With the passing of Dave Ball last autumn, one of the 1980s’ great synth-pop outfits came to an end. He and Soft Cell partner Marc Almond completed the final mix of Danceteria two days before Ball died. It’s the full stop on the band and, fittingly, a concept album about early 1980s New York, where the duo indulged in hedonistic 24-hour nightclubbing which they filtered into darkly peerless electronic music, giving Britain a glimpse of what lay in its 1990s future.
Danceteria is, then, a celebration of long-ago dissolution, the glamour and sleaze of a city that no longer exists. Tonally, it’s similar to Madonna’s most recent album; indeed, she receives a mention on the moodily pulsing title track, an inventory of the 21st Street clubbing mecca.
Tag Archive: Soft Cell
Electronic music pioneers Soft Cell release a super deluxe reissue of their classic 1983 album The Art Of Falling Apart via Universal Music. Soft Cell’s – aka singer and frontman Marc Almond and multi-instrumentalist and producer Dave Ball – second album is freshly remastered by Barry Grint from the original tapes and shows off the feted duo’s gothic take on pop music in all its full, darkly textured glory. Following directly on from 1982’s seminal one-of-the-first remix albums ‘Non-Stop Ecstatic Dancing’, ‘The Art Of Falling Apart’ reached No. 5 on the UK charts. As befits an album celebrating difference and choosing art over the glitzy 80s pop dream, ‘The Art Of Falling Apart’ gloriously twists and turns between anger, frustration and destruction to beauty, reflection and unity.
After expanding their debut album for a box set in 2023, Soft Cell revisit the next entry in their discography: the remix album Non-Stop Ecstatic Dancing. The collection comes back to two CDs with a host of bonus material, including vintage non-LP singles and remixes plus a host of rare promo remixes issued in the last decade.
…After Marc Almond and David Bell burst onto the scene with 1981’s Non-Stop Erotic Dancing – which featured a synth-forward cover of Gloria Jones’ Northern soul classic “Tainted Love” that became a worldwide No. 1 and opened the floodgates for synthpop and New Wave on the American charts – Soft Cell had intentions of recording new material for their sophomore album with a most unlikely ally: Donald Fagen of Steely Dan.