At the start of June, just before summer officially kicks in, Marc Almond’s Soft Cell will be performing at the Hollywood Bowl with this month’s cover stars The Human League, plus Alison Moyet. The last time this writer caught Soft Cell, they were playing the Kia Forum with Simple Minds. In the months since, the world lost David Ball (the other half of Soft Cell) when he died in his sleep in October at the far-too-young age of 66.
Naturally, Almond and the Soft Cell family are still grieving. The Hollywood Bowl show, the current tour overall, and forthcoming album Danceteria (Ball’s last recorded output), do at least offer the group and its fans the chance to pay tribute, and to revel in the music that Ball part-created.
“I love playing in L.A., and California audiences have always been supportive to Soft Cell and to me,” Almond says. “To play the Hollywood Bowl is a dream come true! I’ve always wished I could play there. It’s a legendary venue.”
The tour also offers Almond the chance to catch up with old friends. “The Human League were an inspiration to Soft Cell in the very early days,” he says. “We were both part of a Northern Britain flourishing electronic music scene. Soft Cell was inspired by their minimal electronic sound and Philip Oakey’s singing style. Both David Ball and I (being art students) loved their use of visuals in their shows, screens and projections. No one else was doing that then. It’s wonderful to be touring with them all these years later, and it will be such an amazing unmissable evening. Alison Moyet is a fantastic singer and was also part of the U.K. electronic music scene. It’s a great line up to be touring with.”
It is an extraordinary bill discussed in greater depth in the cover feature. From Soft Cell’s perspective, three bands means a shorter set time, but Almond intends to use that time wisely.
“We keep it to the most popular songs that will be familiar to a U.S. audience and will be immediate to those who aren’t so familiar with us,” he says. “We’ll also nod towards our new album Danceteria which is out in September. A cover of Was Not Was’ ‘Out Come The Freaks’ from the album is already available.”
Almond and Ball met at Leeds Polytechnic in 1977 and formed Soft Cell the following year. That’s 48 years of incredible music, starting with 1981’s dark masterpiece Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret—the album that gave us Soft Cell’s cover of Gloria Jones’ “Tainted Love,” as well as subversive gems like “Sex Dwarf” and “Seedy Films.” As launchpads go, the album was sublime. Nearly five decades later, Almond still gets a kick out of getting up on stage.
“Each time performing live is a new experience whether it’s a familiar or a new audience,” he says. “It’s direct contact with your fans. On this tour, we get to perform to a lot of new people and that’s a challenge too.”
That said, this year has been undeniably difficult. “We’re still coming to terms with the loss of David Ball,” Almond says. “His role has been more of a studio role in the past few years. He performed only on occasions and usually just in the U.K. as he was not able to travel much. It’s his music people hear on stage, as well as co-writing all the songs he prepared and programmed all the shows. Philip Larsen has been a part of Soft Cell for a while now onstage and in the studio, working as Dave’s co-producer, mixer and keyboard player. He adds live parts to David’s music. There will be no more future Soft Cell studio recordings after Danceteria. I wouldn›t record as Soft Cell without David, but the music we've done, I will keep alive with shows and tour.”
Ball is clearly irreplicable. However, Philip Larsen has been a member of the Soft Cell family for a few years now, working alongside Ball. Larsen will be up on stage with Almond on this tour.
“He’s been a big part of our previous album Happiness Not Included and the new album Danceteria,” Almond says. “He’s great to work with and adds great textures to the Soft Cell sound.”
As Almond said, Danceteria will be Soft Cell’s final album. Thankfully, he's delighted with the way it turned out.
“Dave worked on the initial back tracks and ideas at home in his studio then worked with Philip Larsen to develop the song and production and mixes,” he says. “I wrote the lyrics, and then did my vocals separately with my vocals engineer and then worked with the backing singers on the arrangement. Dave only heard the finished playback of Danceteria for the first time two days before he died. We had talked about how excited we were about this record and it gave him a boost. We had planned a big U.K. tour this year, but he was only able to perform in the U.K. due to his health restrictions. We knew this may be the last record due to his health but we’d said this before and we were able to make another. It made his death all the more hard to take in.”
Thematically, the frontman says that the albums revisit the New York of 1982, where Soft Cell recorded Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret.
“The album Danceteria is a love letter to New York, to the America of those times, and the creativity we experienced and how it shaped us, bringing it all full circle,” Almond says. “When we started back then, we played live on the West Coast and they welcomed us more than the East Coast. In those times, we felt both a spiritually American band as well as a British band. The album Danceteria is of course named after the early ‘80s night club, which was a hedonistic hub of music styles and performance like nowhere else. We launched our first album there.”
Regarding gear, Almond admits that it’s more Ball and Larsen’s area. “We always preferred analogue sounds to digital,” he adds. “We always liked to nod back to the lo-fi days of the early ‘80s when we went on stage with a Korg synthesiser and a revox tape machine and tried to keep some of that spirit.”
Almond will spend the remainder of 2026 focusing on the release of Danceteria, and the forthcoming Generations tour. There might be some U.S. headline shows later in the year. “But most of all, I am so excited about the Hollywood Bowl,” he says, “It will be quite something.”
