Soft Cell: Say Hello, Wave Goodbye

2018 marked the 40th anniversary of Soft Cell, one of the most charismatic bands in the history of popular music. To celebrate this landmark, Marc Almond and Dave Ball reunited for an emotional farewell concert at London’s O2 Arena that September. With unprecedented access, this film provides an intimate portrait of the band, following rehearsals as well as footage from the actual concert, woven in with archive and music videos. The film covers Marc’s formative years growing up in Southport and Dave’s in nearby Blackpool, and how the two met as art students at Leeds Polytechnic in the late 1970s. Marc and Dave perform in The Fenton pub in Leeds, where the band played their first ever paid gig. They perform an early Soft Cell song, A Man Could Get Lost, on Dave’s original keyboards. Soft Cell burned brightly between 1981 and 1984, after their gritty but stunning cover version of Tainted Love became a massive hit, the best-selling single in the UK of 1981 and a number 1 hit in 15 other countries, including the USA. Soft Cell were always more interested in using their success to subvert the mainstream than becoming pop stars, as they tell us in relation to Marc’s ground-breakingly androgynous debut on Top Of The Pops. It was the beginning of a career that defied convention. Soft Cell were influenced as much by punk as Northern Soul and Kraftwerk, bringing a punk ethos to synth-pop. In their heyday, the pair produced top ten singles and three classic albums, selling 10m records overall. Soft Cell’s approach was more sophisticated than the press gave them credit for. Their first album, Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret, saw them labelled as sleazy, when in reality it deliberately used the setting of Soho to explore the sexual undercurrents of British society. Bedsitter explored the escapism from the grim realities of Thatcher’s Britain for many, while Say Hello, Wave Goodbye was about a powerful man breaking off an affair with a call-girl. Soft Cell