Bedsit Land 📚 The Strange Worlds Of Soft Cell

Christopher Owens 🔖 Shocking the public is a much more difficult task in 2025.

Videos with chainsaws, dwarves in jockstraps, sex workers, maggots and blood? Didn’t Cardi B do that, or was it Nicki Minaj?

But in 1981, Soft Cell did it first. Bearing in mind that they had been at number one for their cover of ‘Tainted Love’ and three further top 5 hits, to court such controversy would have alienated the pop kids and the record company.

Then again, the two northern hicks always had a penchant for mischief.

Beginning life as an article for The Quietus which celebrated forty years of ‘Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret’, journalist Patrick Clarke makes it clear in the preface that his intention is to rescue Soft Cell from “80’s one hit wonder” status (which, to anyone familiar with the group, is factually incorrect) and give them their proper placing in the pantheon of British alternative music (the first successful synth duo who sat between the darkness of Suicide and the quirkiness of Sparks).

And he does a brilliant job of doing so, reminding us how the group formed in a fertile and anarchic Leeds art school environment that embraced the punk explosion while the National Front and Peter Sutcliffe terrorized Leeds. Combining performance art, electronics and the danceability of Northern Soul, they were at the forefront of the electro wave. While OMD aped Kraftwerk in singing about the wonders of electricity and Gary Numan channelled 70’s dystopia, Soft Cell produced the first British electro song with ‘Memorabilia’.

Drawing upon a variety of figures to tell the tale as well as provide significant context, Clarke takes the reader back to a more provincial Britain, one where seaside glamour of places like Blackpool and Southport was starting to recede and where there was little in the way of opportunities. While David Bowie had turned heads a decade before with his performance of ‘Starman’ on Top of the Pops, Marc Almond offered up something seedier and a little more knowing, while also being a bit more ramshackle in his delivery.

Where the book really ramps up a notch is when discussing the duo’s first trips to New York. Although a warzone and verging on bankruptcy, it was another fertile ground for creativity with the nascent hip hop scene crossing over into the disco and gay clubs as well as no wave. Combine all of that with a new, and legal, drug called Ecstasy and it’s no wonder that the duo would make the first New York Ecstasy fuelled remix album in 1981’s ‘Non-Stop Ecstatic Dancing’.

Read this alongside Marc Almond’s Tainted Life and pay homage to the masters.

Patrick Clarke, 2024, Bedsit Land: The Strange Worlds of Soft Cell. Manchester University Press, ISBN-13: 978-1526173560

⏩ Christopher Owens was a reviewer for Metal Ireland and finds time to study the history and inherent contradictions of Ireland. He is currently the TPQ Friday columnist and is the author of A Vortex of Securocrats and “dethrone god”.