Review | Soft Cell’s ‘Say Hello, Wave Goodbye’ extravaganza is preserved for posterity
‘Celebratory, lavish and often quite deranged show’ gets a multi-format release
By Steve Brown
Words by Simon Button
Four-plus decades since they met at Leeds Poly as art students crafting avant-garde music and videos before moving into the mainstream with some seriously oddball synth-pop that was as catchy as it was deranged, the celebration of all things Soft Cell continues.
We’ve had a definitive best-of CD, an exhaustive boxset, a coffee table book and, of course, a one-night-only show at The O2 that saw Marc Almond apologise for not being able to do every Soft Cell song before he and Dave Ball treated the audience to a run-through of all the singles, lots of album tracks and deep cuts across a 165-minute set.
With such a generous setlist Almond needn’t have apologised. It was one helluva show that has now been captured for prosperity across an equally generous array of formats (though some are already sold out) from a double CD to CD+DVD and DVD+Blu-ray combos via a photobook edition and a collectors’ boxset that packs in all of the above plus vinyl and a programme.
Seeing the Say Hello, Wave Goodbye show up close is the main draw, though, and it’s especially good on Blu-ray where the audio throbs and every pixel of the screen projections dazzles – like the blood red of a slow nosebleed, provocatively-lit strippers, Almond hilariously wielding a guitar in a series of wigs and the lyrics to Sex Dwarf magnified for a communal singalong.
At the time it was hard to take it all in as Marc and Dave ran the gamut from fan favourite Memorabilia (which surprisingly never charted) to the Tainted Love/Where Did Our Love Go? mash-up that first put them on the map, delving deep into the vaults for menacing murder ballad Martin and revisiting such classics as Torch, What and Bedsitter.
It’s a tad annoying that the wonderful Where The Heart Is has been cut from all but the boxset version, likewise a couple of funny cock-ups (Marc mangling the words to one song, Dave disappearing from the stage much to the bafflement of his bandmate) have been excised.
But that won’t taint your love for this most celebratory, lavish and often quite deranged show.
Rating: 5*
Say Hello, Wave Goodbye is out now on various formats. For more information visit softcell.tmstor.es
Images by Carston Windhorst