Album Review: *Happiness Not Included by Soft Cell

This of course triggered the indignant fingers to action when they announced further gigs for the fortieth anniversary of their landmark debut album, 1981's Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret, and then this, their fifth album, people conveniently forgetting the career suicide act when they killed off their pop career with glorious gothic torch songs on second album, The Art of Falling Apart in 1982, and the thrilling blood splattered mental breakdown-pop of This Last Night in Sodom a year later. The fact Dave Ball and Marc Almond are still alive and relatively with it enough to record a new album, the follow up to their previous reunion album, 2002's Cruelty Without Beauty is a minor miracle. The flavour of Happiness Not Included is one of world weariness peppered with salacious reflections of tales of past.

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Two decades on since their last album, Dave Ball and Marc Almond reconvene Of the many comeback albums in recent times Soft Cell's is perhaps the most unexpected of all, considering they played a farewell show at London’s O2 Arena in 2018 and we all thought that was that. It's also 20 years after their last album, so number five was about as likely as a post-death Elvis Presley sighting being real. For all the romantic history they are afforded, the reality is that Soft Cell weren't necessarily as big as you would believe if you weren't actually there.

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