I recently had the nonstop ecstatic thrill of interviewing the legend Marc Almond for FLOOD about Danceteria — the final, full-circle Soft Cell album that revisits the synthpop provocateurs’ early days, when he and the late Dave Ball were out in clubland having fun in pre-Giuliani New York City.
“It was a bit like the Wild West. Boarded-up buildings. You’d go back to your hotel and there’d be a car on fire on the side of the road. It was kind of like that movie The Warriors,” he recalled, speaking via Zoom from his home in Portugal. “It was dangerous, but it was exciting and creative.”
Almond shared many memories of the nights before, including meeting Cindy Ecstasy (who he gave her stage name) during the “dying days” of “bridge-and-tunnel” Studio 54, and experiencing his first MDMA trip with her while listening to the Cure’s “All Cats Are Grey”; his admiration of the “female David Bowie,” Madonna, who recently released a song titled “Danceteria” inspired by her own formative clubbing era; and the final time that he and the ailing Ball performed together, at the 2025 Rewind Festival. But since Almond and I ended up chatting for more than an hour (after we said hello, I never wanted to wave goodbye; I could have talked with him all night), not all of our conversation could make it into my epic FLOOD Q&A. So, I’m exclusively publishing three of my favorite outtakes here.
Of course, I had to ask about the Tim Pope-directed, banned and bootlegged “Sex Dwarf” video — which for so long, before the internet, was almost imposable to see in its infamous uncensored version, so it took on a mythical status and became an urban legend. (When I told Almond that it might have been the first viral video, he said, “I think that’s really cool. I like that!”) Almond revealed that the “vertically challenged” leatherman in the S&M-themed video, who became a fleeting tabloid sensation when he lied to the sensationalist British press and claimed that Soft Cell had forced him to do “horrible things,” was in fact responsible for “Sex Dwarf” going viral.
“He went to the video company and said, ‘I’m in the video. Can I borrow a copy to watch at home?’ He took that VHS, bootlegged it, and sent it to all the tabloid newspapers in a brown paper package. So, what you see on YouTube is probably a bootleg from that time,” Almond explained. “It’s usually really bad quality, which I think adds to it and makes it even better, actually! It kind of looks like some ’80s video nasty/slasher film, which is great. The record company got hold of the master and locked it in a vault: ‘It must never be seen!’ But it was too late. It was already out there.”
Almond also went into detail about how both Soft Cell’s 1981 debut Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret (which he and Ball recorded during their first whirlwind visit to NYC) and Danceteria were concept albums with deliberately constructed narratives, and that he’d been pleased that his friend Neil Tennant had picked up on that. Since Tennant’s Pet Shop Boys once had a West End musical called Closer to Heaven, I asked Almond (a self-described “romantic cynic, or disillusioned romantic” who tries to “write in a cinematic way,” who cited “The Rainbow Room,” a sentimental ballad about a birthday dinner while looking out at the Twin Towers, as his favorite Danceteria track) if he’d ever thought about doing a stage musical based on Soft Cell’s catalog.
“There has been talk of that, actually,” he told me. “Somebody wrote a musical a few years ago of mostly Soft Cell songs, with a few of my solo songs as well. I went to a workshop of it and I liked it a lot. I thought it was quite cool. But Dave didn’t like it at all. He just really hated it. He said, ‘That’s not how I imagine this thing to be.’ So, it never happened. They came to me with another draft a couple of years ago, but then I didn’t like what they’d done to it; I liked it what I first saw in the original workshop! I don’t know, maybe that can be ignited again, now that we’ve got the newer songs from Danceteria. I love the idea of it.”
But perhaps my favorite “outtake” is in the video at the top of this page. Almond unfortunately had his Zoom camera off due to connectivity problems in Portugal, but mine was still on. And so — right in the middle of our Cindy Ecstasy discussion — when I reapplied my glittery pink lipgloss like an ‘80s club kid, he stopped himself mid-sentence to tell me, “Your lipstick looks great, by the way!” Almond is a glamour icon who knows a thing or two about face-painting, so that was the ultimate compliment. Under the deep ringlight, he could see the makeup sliding down, indeed.
Read my full FLOOD magazine Q&A with Marc Almond here!
