Dave Ball, the multi-instrumentalist, producer, and songwriter who performed alongside Marc Almond in the influential synth-pop duo Soft Cell, died yesterday (October 22). The band’s publicist, Debbie Ball, confirmed the news, writing that Ball died peacefully in his sleep at his London home. No cause was given. The musician was 66 years old.
Raised in Blackpool, England, after his adoption into a working-class family, Ball grew up a budding artist with a penchant for the Northern soul craze then sweeping the north of England, obsessively collecting Tamla and Stax singles. He moved to Leeds to study fine art in his late teens and met fellow student Almond, a lamé-clad performance artist. The pair bonded over punk and electronic music and cult films; after a few weeks of futzing with a Korg synthesizer, Ball enlisted his flamboyant new friend as a bandmate.
They were a strange pair—“Marc, this gay bloke in makeup; and me, a big guy who looked like a minder,” as Ball put it to The Guardian in 2017—but the contrast neatly superimposed onto their musical loves. They named the duo Soft Cell, punning on what they called “consumerist nightmares and suburban insanity,” and made songs amalgamating an unlikely trinity of Kraftwerk, Suicide, and cabaret. They made their live debut “at a college Christmas show two short months after they met, performing ramshackle, anticonsumerist songs against a backdrop of Super 8 films of destroyed radios and industrial landscapes,” Pitchfork’s Eric Torres wrote in his review of the band’s debut album, Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret. “The art-punk spark was lit.”
An early breakout single, “Memorabilia,” co-produced by Mute founder Daniel Miller, united their love of kitsch and acid house in a floor-filler that suggested the underground, avant-garde curios of their Some Bizzare label cadre were about to boil over. The eruption came with “Tainted Love,” a tempestuous, darkly intoxicating cover of a Gloria Jones song Ball had heard in a club as a teenager. Backed by a cover of the Supremes’ “Where Did Our Love Go,” the single was the United Kingdom’s second-best seller of 1981 and topped the charts in more than a dozen other countries.
The hit, and the debut album that followed, affixed Soft Cell in British music history: contemporaries of Depeche Mode and path-makers for bands like Pet Shop Boys, Erasure, and Spandau Ballet, even if Almond accused some of that crop of making heartless music “to pose against the Berlin Wall to.” The duo released two more studio albums in the ensuing years, The Art of Falling Apart and This Last Night in Sodom; both charted in the United Kingdom, despite the latter’s release after the group’s dissolution. Soft Cell also released one of the first remix albums, Non-Stop Ecstatic Dancing, and Ball, closely attuned to the evolution of electronic music, would fashion 12″ edits of their singles by splicing together segments of tape. Almond and Ball’s embrace of the clubland party lifestyle, and substance use, contributed to their split. As Ball wrote in his 2020 autobiography, Electronic Boy, “We’d been so successful very quickly, in constant demand and therefore always together—living out of each other’s pockets. I don’t think any relationship could have endured that pressure.”
