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Remembering Soft Cell co-founder Dave Ball, who has passed away aged 66. MOJO revisits a classic interview with the electronic music pioneer.<\/p>\n
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Dave Ball, co-founder of Soft Cell and chart-conquering techno duo The Grid has sadly passed away aged 66. In 2021 Ball spoke to MOJO about his journey from Leeds Poly electro-punk to pop star. In memory of an electronic music pioneer, we\u2019ve republished the piece in full\u2026<\/p>\n
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\u201cLike 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\u2019d heard electronic music on TV programmes \u2013 the BBC Radiophonic Workshop on Doctor Who \u2013 and seen Kraftwerk on Tomorrow\u2019s World [in September 1975].<\/p>\n
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 \u2013 being in the charts was never the plan. We were electro punks. We never saw ourselves as \u2018new romantics\u2019. We weren\u2019t aspirational like Spandau Ballet or Duran Duran. If we\u2019d done a video on a yacht it\u2019d have sunk. A canoe would have been more our speed!<\/p>\n
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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\u2019d 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\u2019d go out clubbing at night with our mates and come back to these horrible rooms.<\/p>\n
The Duane Eddy twang on Bedsitter is a Korg SB100 Synthe Bass. It had this function \u2013 the \u2018bender\u2019 \u2013 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 \u2013 it looked like a briefcase when you closed it up. By contrast, the kind of wump, wump sound was Mike Thorne\u2019s Synclavier \u2013 \u00a3120,000 quid\u2019s worth! That was our technological advantage over the other synth bands at the time. In fact, I remember Don Was calling me \u2013 desperate to know how we got those sounds. And the drums on Bedsitter were the Roland TR808 \u2013 I think we may have been the first to use it on a chart record.<\/p>\n
Transgressive is an important word, I think. It\u2019s a word [Throbbing Gristle\u2019s] Cosey Fanni Tutti uses, and a word Marc uses. Sex Dwarf was an absolute act of transgression. We had the bloomin\u2019 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
As told to Danny Eccleston\u00a0<\/p>\n
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This article originally appeared in MOJO<\/em><\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text module_class=”credit-names” _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” text_font_size=”14px” text_orientation=”center” hover_enabled=”0″ global_colors_info=”{}” theme_builder_area=”post_content” sticky_enabled=”0″]<\/p>\n Image: Getty<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][et_pb_row _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” theme_builder_area=”post_content”][et_pb_column _builder_version=”4.20.4″ _module_preset=”default” type=”4_4″ theme_builder_area=”post_content”][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][\/et_pb_section]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Remembering Soft Cell co-founder Dave Ball, who has passed away aged 66<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":3281,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"on","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mojo-presents"],"acf":[],"modified_by":"kschwarz","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/mojo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3280","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/mojo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/mojo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/mojo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/mojo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3280"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/mojo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3280\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3286,"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/mojo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3280\/revisions\/3286"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/mojo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3281"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/mojo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/mojo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flatplanplus.io\/mojo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}