http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiQ4j-D5o4o

http://drunkennessofthingsbeingvarious.blogspot.com/2011/01/soft-cell-say-hello-wave-goodbye-1982.html

(My reply to a comment on the ‘Bright Eyes’ thread that I think would probably make more sense put here instead)

pink champale † wrote on 10 January 2011 -

“nice site billy. i really liked you piece on ‘say hello wave goodbye’ which made me think at lot as i’ve never heard the song that way *at all*. from the lyrics on the page i can’t fault your analysis one bit, but listening to the song, i don’t hear sneering sarcasm, i hear marc tearing his heart out. to me he doesn’t sound smug about finding a nice little housewife and a steady life, he sounds utterly distraught – that bit, with the wavering synth wash rising up behind him is one of the most beautiful moments in pop music. i hear the song as someone steeling himself to do a terrible thing (all the stuff about what a mess she is him desperately trying to convince himself) for the sake of..what, i dunno – respectability, his career? ( the nation? there’s definitely a touch of hal and falstaff). so yeah, selfish maybe, but not callous – just listen to that terrible moment of hesitation in “we’re strangers meeting for the first time…okay?”. what a song.”

You’ve made me think that one of the things that I really like about Soft Cell songs is the way that Marc can inhabit a character. So many of the songs in Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret are about downtrodden little people; the blackmail victims, frustrated nine-to-five suburban husbands, grey couples acknowledging to each other that their youth has passed them by, priapic and ashamed sex industry consumers… Only ‘Entertain Me’ could really be said to present the listener with an insight into fantastic popstar life!

Something that’s so great about Say Hello is the way that the storytelling is emotionally pitched – The two of us aren’t even listening to the song differently – and certainly neither of us is misreading it. You’re empathising from the point of view of the character, and I tend to imagine what it must be like for the poor girl that he’s dumping.

One of the brilliant things about Marc’s songwriting in the Soft Cell songs, is how it seems to walk a tightrope between empathy and gloating at other peoples’ delusions I think. Just compare ‘Mother’s Little Helper’ by The Rolling Stones to ‘Kitchen Sink Drama’ by Soft Cell. Both songs are equally unsettling to listen to, but Jagger is just being callous about a woman who he clearly considers contemptible, while Almond allows the listener to inhabit the Valium housewife’s imaginative world, even as the chorus acts as a Brechtian commentary, showing her as “in a fantasy (…) living a lie”.

Amazing records. Just breathtaking.

(Overlooking that the second one was “A New Fashion” by Bill Wyman)

But really, this is all about about the 12″ version, and specifically about the strange, moody, slowly shifting instrumental segue into “Where Did Our Love Go”. I once heard a DJ in a Belgium nightclub overlay almost all of Peggy Lee’s “Fever” over the top of the segue section, to superb effect – a mix which I’ve tried re-creating on my PC, but have never quite got 100% right.

And while we’re talking 12″ medleys: this is also indivisible from the Human League’s “Hard Times”/”Love Action”, which was released around the same time, with an equally terrific instrumental dub on the B-side. (Gotta love those extreme FX on “Tainted Dub”.) Those two 12″s absolutely sum up the summer of 1981 for me.

And of course, Almond’s great achievement with “Tainted Love” was to significantly darken the mood of the lyric, conjuring up unspoken associations with Filthy Gay Bumsex and SM power dynamics gone sour. So hurrah for that…

13 August 1981. Also in the studio that week were; Duran Duran, Aneka and Shakin’ Stevens, plus Legs & Co’s interpretation of ‘Startrax Club Disco’. The host was Simon Bates.

27 August 1981. Also in the studio that week were; Startrax, The Nolans, Ultravox, Genesis and Aneka, plus Legs & Co’s interpretation of ‘Hold On Tight’. Richard Skinner was the host.

3 September 1981. To celebrate being number one, Soft Cell decided to perform in a cage for this edition. Also in the studio in a great week were; Modern Romance, John Foxx, Bucks Fizz, The Teardrop Explodes, Dollar and OMD, plus Legs & Co’s interpretation of ‘Slow Hand”. The host was Peter Powell.

I guess I slightly prefer ‘Say Hello, Wave Goodbye’, a track my playground cohorts baulked at because it was so… open. You’re not meant to engage in that sort of stuff when you’re second toughest in the infants.

I love it. At the time I loved it and hated it in about equal measure. I think that’s because Marc Almond’s tortured delivery and the jagged, rather sinister accompaniment chimed with my own tormented state at the time. Things were getting very difficult for me and they’d go on doing so for another couple of years yet before things got better again.

Now I love it unambiguously because of that association, but also because Marc’s vocal rings out clearly across the years and it shines out to as the outstanding number one of that year. By putting an original twist on what was a good song in the first place and making it soar, it meets one of my possible criteria for a ten but it doesn’t quite get there for me so a 9 feels about right and no disgrace.

I think that this is may have been the most child-unfriendly number one for a long time. The sight of Soft Cell on Top of the Pops was something which I wasn’t prepared for, and didn’t know how to process. With characters like Numan or Bowie there was clearly an element of dressing-up and costume, wheras the scowling likes of Kevin Rowland or Paul Weller looked like people you’d see on the street. But this weedy-looking character in bracelets and a black T-shirt without sleeves, he didn’t look like he was pleased to be being filmed, he didn’t look like he was enjoying dancing, but he didn’t look like he was angry about anything specific… Also, you could easily think that he was a woman, although he obviously wasn’t pretending to be one.

And then you noticed the other one, unsmiling, as stocky as the singer was spindly, looking morose, like somebody in a minor and taxing position of authority – a prison officer or a hospital orderly, say.

This wasn’t what pop stars were supposed to look like! But then again, as a boy who was overserious, solitary, weak and tempramental, there also seemed something rather uncomfortably personal about all of this.

And that was before I started to notice their song – clang! clang! And the singer’s voice was something rather slimy to listen to, not at all ingratiating the listener.

Wow, I love Soft Cell. They seem to be the group that friends associate me with most. Like a few bands of this time (The Beat, Altered Images), their career seems ideal to me – Don’t hang around too long, release a lot of singles, some of which everybody knows and some of which only pop people know but all of which are very good, knock out three very different albums, each of which show the same unique view of the world from a different angle, in three years.

Who else can remember Marc on the Oxford Road Show when his microphone was breaking up ? Freddie Starr would have been proud of it and “Where the heart is” was almost spoiled by his strop as he threw the deviant piece of equipment to the floor in a way that only a limp-wristed drama queen could have done.

Ditto ‘Disease And Desire’ from the remastered version, which also includes their version of the ’007′ theme – not heard this!

Didn’t Marc end up crushing a grape with malice at Phonogram’s offices?

I think Marc’s Scott Walker obsession led Dave Ball to try and create mini-orchestras with the backing – which served only to flatten the sound and highlight the flaws in the writing.

Where The Heart Is was the single after What, wasn’t it? A trifle harsh, Conrad. Maybe it didn’t have a killer hook but again the 12″ mix was marvellous with a proto-house piano motif and big, yearning analogue chords. Also one of their best lyrics.

The Art Of Falling Apart got across the board 5 star reviews from memory (NSEC certainly didn’t, there was a decided air of cynicism around it). I tried and I tried, but no, and I think “history” judges NSEC much the better. Never got to hear the last album.

Lineman, #36, you are spot on with your chronology. I remember watching an interview with Marc Almond where he was fondly recollecting the out-of-control rollercoaster that Soft Cell so quickly became in 1982. Getting their drug dealer in to sing on one of their singles being one of the many highlights! (Cindy Ecstasy on “Torch” – possibly the first overt pop reference to MDMA right there).

forget which hendrix song tho: i shall dig it out when i get home from work

On the strength of “TL” I purchased “Non Stop Erotic Cabaret” and all the subsequent Soft Cell singles until “What!”

(Actually, their chart performance was even stronger than you recollect – 1, 4, 3, 2 and 3. A great run that was brought to a halt when they stopped being a pop act and started taking themselves a bit too seriously – the first single from “The Art of Falling Apart”, which conspicuously avoided anything so trivial as a melody failed to make the Top 20).

A&B had already demonstrated their Northern Soul credentials on debut single, “Memorabilia” which lifts wholesale from Vicki Sue Robinson’s classic mid 70s stomper “Turn The Beat Around”.

For the follow up they went the whole hog and delivered the fourth chart-topping cover of 1981 (a fifth is just around the corner).

And they brought to “Tainted Love” the things that all too briefly made Soft Cell one of the most engaging and thrilling of early 80s pop acts – equal parts naive and amateurish to inspired and inspiring.

Ball’s synth riff is the record’s highlight for me. It just sounded like nothing I’d before. Stark, eerie, danceable but not funky. Warm and pulsing but cold and unemotional. Kraftwerk and Moroder on a shoestring.

Hearing it in Neros, the under 18s disco I used to go to on a Monday night, was always a thrilling experience, particularly when the DJ let the track segue into “Where Did Our Love Go.” The instrumental middle part with its ominous drones and cleverly shifting overlap of the two riffs was quite moving when I first heard it – almost a magical experience.

Maybe it’s hard to write about such iconic records with any freshness in 2009. I don’t know – but when I comment I try to capture how I felt about the track at the time, when I first heard it, and also how I feel about it now.

Today, I don’t think “Non Stop Erotic Cabaret” holds up quite as well as I remember it – but “Tainted Love” sounds more than ever like Soft Cell’s finest hour.

(I should possibly do some logging of which Bob The Builder/Teletubbies etc episodes I can still tolerate.)