Dave Paul wasn’t just Soft Cell’s background man, he was driving their amazing, devastating sound | Pop and rock

forBy common consent, Soft Cell’s debut on Top of the Pops, on August 13, 1981, ranks among the show’s most striking performances. It was influential enough to send their single “Tainted Love” first into the top ten, then to number one – eventually becoming the second biggest-selling single of the year – and spark a number of complaints. The final reason was because of the duo’s leader, Marc Almond, who was wearing eyeliner and jewellery, presenting his voice with a strange mixture of intense emotion, high camp and occasional knowing glances into the camera: he was clearly a gay man, but a gay man who refused to conform to the pantomime stereotype that still prevailed on British television, a decision that initially upset the head of his record company – who collared Almond Backstage he protested, “You should slaughter him.” Go up a little!” – then apparently caused the BBC keyboards to light up.

Almond’s presence was so striking that it was easy to overlook the other man on stage, moustachioed, mute, and almost motionless behind his keyboard. But, as his bandmate pointed out, overlooking Dave Paul was a terrible misjudgment. “He was truly mentally disturbed,” Almond later recalled. “There were times when he would jump out from behind the keyboards if someone was threatening me on stage, and he would punch someone in the front row.”

Furthermore, the ball has been as integral to Soft Cell’s success as Almond. He grew up in Blackpool, one of the hotspots of northern soul music, and was largely responsible for the presence of music in Soft Cell’s work: it included not only Gloria Jones’ warp-speed “Tainted Love,” but also “What’s Judy Street” and “The Night,” Frankie Valli’s northern dancefloor favourite. It was Ball who came up with their version of the Tainted Love hook, by rhythmically emphasizing the first two notes of the song’s bass line on his synthesizer: doink-doink! It was Ball’s love of John Barry’s childhood soundtrack that gave Soft Cell their greatest single, the deeply spiteful “Say Hello, Wave Goodbye” — with its cinematic lushness and Ball’s Korg-bass synths — that became the signature of their early sound (you can hear it used to impressively filthy effect on the follow-up to Tainted Love, Top 5 Bedsitter Songs). And if he seemed less of an obvious threat to the heteronormative norms of middle England than his bandmate, Paul was equally committed to the idea that Soft Cell should be a pop band that could, in Almond’s words, “provoke people, shock them, wake them up, subvert them.” His tastes in electronic music were less influenced by pop than the confrontational racket made by Suicide and Throbbing Gristle.

Ball and Almond’s own desire for confrontation made them stand out, even in the climate of post-punk pop going well, as evidenced by the tabloid furor caused by the video for Sex Dwarf, a track from their debut album Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret, and the fact that their debut album had a song called Sex Dwarf in the first place.

It went on a succession of stunning releases, but after its first duo of hits, it also proved its commercial downfall: Anything Goes Right or Not, trailing its second album with two singles concerned respectively with a horribly dysfunctional family (Where the Heart Is) and amphetamine-fueled compulsive sexual behavior (the John Rechy-inspired numbers). It proved too much for the British record-buying public. By the time of the release of their third album, 1984’s exceptional This Last Night in Sodom, it was hard to avoid the feeling that Ball and Almond were doing everything they could to destroy what was left of their popular success. Produced by Ball and recorded in mono “just to be bloody mental”, it sounded claustrophobic, chaotic, and downright sexy: on one track, the completely improvised Mr. Self Destruct, Ball really let his love of industrial music run wild. The lead single, “Soul Inside”, was accompanied by a video of the duo smashing their gold and platinum discs. They broke up shortly after its release.

On Ball’s subsequent solo album, In Strict Tempo, he ventured deeper into musical left field: equally influenced by dance, classical and industrial music, it featured vocals by Genesis P-Orridge and Gavin Friday of the Virgin Prunes, while the cover star was Geoff Rushton, better known as John Balance of Coil. But after its release, he mainly worked as a producer and remixer. He continued his association with Genesis P-Orridge, and contributed to Jack the Tab and Tekno Acid Beat, two 1988 TV projects that billed themselves as acid house albums, though they sounded considerably less like acid house than Soft Cell’s first single Memorabilia, which, with its relentless, ground-pounding drum beat and a chatty, trippy riff that strangely foreshadowed the music sweeping Britain during the Second Summer of Love in 1988.

In fact, Paul was ahead of the curve when it came to acid house in more ways than one. He was introduced to the then-legal drug MDMA in New York during the making of Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret, and the duo allowed him to consume their remix album Non Stop Ecstatic Dancing. The clue was in the title, not that anyone in the UK at the time knew what ecstasy was, or indeed what the rapping of a new version of Memorabilia was leading to: “We take a pill, close our eyes and let our love materialize / I don’t mean love on a box of chocolates, I mean love that really vibrates.”

In 1989, he founded the network with another Psychic TV alumnus, Richard Norris. In a strange echo of Soft Cell’s success with Tainted Love, they had a hit with a track that didn’t fully represent what they were about. Swamp Thing, a banjo-sample-driven commercial house tune recorded, at least in part, with the intention of riling up dance purists, was released in 1994, the same year the duo produced another major hit, Billy Ray Martin’s Your Loving Arms – but its playful, radio-friendly tone was a bit removed from the more idiosyncratic aspects of Grid’s work. They have previously collaborated with Timothy Leary, Sun Ra, and Roxy Music’s Andy McKay; The most memorable tracks on the album from which Swamp Thing was taken, Evolver, featured heavily on Robert Fripp’s processed guitar; It may be more appropriate that they be remembered for the great 90s Balearic classic Floatation, best heard on Norris and Andy Weatherall’s collaborative Subsonic Grid Mix.

The Grid never broke up – they released a full-length collaborative album with Fripp in 2021 – but by the early 2000s, Ball and Almond, who had worked together sporadically in the 1990s, had re-contracted Soft Cell. Their initial reformation, which produced the 2002 album Brutality Without Beauty, quickly faltered after a disastrous US tour. They decided to end things on a proper note with a one-off 2018 farewell show at London’s O2 Arena, but ended up touring further and produced a new album called Happiness Not Included. You can understand why their plans changed: the O2 show was enthusiastically received, a bit of a mess and a powerful reminder that Soft Cell were a pop duo like no other. Watching Almond lead the crowd in a sing-along of Sex Dwarf, or 1983’s Meet Murder My Angel with the wailing noise of a modular synth, it was hard not to be puzzled by the idea that this was the band that graced the stage of a Top of the Pops or a Smash Hits cover.

But they did, and you can never forget that, because of the degree of influence their careers had. They were the first, but certainly not the last, British synth-pop duo to marry soulful vocals with icy electronics: Erasure’s Andy Bell claimed they “would never have existed” if Soft Cell hadn’t existed first. On the one hand, Ball’s intro to Tainted Love has been sampled on songs by Rihanna, Pink, and Flo-Rida. On the other hand, Trent Reznor was so inspired by what he called the “beautiful, heartbreaking, depressing, chaotic, combustible” sound of The Art of Falling Apart and This Last Night in Sodom that he borrowed the title of the latter’s opening song for the first track of Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral: Mr Self Destruct.

Being the musical link between Rihanna and Nine Inch Nails is no easy feat, but Dave Paul wasn’t a man accustomed to blowing his own trumpet: “I’ve been lurking in the background,” he once shrugged. In response, Marc Almond reiterated that overlooking his bandmate was a terrible misjudgment. “Soft Cell was more Dave than me,” he told an interviewer firmly.