Patrick Clarke on Bedsit Land, his biography of Soft Cell

Now in a new book, Bedsit land: The strange worlds of Soft Cell, music journalist Patrick Clarke takes a deep dive into their early years before fame and drugs led their partnership to self-destruct.

Talking to The Yorkshire Post, Clarke explains that the biography grew out of a “really intense labour of love” feature that he wrote for the online music and pop culture magazine The Quietus to mark the 40th anniversary of Soft Cell’s first album, Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret. “With everything with The Quietus, I wanted it to stand apart and be as good as it possibly can be,” he says, recalling that at the time he was talking to Almond and Ball and numerous friends and associates such as Annie Hogan and Josephine Warden and Brian Moss of Vicious Pink his own life mirrored some of the chaos that swirled around Soft Cell in the early 80s.

“My house blew up because we had a dodgy landlord who tried to re-wire the house in a day and ended up setting it all on fire and it was the weird in-between bit between Covid and not-Covid, everything was really mad at that point, and I often find that when things are getting really intense we pour even more into what we’re writing.

“So the Soft Cell thing became my obsession because I was dealing with so much other stuff in the world that more than anything it became this really big, fascinating project that I went for even more than usual.”

Born a decade after Soft Cell first broke up, Clarke’s fascination with the group deepened as he scratched beneath the surface. “Every band is more than just their biggest hit, but you often find that was their biggest hit for a reason, because that was their best song. But with Soft Cell, it became so apparent that the opposite was true. There was so much stuff that I loved way beyond the one song that I would’ve heard,” he says.

“Then looking into their story, I think it was where they were from, by the seaside (Almond was born in Southport, Ball in Blackpool) that really interested me and it clicked early on, the link between the seaside in Britain being quite an odd place and Soft Cell being in reality quite an odd band. I think that was what drew me in to start with, and then from there there were all these sprawling tangents.”

The pair met at art school in Leeds which at the time was “one of the most radical in Europe”, staffed by people like Jeff Nuttall, a controversial figure. “One interviewee described him as like a midwife of counterculture in the 1960s with his book Bomb Culture. A lot of it is badly researched and fact-checked and sort of untrue, but it’s got this crazy energy arguing in the aftermath of the atom bomb in the Second World War with the first generation of people coming of age in the 60s who had been born after the atom bomb, trying to make sense of a world in which that had happened. That led to this animalistic outpouring of transgressive art whether that was rock ’n’ roll or Beat poetry or hippies or beatniks​​​​​​​. Those were his guiding principles and then he took them to Leeds​​​​​​​ with this spirit thta you should be as shocking and provocative as you possibly can​​​​​​​. And he was a provocative and shocking man.”

While Almond was heavily into performing arts, Ball developed an interest in synthesisers. Their early influences including such avant-garde artists as Suicide, Throbbing Gristle and Fad Gadget alongside the electronic dance music they heard at clubs such as The Warehouse and the Phono. “Throughout Soft Cell’s career what they did really well was mash things together and I think that experimental electronic impulse was always there and was maybe even the source of that desire to mix things up and mash things together.

“Tainted Love I guess it is a really obvious example of Northern Soul meets electronic pop music, but the amount of other stuff that they were bringing in became more and more, and that experimental side, particularly for Dave, was there at the very core I think throughout.”

In the book, Almond describes Soft Cell as a ‘transgressive electronic punk band’ – and Clarke agrees. “They were and then that transgressive electronic punk band accidentally became huge pop stars and had to deal with how that was going to make any sense whatsoever.”

In Leeds they formed a tight-knit friendship group with figures such as Vicious Pink, Annie Hogan, Kris Neat and Sophie Parkin, who would all become significant supporting players in their story. “It was a relatively small scene,” Clarke says. “I think that’s partly because they shared ideals and the fact that this art school had brought a load of radically-minded people in the same place, but also the contrast with that and the world outside.

“Not just Leeds but the whole country was in quite a bad state, not completely dissimilar to how it is right now, there was a huge rise in far-right violence and racial attacks and homophobic attacks. They faced a lot of antagonism everywhere other than their little group and given that they had this provocative instinct, their impulse was to dial it up even more, to become more close-knot, to become more radical, to p*** people off even more and that did mean that a lot of them were assaulted on the street. Marc Almond found himself on a train with a load of football hooligans, he had to hide in the driver’s compartment. Loads of others have told me of having things thrown at them, getting in mass brawls and fights, so this scene had to be really close-knit in order to fortify themselves against a very hostile country outside.”

Meeting Stevo, who would go on to manage Soft Cell and land them a deal with Phonogram, proved pivotal. His chaotic approach could also sometimes be a hindrance, though. “Artistically, I think having a figure like Stevo as the buffer between their record label and them (was important),” he says. “Their record label wanted a band that was going to produce hits and not be too much trouble, keep an eye on what’s going to sell well; Soft Cell were the opposite. They were these experimentalists who accidentally had a hit and found themselves under all this pressure.

“When you’ve got someone like Stevo, who was so confrontational and so eccentric if you’ve got to get through him to Soft Cell then by the time you do often you’re like, ‘fine, just let them do what they want’ – and he knew that. He’s not stupid, Stevo, he’s very canny, a very wily operator who knew what he was doing. He knew that if he ramped up the eccentric, intimidating side then his artists would have more creative freedom – in the smae way that Peter Grant did with Led Zeppelin. It’s like a proven management technique, to be as nuts as you possibly can and act as a distraction.

“The flip side of that is that welfare wasn’t Stevo’s strong suit. (Soft Cell) were taking a lot of drugs, they were under an enormous amount of pressure being famous, Marc Almond was receiving a lot of overtly homophobic abuse in the press and on the street. Rowan Atkinson would play him on Not The Nine O’Clock News as this prententious, foppish wimp and that affected him a great deal. When you are in that situation, what you need from your manager is for them to help get your s*** together, sort yourself out, take a break if you need a break. But because Stevo was so intent on pursuing art for art’s sake, he didn’t really do that.

“I think Soft Cell couldn’t really have happened without Stevo, so it’s kind of a paradox. They probably would’ve lasted a lot longer, they may have been happier within themselves, they may not have made quite as good art, it’s quite a tricky question. The conclusion that I come to in the book is that it had to be that way, for better or worse.”

Bedsit land: The strange worlds of Soft Cell by Patrick Clarke is published by Manchester University Press, £12.99. Patrick Clarke will be in conversation with John Robb at Farsley Literature Festival at The Old Woollen, Farsley on November 6.