If you’ve only ever heard “Tainted Love” and are intrigued enough to still be reading, this box set might be for you. Truly I am the target audience for this product by any metric.Īdmittedly after the above preamble, it will probably come as no surprise to anyone who has read this far to find that I’m absolutely unashamedly nuts about this compilation. In short, I am not only qualified to properly evaluate their new career-summing box set Keychains and Snowstorms: The Soft Cell Story, I am squarely within the fanboy Venn diagram that this exhaustive compilation is meant to appeal to. I even own the entire discography of Vicious Pink Phenomena.
I still have them all along with practically every Marc-related release, Dave Ball’s solo album, everything by The Grid and many things produced or remixed by Dave Ball. It was an incredibly subversive thing to see on such a goofy middle-of-the-road disco hits program-one that usually followed The Lawrence Welk Show or Hee-Haw on Saturday evenings, depending on where you lived-and I wholeheartedly approved.įrom that point on, I had every Soft Cell album, EP, 12” remix, book, VHS, fan club issue, bootleg, you name it. I’m a huge Soft Cell/Marc Almond fan and I have been ever since “Tainted Love” was a hit and their memorable 1982 Solid Gold TV appearance-where Marc beat the stage with a leather belt and generally camped it up bigtime-caused my father to become visibly agitated and angry.
