Soft Cell: 'Next time you see me onstage I’ll probably be wheeled on'

“I fractured lower vertebrae in my spine and cracked about five ribs and broke my wrist – I managed to damage myself quite a bit,” the 64-year-old says of the accident. A bout of pneumonia and sepsis followed and he ended up in intensive care in an induced coma. “I was in hospital for seven months – it was like my third lockdown,” he recalls. Since returning home at Christmas, he is still in “regular contact with doctors and nurses” and walking with crutches, but Ball is full of praise for his treatment, saying: “The aftercare is brilliant – I haven’t a bad word to say about the NHS. I was just talking to a nurse about the strike – the pay they get is pathetic. In my eyes they do a wonderful job.”

Still, he’s determined to be fit enough to perform at their open air shows, which include Let’s Rock Leeds at Temple Newsam on June 17. “Next time you see me onstage – and I’m not joking – I’ll probably be wheeled on, literally. It’s definitely not an image, it’s a necessity,” he says.

Soft Cell’s new album and DVD, Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret...and Other Stories, documents the two-hour live set from Ball and singer Marc Almond’s winter 2021 tour to mark the 40th anniversary of their debut longplayer. The first half of the set was largely given over to their then-forthcoming new album *Happiness Not Included, while in Act II they played Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret in its entirety.

Ball remembers that the date in Leeds, where he and Almond first met at polytechnic in 1977, was particularly well received. “It was great fun because...we’d always cherry-picked tracks off albums, like anyone does, but it was quite nice to re-do that whole first album because for a lot of people, that’s when they really first heard Soft Cell,” he says. “It was our golden period, if you like, in terms of chart success, that was the biggest-selling album.”

Among Ball’s personal highlights from the set was Chips On My Shoulder. “It was always a crowd-pleaser right from the early days when we were touring around the little clubs in Yorkshire. We played it live at that last Leeds show and it went down a storm. It’s great to hear those again and see the crowd reaction. You don’t really tend to reassess your own work that much; the people that can reassess it are the fans. I seldom listen to our old albums, but that make you reassess it and realise the quality of the songs.”

Along with the live album, Soft Cell are due to release a “part two” of *Happiness Not Included. “We recorded a lot of tracks, so there’s a whole other album’s worth of stuff coming out very shortly,” Ball says, adding that he and Almond are writing “new stuff at the moment”. “I’ve got about eight tracks on the go, just rough ideas,” he says. “If there’s a plan to a single or something, then there’s always things available.”

Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret...and Other Stories is out now on vinyl, DVD and BluRay. Soft Cell play at Let’s Rock Leeds on Saturday June 17. https://www.softcell.co.uk/