Live Report: Soft Cell – O2 Academy Glasgow

As debuts go, ‘Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret’ was a statement of intent – one of the most influential, defiant albums of the 80s. Soft Cell emerged fully formed, with a clutch of bed-sit dramas tarted up in synthesized sheen, and set the pop duo blueprint for the rest of time. Almond already a black-eyed, sylph-limbed icon with a deft line in characterisation; Dave Ball, the impassive genius on keys. 

You can’t listen, even once, and fail to recognise how well-endowed it is with singular, iconic pop songs. The single-sink drama of ‘Bedsitter’. The dungeon-dwelling sleaze of ‘Sex Dwarf’. The operatic melodrama of ‘Say Hello, Wave Goodbye’. The irresistible, never-aging re-imagining of Gloria Jones’ Tainted Love. And they perform it all, for the first time in twenty years, at Glasgow’s 02 Academy.

It’s a special night for the crowds that snake outside the venue, and many are dressed to thrill. A flash of silver lame, hard men in eyeliner – the guy behind me confesses to his pal he nearly fainted earlier, he was so excited to see Marc Almond in the flesh. Young and old, queer or straight, all gathered to watch a piece of pop history.

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Though the tour’s billed as a 40th anniversary playthrough, they’re not serving up something so traditional. ‘Happiness Not Included’ – their first album of new material since 2002’s ‘Cruelty Without Beauty’, is to be released in February 2022.

They’re holding up beautifully. Almond hasn’t aged a day over 40 himself, clad all-in black and occasionally removed shades, dancing atop a silver platform as politically-observant projections on corporate greed and climate change play behind.

They tear through a healthy chunk of new material – new single ‘Bruises On All My Illusions’ has a musical punch that belies the jaded disaffection of its lyrics (“lying in my bed listening to the police sirens, sounds like lullabies”), railing against tired sloganeering on Monoculture, the exhausted past on ‘Nostalgia Machine’.

Almond is animated, writhing, working the room and praising the Glasgow crowd who’re eating this up with a spoon, dropping to his knees and bouncing off the energy. Ball sits behind the keys, partially obscured by black music stands – the icy demeanour of youth melted somewhat by age, but no less impactful for it.

As lights fall blood-red, a stock-still Almond launches into the miniature horror-story of Martin as a means of first-act finale: “He lives in a fantasy/There’s a danger that he’ll take too far/ His morbid curiosity”. The quasi-operatic menace he’s able to channel, standing stock-still, smiling, foot tapping, communicating danger and wired elegance.

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The classics are played in order, as they should be. ‘Frustration’. ‘Tainted Love’. ‘Seedy Films’. ‘Youth’. ‘Sex Dwarf’. ‘Entertain Me’. ‘Chips On My Shoulder’. ‘Bedsitter’. ‘Secret Life’. ‘Say Hello, Wave Goodbye’. – It’s strange to think that these songs are coming up to middle-age, given how much of their legacy you can hear in the now. Does he receive as much of the lyrical due he deserves for these three-minute character sketches? It’s stark to listen back and hear how much of Soft Cell’s work is concerned with escaping the mundanity of everyday life.

‘Bedsitter’s maudlin dramas, ‘Chips On My Shoulder’s refrain of “misery, complaints and petty injustice’. But these suburban rumblings are disturbed by subversive undercurrents, offering escape from repression. Stalking the tightrope of the sexual and seedy like no other British band before or since, it’s in the sauce that Soft Cell truly come alive.  

‘Tainted Love’s re-imagined Northern Soul is sung back word-perfect, and even gets the sound guys dancing. ‘Seedy Films’ flashes its dirty mac, a peek into the world of the perverse. Sex Dwarf’s iconicly provocative chorus, the feckless luster at its heart mercilessly “luring disco dollies to a life of vice” – as call-girl postcards and call-cards decorate the stage. The frotting frenzy continues into ‘Entertain Me’s frenetic scrabble for instant gratification.

‘Say Hello, Wave Goodbye’ wins the room. Unbleached by overplay, the vicious barbs of the kiss-off haven’t lost any of their sting – and every single word is bounced back from the crowd. Men and women with their arms aloft, if lighters were still allowed we’d all be holding them.

‘Memorabilia’, their first ever single, closes. For all the gloss of who Soft Cell are now, how they grew and what they became, it’s these trinkets of mischief and misadventure – all the tat that makes a life, leant significance and drama through imagination – that made them such an iconic touch-point in Britain’s peerless 80s pop legacy.

And in spite of its retrospective reversal, starting with the new and ending with the old, it’s a celebration, by a band looking as much to its future as its past.

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Words: Marianne Gallagher // @SoLongMarianne
Photography: Thanks to James Edmond (Scottish Music Network)

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