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Dave Ball<\/a>, the multi-instrumentalist, producer, and songwriter who performed alongside Marc Almond in the influential synth-pop duo Soft Cell<\/a>, died yesterday (October 22). The band\u2019s publicist, Debbie Ball, confirmed the news, writing that Ball died peacefully in his sleep at his London home. No cause was given. The musician was 66 years old.<\/p>\n Raised in Blackpool, England, after his adoption into a working-class family, Ball grew up a budding artist with a penchant for the Northern soul craze then sweeping the north of England, obsessively collecting Tamla and Stax singles. He moved to Leeds to study fine art in his late teens and met fellow student Almond, a lam\u00e9-clad performance artist. The pair bonded over punk and electronic music and cult films; after a few weeks of futzing with a Korg synthesizer, Ball enlisted his flamboyant new friend as a bandmate.<\/p>\n They were a strange pair\u2014\u201cMarc, this gay bloke in makeup; and me, a big guy who looked like a minder,\u201d as Ball put it to The Guardian<\/em><\/a> in 2017\u2014but the contrast neatly superimposed onto their musical loves. They named the duo Soft Cell, punning on what they called \u201cconsumerist nightmares and suburban insanity,\u201d and made songs amalgamating an unlikely trinity of Kraftwerk, Suicide, and cabaret. They made their live debut \u201cat a college Christmas show two short months after they met, performing ramshackle, anticonsumerist songs against a backdrop of Super 8 films of destroyed radios and industrial landscapes,\u201d Pitchfork\u2019s Eric Torres wrote in his review of the band\u2019s debut album, Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret<\/em><\/a>. \u201cThe art-punk spark was lit.\u201d<\/p>\n An early breakout single, \u201cMemorabilia<\/a>,\u201d co-produced by Mute<\/a> founder Daniel Miller, united their love of kitsch and acid house in a floor-filler that suggested the underground, avant-garde curios of their Some Bizzare<\/a> label cadre were about to boil over. The eruption came with \u201cTainted Love,\u201d a tempestuous, darkly intoxicating cover of a Gloria Jones song Ball had heard in a club as a teenager. Backed by a cover of the Supremes\u2019\u00a0\u201cWhere Did Our Love Go,\u201d the single was the United Kingdom\u2019s second-best seller of 1981 and topped the charts in more than a dozen other countries.<\/p>\n The hit, and the debut album that followed, affixed Soft Cell in British music history: contemporaries of Depeche Mode and path-makers for bands like Pet Shop Boys, Erasure, and Spandau Ballet, even if Almond accused some of that crop of making heartless music \u201cto pose against the Berlin Wall to.\u201d The duo released two more studio albums in the ensuing years, The Art of Falling Apart<\/em> and This Last Night in Sodom<\/em>; both charted in the United Kingdom, despite the latter\u2019s release after the group\u2019s dissolution. Soft Cell also released one of the first remix albums, Non-Stop Ecstatic Dancing<\/em>, and Ball, closely attuned to the evolution of electronic music, would fashion 12″ edits of their singles by splicing together segments of tape. Almond and Ball\u2019s embrace of the clubland party lifestyle, and substance use, contributed to their split. As Ball wrote in his 2020 autobiography, Electronic Boy<\/em>, \u201cWe\u2019d been so successful very quickly, in constant demand and therefore always together\u2014living out of each other\u2019s pockets. I don\u2019t think any relationship could have endured that pressure.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n