During the Eighties, especially near the beginning, there was a plethora of groups that comprised a singer who provided the showmanship, and an instrumentalist who lurked at the back behind a keyboard or a computer. Pet Shop Boys, Erasure, Yazoo, The Communards, among others; and Soft Cell.
Marc Almond provides the front, with his androgynous looks and elegant voice. It’s a nice change to have somebody singing from the torso rather than the shouting or head voices that it’s felt like there’s been for ages; this is back to some good old singing, and gorgeous it is. The Soft Cell classics are on here – Say Hello and Wave Goodbye, an excoriating breakup song, and Tainted Love which is one of those that gets overplayed for my liking, and used as a dance track by cheesy wedding DJs when it really isn’t a dance track – although it allows people to clap or stomp along with the clap motif, I suppose.
As is often the case, though, the tracks that aren’t the ones with all the airplay are more interesting and fun. Many you couldn’t play on the radio, reaching almost Zappa levels of joyful smut, such as Seedy Films and Sex Dwarf, accompanied by spanking sounds and the giggling of Josephine Warden from the backing group with the deeply LGBT name of Vicious Pink Phenomena, doing her best impersonation of Dale Bozzio from Joe’s Garage. Elsewhere, Frustration is a very funky track about ordinariness, playing like daytime drudgery versus the night-time hijinks of Seedy Films and Sex Dwarf – the album as a whole seems to embrace hedonism as an escape from the realities of Eighties Britain (or perhaps poke satire at people who are staid conservatives by day and into all kinds of kinks at night), and great fun it is too.
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