With the passing of Dave Ball last autumn, one of the 1980s’ great synth-pop outfits came to an end. He and Soft Cell partner Marc Almond completed the final mix of Danceteria two days before Ball died. It’s the full stop on the band and, fittingly, a concept album about early 1980s New York, where the duo indulged in hedonistic 24-hour nightclubbing which they filtered into darkly peerless electronic music, giving Britain a glimpse of what lay in its 1990s future.
Danceteria is, then, a celebration of long-ago dissolution, the glamour and sleaze of a city that no longer exists. Tonally, it's similar to Madonna’s most recent album; indeed, she receives a mention on the moodily pulsing title track, an inventory of the 21st Street clubbing mecca. The lyrics throughout are often diaristic, rife with references ranging from eating shrimp cocktail at the Rainbow Room in 1982, on a cut named in its honour, to chatting up a murderous-looking hustler, “just this side of vagrancy”, in Club Berlin as dawn creeps in on the mournful “After Hours”.
As an album, it’s both poignant and patchy. The older Almond sometimes captures his debauched long-ago self with poetic snap, as on the hi-NRG punch of “Decadence is Hard Work”, and, at others, not so much, as on the “Say Hello Wave Goodbye”-esque “Times Square” (“In Times Square/You don’t know what you’ll find there/It’s crazy and it’s wild there/ But it’s really very nice there”).
The songs are a mixed bag, one moment wordily interesting but melodically unmemorable, the next drifting musically into the naff (as on “Wave to America” and “In Heaven (When I Dance With You)”), then occasionally hitting all the right buttons (sax-laden instrumental opener “Elusive” sets the scene perfectly). It’s an album that strives hard but often feels elementally too far from the dirt, drugs and mental chaos it conjures.
Nothing Soft Cell have released in the 21st century has been even faintly comparable to their 1980s albums. Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret and The Art of Falling Apart are among the decade’s very best. Danceteria shimmies directly in their shadows, an apt, adequate coda that's the end of the line, and feels like it.
Below: watch the video for the title track to Soft Cell's Danceteria album
