On 9 February 2019, I had my one and only conversation with Soft Cell’s Dave Ball. The intention was to use this in a project I was working on at the time that ultimately never got finished.
On the sad occasion of Ball’s passing, I decided to revisit the conversation. I remember it was a Saturday afternoon, and took place during the halftime break of a football match he was watching on television. This was before I regularly used video conferencing for music interviews and so I just called the mobile number that his PR contact had passed over to me.
On Frank Tovey and Leeds Polytechnic
I knew Frank Tovey before he started Fad Gadget. He was a student at Leeds Poly. I was in the first year and he was in the third year. This was 1977, when I joined.
The new kids used to hang out with the older students, and I remember Frank being a performance artist and very intense guy. He was southern, from London, and there was a North-South divide among the students. That really pissed him off. I used to see him around Leeds Poly a lot. There was one performance he did called Berg, which I can vaguely remember going along to watch.
There was a small recording room at Leeds Poly. It was mostly designed for people that studied performance art to make soundtracks. Before I got a synthesiser, I used to muck about in there with a guitar and an echo chamber. And one day I was in there and there was an Crumar Compac electric piano. I thought, ‘Fucking hell, I’m going to have a fiddle around with it,’ and I put it through my effects pedals and recorded some bits and then put the piano back to how I’d found it.
Frank heard what I’d been doing and said, ‘Where did you get that keyboard sound from?’ And I said, “Oh, it was from this electric piano that was in the studio.’ And he said, ‘That’s my keyboard! You never fucking asked me if you could use it!’ He hated me for a while because of that. We didn’t really hit it off, and I imagine it was was because I’d used his electric piano.
He was probably the reason I bought a synthesiser because I thought, ‘I won’t bother using his one again!’ It pricked up my ears to messing about with electronic music.
On performance art and the origins of Soft Cell
Leeds Poly was very encouraging of people who wanted to do performance art as opposed to acting. Quite a lot of the lecturers there did performance art. I don’t know what you would call it – it was radically different theatre, using your bodies as art, almost like living human sculptures. I mean, I was never that much interested in it.
I started working with Marc Almond at Leeds just after I got my synthesiser. He’d heard me doing these bleeps and sounds, and he asked me if I do some music to go with his performances. And so, originally, I was just doing the sounds for Marc’s performance art pieces, and then that evolved into Soft Cell.
It was mostly just sounds. There were a few songs in these early performances of Marc’s. I was writing these funny little quirky songs at the time. Marc heard some, and he said, ‘Can I have a go at singing some of these?’ And I said, ‘Yeah. Why not?’
This developed, and it sounded much better with him singing than me. I wasn’t a singer. And then he said, ‘Can I write some lyrics? Some new ones?’ And I said, ‘Of course,’ so then the relationship developed as a writing partnership. And then we talked about calling it something, and it became Soft Cell. It was The Soft Cell, originally, but we decided to drop The.
On his first synth
It was a Mini Korg 800DV. I still have it. I got it just after I’d started at Leeds Poly.
Before I got it, it had belonged to the drummer out of the band Jethro Tull. It’s quite ironic, really, because Marc’s been working with Ian Anderson, the singer from Jethro Tull. I grew up in Blackpool, and Ian’s also from Blackpool. That’s where I found the synthesiser, in a music shop in Blackpool.
It cost me £400 second-hand, which was a lot of money. My dad had just died and I’d been left some money. Originally I’d played guitar but I wasn’t very good, but then I heard Kraftwerk, so I did a part exchange for this synth with my Fender Telecaster guitar. I lugged it back to Leeds and it was a it was a permanent feature in the little sound recording room. I mastered how to use that synth over the next few weeks.
On Mute Records
Apart from seeing Frank’s performance of Berg, the next thing I remember about him was a post-punk college band, and he was the singer. I can’t remember the name. There was a few of them in the band, and they were mostly the London students. They did a couple of shows. They weren’t that good. I remember saying to Frank before he went on, ‘Are you nervous?’ And he just glared at me and said, ‘Fuck off!’
Marc kept in touch with him. After he’d left Leeds, we heard that he’d put a record out with this new label called Mute. This was ‘Back To Nature’. Marc and I heard that and thought it was brilliant.
There used to be a punk club in Leeds called The Warehouse, where loads of really amazing bands used to play and I saw tons of stuff there. Frank did a gig as Fad Gadget. He’d totally gone away from the New Wave band he’d been singing with at Leeds. He had his keyboard, and he was wearing what looked like a karate outfit. He had this microphone which was plugged into a length of grey plastic drain pipe. He was shouting into it and he was jumping up and down on his keyboard and throwing himself around. He was like an electronic Iggy Pop. He was quite wiry, and tall, and sinewy, so he was very agile, and very fit. And that was a great performance. That was one of his first gigs in Leeds as Fad Gadget. It was the only time I ever saw him live.
Marc had given Frank a Soft Cell demo, and asked if he could pass it on to Daniel Miller at Mute. We’d heard his single as The Normal, and then we’d heard ‘Back To Nature’. He did ‘Ricky’s Hand’ with Frank, and then Daniel had done the Silicon Teens album. We thought, ‘This guy sounds fantastic!’
It was just before Depeche Mode signed to Mute. So we said to Some Bizarre, who we were working with, ‘Can we get Daniel to produce Soft Cell?’ And because of that we did end up working with Daniel. We did ‘Memorabilia’, our first proper single, with Daniel. And the original demo of ‘Tainted Love’ was done with him. We did a load of backing tracks with with him for our live shows at the time, which people probably didn’t know he’d worked on with us.
When we signed to Phonogram, they decided they wanted to get a different producer in, which was Mike Thorne. Daniel was great, but I think he was a bit too techno for us at the time, with the benefit of hindsight. His style was suited to Depeche Mode with that sequenced techno-pop sound. Whereas with Soft Cell, it was still meant to sound like a group – it was just a group that was made up from synthesisers.
I don’t know – our sound was, I don’t like using the word, but more organic. The Human League were using Roland Micro Composer. Daniel was using an ARP sequencer. They were very machine-driven productions. We used a drum machine, but I just used to have to play it as tight as possible. You can hear it. It’s very tight, but I still had to play it by hand. It’s like having a bass player playing the bass, but instead of playing a guitar, they’re playing the bass on the keyboard, and still using their hands.
In memory of Dave Ball, 3 May 1959 – 22 October 2025.
With thanks to Debbie, Barbara and Paul.
Interview: Mat Smith
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