I can remember like it was yesterday how I first heard and saw Soft Cell on a TV show here in America. The English electronic duo were performing Tainted Love live and I did not like it one bit. Alas, I did later succumb and became a fan after hearing Bedsitter on the radio and then discovering their debut Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret at the record store.
The title was the clincher: my young teenage mind wanted to be corrupted: Seedy Films, Secret Life and, of course, Sex Dwarf piqued my imagination before I’d heard a note and I knew this wasn’t my parents’ Alice Cooper-shock rock. No, this was something entirely different — an opening to a seamy side of real life I would never have experienced. I was an instant life-long fan and their successive albums were the soundtrack of my teenage years.
Fast forward to now. Soft Cell has just issued their swan song Danceteria, an homage to those decadent days recording their first album in NYC. Those pivotal days where they first met Cindy Ecstacy, the drug dealer who would go on to provide additional vocals for the duo and send their song Torch to the upper echelons of the charts. This release is bittersweet, of course: Dave Ball, who was ailing for some time, must have known this was to be the duo’s final album and managed to brilliantly encapsulate all eras of Soft Cell while still sounding defiantly modern.
The generously proportioned 62-minutes concept record kick off with Elusive, a short instrumental introduction that ends in a dialogue about how the 80s were experienced and not beholden to the internet and its eternal memory. The title track follows with its joyous remembrance of the nightclub that Soft Cell relaxed in after long days of recording: the drugs, the excess and especially the dancing. The Space Inside channels Pet Shop Boys and is easily the best track on the album. I hope this is upgraded to single status because it’s just begging for an extended version (maybe Pet Shop Boys will get in on it?).
Times Square recalls Marc’s birthday dinner and a budding romance that ended with a barefoot dance in the rain, while Two Of A Kind is the Soft Cell I love best: dark and ominous with wonderfully bleak lyrics. The Rainbow Room is the Say Hello, Wave Goodbye of the set and I would definitely expect a Christmas remix as the holidays approach (I will forgive it for having the absolute worst couplet in all of lyricdom: “Will you have the steak/or will you have the fries/it doesn’t really matter/when I look in your eyes”. Really?).
In Heaven is uncharacteristically happy Soft Cell but definitely a slamming number. Decadence Is Hard Work is the sleazy Soft Cell we all know and love and precedes the album’s two weakest tracks: Crackland and What Is Your Morality. Crackland has weirdly chipper music considering the subject matter and both songs are extremely repetitious. Soft Cell wisely left both tracks off the vinyl version and they add nothing of value to the CD either.
Losing Yourself is another dollop of deliciously dark, bleak Soft Cell while After Hours and Wave To America pick the tempo back up for the finale, a banging rework of Out Come The Freaks, featuring back up from Nona Hendryx. With its techno-tinged rhythm track tipping a wink to Memorabilia, covering this Was (Not Was) cult classic feels like a cheeky nod to the time when Don Was was on the blower after Marc and Dave released Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret begging to know how they accomplished their synth sounds.
Bringing the duo nicely full circle, it’s entirely fitting that Danceteria is their first since 1982’s Non Stop Ecstatic Dancing mini album to be sequenced in a continuous club mix. While not the absolute end of Soft Cell releases (a deluxe edition of their third studio LP, 1984’s This Last Night In Sodom is on the cards and, as was the case with 2022’s melancholic comeback *Happiness Not Included, the new CD packaging contains an extra pocket for what one would assume will be an additional disc of unused tracks and remixes relating to the sessions) this album is definitely the perfect way for them to wave goodbye.
A fitting bookend to the career of Britain’s most decadent duo.
Steven Vil
