Far more than a mute foil to Marc Almond, Ball brought his love of northern soul and strange electronics to bear on some of Britain’s most uncompromising pop
• News: Dave Ball, synth-pop hitmaker as one half of Soft Cell, dies aged 66
By common consent, Soft Cell’s first Top of the Pops appearance, on 13 August 1981, ranks among the show’s most striking performances. It was impactful enough to send their single Tainted Love first into the Top Ten, then to No 1 – it ultimately became the second biggest-selling single of the year – and to provoke a number of complaints. The latter were caused by the duo’s frontman, Marc Almond, clad in eyeliner and jewellery, delivering his vocal with a weird combination of intense passion, high camp and occasional knowing looks to camera: he was clearly a gay man, but a gay man who declined to conform to the pantomime stereotype that still prevailed on British TV, a decision that first upset his own record company boss – who collared Almond backstage and protested “you’ve got to butch it up a bit!” – then apparently caused the BBC’s switchboards to light up.
Almond was such an arresting presence that it was easy to overlook the other guy on stage, moustachioed, mute and virtually motionless behind his keyboard. But, as his bandmate was given to pointing out, overlooking Dave Ball was a terrible misjudgement. “He really was a psycho,” Almond later recalled. “There would be times when he’d leap from behind the keyboards if someone was threatening me on stage, and he’d punch someone in the front row.”
