Biography of Soft Cell

Like the traditional synthesizer-driven dance-pop of the early '80s, Soft Cell was detached from their material, yet they were not cold. Instead, the duo of vocalist Marc Almond and keyboardist David Ball was warm and human; they were joyfully sleazy, celebrating kinky sex and trashing pop standards. Their finest moment came with a single from their first album, Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret, in 1981. "Tainted Love" represents everything Soft Cell wanted to achieve and it was an enormous success, spending nearly a year on the Billboard singles charts. After that, the duo occasionally recaptured some of the spark of that single (their cover of "Where Did Our Love Go?," in particular) but more frequently slipped into self-parody; they broke up in 1984. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine