Dave Ball, the multi-instrumentalist, producer, and songwriter who carried out alongside Marc Almond within the influential synth-pop duo Soft Cell, died yesterday (October 22). The band’s publicist, Debbie Ball, confirmed the information, writing that Ball died peacefully in his sleep at his London house. No trigger was given. The musician was 66 years previous.
Raised in Blackpool, England, after his adoption right into a working-class household, Ball grew up a budding artist with a penchant for the Northern soul craze then sweeping the north of England, obsessively accumulating Tamla and Stax singles. He moved to Leeds to check advantageous artwork in his late teenagers and met fellow pupil Almond, a lamé-clad efficiency artist. The pair bonded over punk and digital music and cult movies; after a couple of weeks of futzing with a Korg synthesizer, Ball enlisted his flamboyant new pal as a bandmate.
They had been a wierd pair—“Marc, this homosexual bloke in make-up; and me, an enormous man who regarded like a minder,” as Ball put it to The Guardian in 2017—however the distinction neatly superimposed onto their musical loves. They named the duo Mushy Cell, punning on what they known as “consumerist nightmares and suburban madness,” and made songs amalgamating an unlikely trinity of Kraftwerk, Suicide, and cabaret. They made their dwell debut “at a school Christmas present two quick months after they met, performing ramshackle, anticonsumerist songs in opposition to a backdrop of Tremendous 8 movies of destroyed radios and industrial landscapes,” Pitchfork’s Eric Torres wrote in his evaluation of the band’s debut album, Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret. “The art-punk spark was lit.”
An early breakout single, “Memorabilia,” co-produced by Mute founder Daniel Miller, united their love of kitsch and acid home in a floor-filler that instructed the underground, avant-garde curios of their Some Bizzare label cadre had been about to boil over. The eruption got here with “Tainted Love,” a tempestuous, darkly intoxicating cowl of a Gloria Jones music Ball had heard in a membership as a youngster. Backed by a canopy of the Supremes’ “The place Did Our Love Go,” the one was the UK’s second-best vendor of 1981 and topped the charts in additional than a dozen different nations.
The hit, and the debut album that adopted, affixed Mushy Cell in British music historical past: contemporaries of Depeche Mode and path-makers for bands like Pet Store Boys, Erasure, and Spandau Ballet, even when Almond accused a few of that crop of constructing heartless music “to pose in opposition to the Berlin Wall to.” The duo launched two extra studio albums within the ensuing years, The Artwork of Falling Aside and This Final Night time in Sodom; each charted in the UK, regardless of the latter’s launch after the group’s dissolution. Mushy Cell additionally launched one of many first remix albums, Non-Cease Ecstatic Dancing, and Ball, carefully attuned to the evolution of digital music, would vogue 12″ edits of their singles by splicing collectively segments of tape. Almond and Ball’s embrace of the clubland celebration way of life, and substance use, contributed to their cut up. As Ball wrote in his 2020 autobiography, Digital Boy, “We’d been so profitable in a short time, in fixed demand and due to this fact all the time collectively—dwelling out of one another’s pockets. I don’t suppose any relationship may have endured that strain.”
