The band Soft Cell thought were “as influential as The Beatles”
No other band was as essential to the UK synthpop explosion while being indebted to little of the scene’s formulae as Soft Cell.
While Dave Ball’s synths were the method, he and frontman Marc Almond were far too tethered to the northern soul dancefloor of their youth to ever orbit the likes of Tubeway Army’s automaton schtick. Fired-up with the spirit of Motown charge, glam at its most exotic, and the decadent end of disco’s club fringes, Soft Cell’s presence in the early 1980s’ electro seizure of the pop charts radiated an infinitely more sensuous warmth and beckoning allure than many of their chilly peers.
Finding fame virtually overnight with a number one cover of Gloria Jones’ ‘Tainted Love’ in 1981, the mainstream would lazily label Soft Cell as a one-hit wonder. Yet, to those paying attention, Ball and Almond’s pop alchemy was packed with other fantastic hits on their debut Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret and beyond, finding an easy home in Smash Hits as well as lacing their Top of the Pops numbers with social reportage on the economic malaise fogging Thatcher’s Britain.
Successfully eschewing the scene’s stagnant trends and lapses into Howard Jones derivativeness, Soft Cell nonetheless still hurtled down an electronic road paved by the movement’s elder statesmen. “I know it’s a bit of a cliché to talk about Kraftwerk, but without them, modern music would have sounded very different,” Ball revealed to MusicRadar. “To my mind, they are as influential as The Beatles; they are the techno Beatles”.
It can’t be overstated how seismic Kraftwerk’s influence was on popular music back in the mid-1970s. Burnished amid the Krautrock underground earlier in the decade, the expanded hardware of new Minimoogs and ARP Odysseys would help realise the Düsseldorf collective’s immersion in electronic music, a fitting soundtrack marrying perfectly with their wholly-un rock aesthetic of smart suits and cropped hair, and the evolving conceptual explorations of technology and the German cultural landscape. As synthesizers and supporting hardware shifted, so too did Kraftwerk’s gesamtkunstwerk, moving away from the analogue kinetics of 1974’s Autobahn and into 1981’s Computer World’s polyphonic data dance. Kraftwerk was electronic music’s big bang.
“Look at how influential they were in America,” Ball remarked. “You’d got the start of hip-hop, then these four German blokes in suits turn up playing this strange, angular music. Angular, but amazingly funky at the same time. Arthur Baker, Afrika Bambaataa… they were all listening to Kraftwerk. Taking their beats and turning hip-hop into electro. And out of that came ‘Planet Rock’”.
Kraftwerk’s influential legacy extended far beyond what was anticipated by a purist press who often wrote off their electronic works as passing novelties during an age when rockist journalists were still worshipping Led Zeppelin. Just as The Beatles’ creative fingerprints can be felt on so much of the last 60 years of pop, Kraftwerk’s sonic language, shaped all those years ago, shines just as deeply and myriadly, be it post-punk, industrial, or Chicago house. For Ball, at Kraftwerk’s heart was a timeless popcraft that shunned musical distraction for compositional elegance akin to the finesse of classical music’s finest.
“They’re full of brilliant songs, but when you have a proper listen, you immediately notice how much space there is… very simple arrangements,” Ball summarised. “To me, that’s the sign of a good, strong song”.
