Censorship, Homophobia & One Of The Biggest Hits Of All Time: Soft Cell On Five Decades Of Fame & Misfortune

“It’s this huge cultural phenomenon,” laughs Soft Cell singer Marc Almond when asked what it’s like to have recorded one of the most recognisable songs in the history of pop music.

Tainted Love, as covered by Soft Cell in 1981, was a global hit, topping the Singles Chart in Australia and becoming the 59th biggest-selling song of all time in the UK. In fact, its gloriously minimal synth blips and clipped beats have become shorthand for all things ‘80s - you hear that Tainted Love intro, and you are instantly swept back to a time of Walkmans, eyeliner and bangles up to your elbow.

Beyond Tainted Love, the British electronic duo Soft Cell have had a career spanning five decades. They’ve released five studio albums in that time, the most recent being 2022’s *Happiness Not Included, while both members have penned memoirs and pursued musical careers outside Soft Cell. Keyboardist and co-songwriter Dave Ball has multiple side hustles that include house duo/remix team The Grid, who created the 1994 global club hit Swamp Thing, and a respectable swathe of production credits (check out his handiwork on Kylie Minogue’s 1998 single Breathe).

Meanwhile Almond pursued a career that’s produced 27 solo and collaborative studio albums, he has also formed bands Marc & The Mambas, The Willing Sinners and Flesh Volcano (with Australian musician JG Thirwell - composer of the sublime Archer theme music), written two memoirs, published three books of poetry and, in 1998, scored another global chart hit with his Gene Pitney collaboration Something’s Gotten Hold Of My Heart.

Yet 2025 will be Soft Cell’s first time in Australia. In 2021, the duo began a 40th Anniversary tour of their debut album, Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret - home to Tainted Love. Initially confined to the UK, in 2022, they took the show to the US, and last year, it expanded into Europe. Finally, it lands in Australia in 2025. And, opening for Soft Cell will be none other than lead singer Marc Almond performing a showcase of his forty-year solo career, also a first for Australia.

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“I mean, we either didn’t get the offer or when we got offers, the timing was kinda wrong,” explains Almond about his and Soft Cell’s lack of Australian visits. “And then the offers just kinda died away, really. Then a few years ago I started doing some more Soft Cell shows, so the promoters came through and said, ‘Would you finally come to Australia?’ And I just jumped at the chance because I just thought, ‘Well, it’s now or never. I’ve got to go.’

“And then I thought that I don’t just wanna go and do just a Soft Cell show. So what I’m doing is I’m supporting myself. I’m doing two halves of the show with an interval. And the first half will be me with my band doing kinda solo hits and solo songs and things. The second half of the show will be Soft Cell doing the whole of the Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret 80s album with some extra hits and extra songs as well. It’s a kinda double whammy show, really. I’m killing two birds with one stone, as it were, and going over as solo and going over as Soft Cell at the same time.”

Having been born in the Merseyside coastal town of Southport, Almond was studying in Leeds when he first met Ball and has since spent time living in London, Barcelona and Moscow. He now resides in Portugal, where he is planning the upcoming Australian tour. “I’ve never been to Australia, so it is a whole new adventure for me,” says Almond. “I was so excited when I finally got this offer to go, and it’s taken a while to work out this double show thing.”

Soft Cell’s Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret landed at a time when synth-pop was at the forefront of the post-punk, new wave movement. In 1981, it slotted in amidst landmark releases of the electronic music genre: The Human League’s Dare, Heaven 17’s Penthouse And Pavement and Depeche Mode’s Speak And Spell.

It was a watershed year for British electronic music - in the UK, The Human League’s Don’t You Want Me and Soft Cell’s Tainted Love were the top two selling singles of 1981. Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret stood apart with its audacious lyrics about suburban mundanity, the curiosity of adolescence and sexual hedonism. The songs moved from catchy pop hooks to moody ballads and celebrated what was then seen as alternative lifestyles (art students exploring the underbelly of city life). At the time it was described by critics as “brash”, “subversive” and “camp”.

“It’s great because I’ve really found a relevance with it again,” Almond muses about returning to the songs of Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret. “You know, sometimes it’s hard to go back to songs you wrote forty-five years ago, forty-six years ago. But something like Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret, I rediscovered it… I didn’t listen to it for many years.

“I sat down with Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys, and he said to me Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret was a hugely influential album for them. He said it’s really like a piece of theatre; it tells this story all the way through. And it does, it’s kinda like a narrative that goes through it and it’s still relevant, it still has relevance. Maybe there’s still a bit of naivety in some of the lyric writing, but I think that’s great, you know, I can’t write in the same way that I did all those years ago. But I feel a real affection for it and it does tell this story going all the way through it. It’s like a little complete piece. And it still sounds good. People have rediscovered the kinda 80s sounds and 80s influences. It’s amazing how those sounds still sound good and they still sound quite current.”

But despite the influence of Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret and the string of hits that the duo achieved on home turf (five top five hits in one 18-month period and four Top 20 albums over the decades), the band are often referred to as a ‘one-hit wonder’ due to the super-sized success of Tainted Love - a song written for legendary US garage band The Standells but eventually landing with US soul singer Gloria Jones who released it as a b-side in 1965.

Since 1981, Soft Cell’s version has been remixed, reissued (a hit again in 1991), sampled (Rihanna’s SOS), synced (Danny DeVito stripped to it in Friends, Matthew Rhys murdered to it in The Americans) and was even paid homage to in an award-winning Spike Jonze Levi’s ad in 1996. Like many artists with an elephant-sized hit in the trophy room, Soft Cell first tried to escape it before coming back to embrace it.

Almond is thoughtful about it now: “Something like Tainted Love is kinda a thing on its own, isn’t it? It’s much bigger than me. It’s much bigger than Soft Cell, really… We had this huge success with Tainted Love and Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret and there was this string of hit singles from that: Bedsitter and Say Hello Wave Goodbye. And I think we kinda went in the other direction, and we decided to be deliberately uncommercial because I think we really had to.

“Had we carried on in a pop vein just bringing out Tainted Loves and Bedsitters or whatever, I think we had to do something that really was a move away from that. And in a way, it was kinda committing commercial suicide because… we didn’t give them [the record company] the [follow-up] album they really wanted, which was just more Tainted Loves. But in the end, I think it gave us a stronger following with the fans and a stronger and longer life. And when I went on to be a solo artist, I kinda went into all different musical genres.

“I took my influence from people like David Bowie, for example, who had not cared so much about being commercial all the time but just doing really great artistic things and some pop things and some un-pop things and creating this kind of legacy with fans that have made you last the test of time. And forty-five, forty-six years later, I’m still making music and still making, hopefully, records that are reaching the public.”

Of course, there was also controversy surrounding Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret. If you purchased a locally-pressed version of the album in Australia back in the day, you could see on the back cover that one of the album’s track titles had been blacked out. Pull the vinyl out of the sleeve and, sure enough, there were only four tracks on side one instead of five.

However, the mystery song’s lyrics remained on the album’s insert: “I would like you on a long black leash/I would parade you down the high street”. Sex Dwarf, a song lampooning the hypocritical headlines of Britain’s morality-policing tabloids, had itself become a tabloid headline due to the X-rated bondage-themed accompanying video. The video was banned, and the song was pulled off the album in some territories.

The resulting backlash was terrifying at the time, but Almond recalls it almost fondly now, “When we did that record, I think we really were… we were two art students. That’s how we met, we went to art college where we’d do very confrontational stuff, performance art, stuff like that. We never kinda expected to really take off in that pop world that we did.

“So, when we did Sex Dwarf, it was really like an art statement, and we worked with director Tim Pope, who had worked with many other people around that time, like The Cure, Siouxsie & The Banshees, and various people. And he liked the subversive element, we wanted to do something that really, I think, would upset the record company in a way and just really put ourselves out there and do something that was a very un-pop group thing to do. When I look at it now, I kinda put my head in my hands, and I think, ‘Oh my god, what on earth was I thinking of?’

“I mean, it really caused a lot of trouble for us, you know. Because we got raided, our offices got raided, there was a whole big tabloid story about it. In a way, it mirrored the whole arc thing of [the song]. Sex Dwarf was taken from a tabloid headline, and then it became a tabloid headline. It really was great; it was one of those things that has taken on legend. People say, ‘I’ve never seen the Sex Dwarf video.’ And I kinda think, ‘Well, maybe the legend of it is better than actually seeing it.”

All copies of the video, and the master copy, were destroyed but not before it could be bootlegged. A pirated version of the Sex Dwarf clip has made its way to Reddit, of course, and an informative, fan-made mini-doc about the controversy is available on YouTube. The Reddit version of the video is grainy and fuzzy, a fact that makes Almond laugh, “It’s like an 80s video nasty.”

While the duo took a hiatus in 1984 after album number three (This Last Night In Sodom), they regrouped to release their fourth album (Cruelty Without Beauty) in 2002. But it was 2022’s *Happiness Not Included that led them back up the UK charts. The album sees them collaborating with a cross-generational mix of LGBTQIA+ artists (Pet Shop Boys, Christeene) who cite Almond and Soft Cell as influences. Over the years, other queer artists such as Anohni and Patrick Wolf have also name-checked Almond.

“I’m really thrilled about that, you know,” notes Almond about that acknowledgement. “I’m really made up about that. Anohni is a great friend of mine, I’ve known her many, many years and we’ve sung together. Anohni was the first person to bring me back on stage again after I had my motorbike accident in 2004 [Almond suffered serious head injuries in 2004 as a result of a traffic collision in central London]. Anohni brought me back on stage - having to overcome my confidence of getting back on stage again. And so I’m absolutely thrilled that she’s always acknowledged me. To be of that whole queer influence, I think, has been… I’m really kinda touched by it. I think when you influence or inspire anyone in music it’s a great thing, it’s what it’s all about. Just as people inspired me, it’s great that I’m inspiring other people, and that’s how music moves forward.”

Almond recalls that he faced a lot of industry homophobia when Soft Cell were starting out in the early 80s. He also recalls how much he admired Bronski Beat singer Jimmy Somerville for tackling that homophobia head-on (Almond collaborated with Bronski Beat on a cover of Donna Summer’s I Feel Love, giving them a UK top three hit in 1985).

“It was a really weird time at the beginning of the eighties,” Almond remembers, “because we were told not to come out: ‘Your career will be ruined’, ‘Your records will be put in the bin.’ It was a very, very homophobic time. And then Jimmy came out, and he was just this normal-looking guy, and he was singing these very out-there songs. So I’ve got to give it to Jimmy really as the guy that really broke the mould and broke the ice, much more being braver out there than a lot of other artists like myself were at the beginning of the eighties, who were being kinda queer and subversive in our way but we weren’t really being as out there as Jimmy was. Jimmy really put himself out there; he was a real trailblazer.”

But Almond did blaze a trail both as an LGBTQIA+ icon and musical innovator. In 2018, he was even recognised for his “services to arts and culture’, landing himself an OBE. That same year was rumoured to be the end of Soft Cell as well, the duo playing a sold-out, career-retrospective “final show” at London’s O2 Arena (20,000 capacity). But the siren call of the Soft Cell synths pulled the band back into the studio and back on the road.

“In recent years, we’ve kinda found a way to get working together again,” explains Almond. “We send stuff back and forth, and I hear stuff that Dave does, and I just get very excited by it because he has those great touches. He does electronic music like nobody else does, and he brings those signature things to his sound. For me, it’s a perfect setting for my voice. So, I think whenever the time feels right, it’s just an organic thing, really. I can’t really explain how it happens, except it’s a chemistry thing that we have.”

Soft Cell will tour Australia for the first time in April 2025. Tickets can be purchased via Destroy All Lines.