Dave Ball obituary | Dave Ball

When the synth-pop duo Soft Cell formed in 1977, Dave Ball, who has died in his sleep aged 66, made the right foil for the vocalist Marc Almond. Where Almond was mercurial and histrionic, Ball assumed the position of mysterious and reclusive mastermind. Almond would invariably be writhing in one thing black and skin-tight, presumably festooned with zips, whereas Ball is perhaps carrying a swimsuit and tie and attending soberly to his keyboard. Ball informed the Guardian: “We were a weird couple: Marc, this gay bloke in makeup; and me, a big guy who looked like a minder.”

Ball’s dying comes a couple of weeks after Soft Cell’s headlining efficiency on the Rewind Festival at Henley-on-Thames in August, the place he took to the stage in a wheelchair. This was the results of a severe accident in March 2022, when he fell down the steps at his south London dwelling and broke his again, resulting in a protracted keep in intensive care.

“I was pretty much unconscious for about two months, as I was in an induced coma,” he mentioned. “I was so medicated, I was on everything, from morphine upwards. I was even on fentanyl, and that’s the stuff that killed Prince.”

He spent seven months in hospital, struggling medical issues together with pneumonia and sepsis. He recovered sufficiently to have the ability to play dwell reveals and to work within the studio, the place Soft Cell had lately accomplished their sixth album, Danceteria, named after the influential New York City dance membership from the Nineteen Eighties and resulting from be launched subsequent yr.

Ball was born right into a single-parent family in Chester, and was given up for adoption at 18 months outdated. He subsequently grew up in Blackpool together with his adoptive dad and mom, Donald and Brenda Ball, who modified his first identify from Paul to David. He had a youthful sister, Susan, additionally adopted.

He attended Arnold college in Blackpool, and met Almond in 1977 at Leeds Polytechnic, the place they had been each learning artwork. Almond was a efficiency artist on the time, difficult audiences by performing bare and daubing himself with cat meals. “He had heard me making bleepy noises on a synthesiser and asked me to do music for his performances,” mentioned Ball.

A shared love of Northern Soul music prompted the pair to type Soft Cell. Financed by £400 from Ball’s mom, they recorded the EP Mutant Moments on a primitive two-track tape recorder. The EP was finally launched in 1980 on the Big Frock label. When Soft Cell subsequently performed on the Futurama 2 Festival in Leeds (third on the invoice after Siouxsie and the Banshees and U2), Ball noticed BBC DJ John Peel and gave him a white label copy of the EP. Peel subsequently performed it, and it caught the ear of Stevo, supremo of Some Bizarre information, who signed Soft Cell.

In July 1981 they launched the one Tainted Love, distinguished by Ball’s baleful synth motif and Almond’s agonised vocal. Following an look on Top of the Pops, it shot to No 1 within the UK, promoting greater than 1,000,000 copies. It would go on to be a sizeable hit within the US, reaching No 8 in the summertime of 1982. November 1981 noticed the discharge of Soft Cell’s debut album, Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret, which reached No 5 within the UK and 22 within the US. It can be by far their most profitable album.

The Art of Falling Apart (1983) reached No 5 in Britain and 84 within the US, whereas This Last Night in Sodom (1984) – their final album earlier than Cruelty Without Beauty (2002) – reached 12 within the UK. However, they fared higher on the singles charts, with Bedsitter; Say Hello, Wave Goodbye; Torch; and What all Top 5 hits within the UK.

Ball described how This Last Night in Sodom was the results of a interval of utmost decadence and prodigious drug use. “You can hear the product of all that,” he informed Thomas H Green at theartsdesk. “Mr Self Destruct, Slave to This – basically a reference to being a slave to the music biz but also a slave to whatever addiction you had. Even L’Esqualita is a reference to a heroin shot, all about a Puerto Rican transvestite club in New York.”

Ball had already recorded a solo album, In Strict Tempo, in 1983, and now fashioned the group Other People together with his then spouse Gini Hewes – they subsequently divorced – and Andy Astle, and so they launched the one Have A Nice Day (1984). He subsequently made a few singles as a part of English Boy on the Loveranch.

He additionally labored with Psychic TV, the place he met Richard Norris. After calling themselves M.E.S.H. and recording the observe Meet Every Situation Head On, Ball and Norris morphed into The Grid in 1988 and launched a string of profitable singles, specifically the UK No 3 hit Swamp Thing.

Soft Cell reunited for some dwell performances in 2000, however two years later Cruelty Without Beauty failed to achieve the UK Top 100. In 2018 they staged what they thought was a farewell live performance on the O2 in London, and Ball revealed that his well being had been poor. “I used to be a heavy smoker,” he informed theartsdesk. “I had COPD, pneumonia, I was incapacitated, walking around with a stick. I no longer am but I’m still on steroids from the long years of smoking fags and sniffing God knows what.”

Nonetheless, they gave a brief UK tour in 2021, marking the fortieth anniversary of Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret, and in May 2022 they launched the album Happiness Not Included. It reached No 7 within the UK.

In 2020 Ball produced a memoir, Electronic Boy: My Life in and Out of Soft Cell. After his dying, Soft Cell’s supervisor Chris Smith commented: “He was respected by his peers, and I will miss him immensely, but I’m also really happy he got to see how loved he was in the most recent stages of his long career.”

The assertion went on to say that Ball is survived by his shut household, together with his 4 kids.