“Like most people of my age, I was blown away by Autobahn. I was working in an ice cream van in Blackpool with a guy who had a cassette of it. I was into Northern Soul, but I’d heard electronic music on TV programmes – the BBC Radiophonic Workshop on Doctor Who – and seen Kraftwerk on Tomorrow’s World [in September 1975].

Marc [Almond, Soft Cell singer] and I had gone through punk but wanted to do something more futuristic. Like Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire but a bit more lyrical. We wanted to make catchy but twisted pop songs. But we were just two weird guys from Leeds Poly art school – being in the charts was never the plan. We were electro punks. We never saw ourselves as ‘new romantics’. We weren’t aspirational like Spandau Ballet or Duran Duran. If we’d done a video on a yacht it’d have sunk. A canoe would have been more our speed!

Bedsitter was totally autobiographical. Marc and I were both living in a housing association building in a rough part of inner-city Leeds. Marc had the room right next to mine. We’d pass cassettes to each other across the corridor, music and lyrics. He had a job in the bar at Leeds Playhouse in the day and a cloakroom attendant at the Warehouse in the evening. Then we’d go out clubbing at night with our mates and come back to these horrible rooms.

The Duane Eddy twang on Bedsitter is a Korg SB100 Synthe Bass. It had this function – the ‘bender’ – that altered the pitch and gave you that sound. And the bass sounds had a dirty, moody murkiness I loved. After Tainted Love had been a hit, we recorded the rest of the Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret album in New York with Mike Thorne, and the Synthe Bass was the only thing I took with me – it looked like a briefcase when you closed it up. By contrast, the kind of wump, wump sound was Mike Thorne’s Synclavier – £120,000 quid’s worth! That was our technological advantage over the other synth bands at the time. In fact, I remember Don Was calling me – desperate to know how we got those sounds. And the drums on Bedsitter were the Roland TR808 – I think we may have been the first to use it on a chart record.

Transgressive is an important word, I think. It’s a word [Throbbing Gristle’s] Cosey Fanni Tutti uses, and a word Marc uses. Sex Dwarf was an absolute act of transgression. We had the bloomin’ vice squad coming down to confiscate the videos. But the title had come from a News Of The World headline in the first place, then our song became a News Of The World headline, in a newspaper that printed pictures of topless women. It was a bizarre, hypocritical world.”

As told to Danny Eccleston 

This article originally appeared in MOJO