “the deep breath before the plunge. So many amazing and sad memories all mixed together. Even the title’s irony doesn’t escape me. We talk about the stars aligning, the moments when it all clicks together. The Polaroids of me with Divine and Warhol, then the end of Studio 54, or out with [the disco singer] Sylvester or taking Ecstasy, dancing on the 8mm film, and watching the sunset from the top of the Rainbow Room.” Asked if he had any idea at the time that “Tainted Love” would become a massive hit, Almond replies: “How could we? I am friendly with Annie Lennox [of Eurythmics] and she said the same thing about “Sweet Dreams.” How could anyone know? The stars align.”

Soft Cell continued to record two more full-length albums (1983’s The Art of Falling Apart and 1984’s This Last Night in Sodom) and score hit singles amid a whirlwind of media attention, such as their performance of “Tainted Love” on Britain’s music television show Top of the Pops. After the duo broke up in 1984, Almond and Ball pursued solo projects but have periodically reunited to tour and record new music. “I think all the albums are so different and mean varying things to so many people and the soundscape they created at the time,” Almond says on how *Happiness Not Included stacks up in Soft Cell’s discography. “What I am saying is that I don’t believe any one [album] is better than another. Clearly, some were more commercially successful but for me, they all sit as a body of lifetime work, for better or worse.”

Beyond their hit songs and enduring popularity, Soft Cell set the mold for future synthpop duos such as Yazoo, Pet Shop Boys and Goldfrapp. In characterizing the musical chemistry between him and Ball after more than 40 years, Almond says: “We are of course so different but our roots are firmly from the north/northwest of England, and it is such a qualitative place. The affordable glamour and heart of Blackpool, seaside towns out of season like Southport, the darkness of Leeds in the time of the Ripper, the anger and excitement of the music scene with Northern soul, disco, punk and electro (and this was new to all of us, not just to one generation as it is now in this derivative age we find ourselves). I was angst and spotty and gay (and the least likely pop star) and Dave was tall, handsome and charismatic. As Jung said: ‘The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.’ And in many ways, we both were transformed by each other.”