Last October, 80s electro-pop pioneers Soft Cell – singer Marc Almond and keyboardist Dave Ball – decided that the new songs they’d been working on were finished. “I said, ‘Do we both put a big tick beside this album?’” Almond remembers. Ball agreed; they were both happy. “Two days later, someone came in and said: ‘Dave’s just passed away,” Almond says. “And I just felt numb, to be quite honest.”
Ball died in his sleep aged 66 on 22 October 2025; he’d had health issues since a fall at home in March 2022 left him with pneumonia and then sepsis, and in an induced coma for months. It means new album , which was released on Friday, is Soft Cell’s sixth and last. “I would never do another Soft Cell album without Dave,” Almond says.
Both musically and thematically, is a fitting closing chapter: an excellent, exuberant, arty dance-pop record about the pair’s adventures in New York (and the famous titular nightclub beloved of Andy Warhol and Madonna) in the decadent early 80s, back when Soft Cell were the great transgressives of UK pop.
Soft Cell are best known for their 1981 million-selling number one smash “Tainted Love”, their electro makeover of Gloria Jones’ 1964 soul classic. But the former Leeds Polytechnic art students – Ball, the synth master, and Almond, the vivacious provocateur – used austerely dark electronics to detail the thrill of gay nightlife’s sleazy underbelly – all S&M clubs, porn cinemas, and sexual experimentation – as well as its flipside, the isolation and societal shame it could bring.
Against all odds, it was a template followed by synth-pop duos Erasure and Pet Shop Boys, and it made Almond a pop star, even when dressed in his provocative androgynous aesthetic: between 1981 and 1982, Soft Cell had five top-five hits largely drawn from hedonism-as-salvation debut album , including the truly wonderful torch song “Say Hello, Wave Goodbye”, about the end of an illicit affair.
“We were these two art students – we imagined we’d maybe have this little underground group,” Almond says, now 69, a breathlessly chatty presence on video call from his home in the remote woodlands of Portugal. “But we were thrust into the world of pop stardom, and everything changed.” It didn’t sit well. “We hated it so much at first. It gave us a chance to be subversive, but I just found it all too much, the pressure to conform, to be a role model to our younger fans.”
Back when Almond and Ball met at Leeds Poly in 1977 – two “chalk and cheese” northern boys from Southport and Blackpool respectively – they bonded over “the same kind of dry sardonic sense of humour” and alternative culture. “We liked B-movie trash culture, German electronic music, slasher movies, video nasties, cult underground movies.” Yet suddenly there they were, on the cover of pop bible , “wearing Christmas party hats and blowing kazoos”, Almond says, still sounding disgusted at himself. “And we just thought, ‘This is the worst moment that’s ever happened to us. Why are we doing this?'”
The tabloids also took an interest, especially in their track “Sex Dwarf” and its video, in which sex workers met . “We didn’t twig that it was like a video nasty at the time, and it gave us a lot of bad attention, nearly got us in trouble with the police,” Almond says. Their answer to this unwanted mainstream attention? Self-sabotage. “We did everything trying to destroy it,” Almond admits. “We ended up doing interviews with bags over our heads. We went into the record company and smashed up all the gold discs. We decided to commit commercial suicide, not be just two disposable pop stars. And going to New York gave us that freedom.”
And it’s this period that Almond is evoking in Danceteria. “I’m writing about a love letter to New York in that period and how it changed us as people, how it changed us as a band. We became an honorary New York band.” Almond had touched on the subject on “Polaroid”, a track on their 2022 album Happiness is Not Included about meeting Andy Warhol at Danceteria and being invited to his latest iteration of the Factory. “We talked about mundane things while he was looking through you and taking Polaroids of you and not really listening to what you were saying.”
When they arrived in 1981, New York was a revelation, even compared with the gay Soho scene in London they’d depicted on . “You think you’ve seen it all when you go to Soho, but you’d never seen anything like New York. Soho felt oppressed in some ways.” Almond describes New York then as “this dangerous, dark, creative, fantastic place. And lots of clubs in cellars and subterranean bars. Everything seemed to go on underground in dark places, but it was very exuberant. You could go to a club and see live sex performed on stage. The whole heavy leather and heavy S&M sex clubs around the meatpacking district with trans sex workers, which really inspired the song ‘The Space Inside’,” he says of the dark underground disco track on .
It goes without saying that it was a debauched time: Almond did his fair share of whatever substance was going, and then some. “A whole heady mix of over-the-top drinking and drugging,” he says, especially with the new drug on the scene: ecstasy. “Nobody knew where it came from. There was a couple of dealers in New York. It was a very private thing that people were giving to personal friends.”
The revelry is captured in : in the joyful disco of “In Heaven (When I Dance with You)” and the title track, where everyone got “higher than high”. But alongside the sparkling ballad “The Rainbow Room”, there are stark moments of self-reflection and regret in “Losing Yourself” and “What is Your Morality?” “I wanted to get that feeling of going deeper into the night and losing yourself in the darker spaces of clubs, just trying to escape from things,” Almond says. “And I wanted to paint the city as quite a lonely place as well. Everybody’s looking for love in their spaces. But it’s quite an unforgiving city.”
While in New York, Soft Cell made their second album, 1983’s The Art of Falling Apart, and their third, 1984’s This Last Night in Sodom. But by that time, the city was being decimated by Aids. Almond remembers hearing about it for the first time. “I was in a car driving into New York. They were talking on the radio about a new disease that was affecting gay people, Haitian people, haemophiliac people. They didn’t have a name for it. They were calling it Grid at that time.” The scene Almond loved slowly disappeared. “I noticed the closed signs on various places, closed by order of the mayor. It was starting to be very desolate. You started to see very sick people. A hotel on Christopher Street was closed down and became a hospice. It became a very dark city indeed. And everybody became very afraid. It was a weird time, and it stopped being fun.”
After the decidedly uncommercial This Last Night in Sodom, Soft Cell decided to split. “New York gave us freedom, but it also broke us up as a band. We realised how separate we were.” Still, it was mutual. “We never ever really argued in almost 50 years of knowing each other,” Almond says. “Sometimes I think Dave rolled his eyes at some of my ideas more than anything. And if I wasn’t keen on a tune that he’d given me, I’d just ignore him, basically. We just wanted to do different things.”
Almond went on to have an eclectic and successful solo career, while Ball worked as a producer and had 90s chart success as The Grid. They reunited as Soft Cell first in 2000, releasing the album in 2002; a billed final gig at the O2 in 2018 was followed by 2022’s well-received , which Almond says at the time felt like a swansong.
But now comes the final curtain with . It is inevitably bittersweet for Almond. He says that Ball’s death “wasn’t an enormous surprise”, given his ill health; his fall, in which Ball fractured his spine and broke five ribs, left him using a motorised wheelchair. The pair’s last concert as Soft Cell was at the Rewind Festival in Henley in August, just two months before Ball died. “He wasn’t in great shape then. I wasn’t really happy with the audience seeing him like this, but Dave really loved doing the live show.” Ball was in high spirits on completing the album. “He seemed really in a good place actually, and happy with the record.”
Almond says they’d been closer making than they’d been in some time. “But I think what was really overwhelming for me was I was relieved we’d done this record together. It was almost like fate that we’d done it like this to end it off, that drew things in a full circle,” Almond says. “I just feel sad that Dave wouldn’t be around to see it.”