Released: July 28
A year on from its original release, Soft Cell revisit their Top 10 comeback LP, ‘*Happiness Not Included’, with a bumper pair of releases that revive sessions from the duo’s first record in two decades.
Marc Almond and Dave Ball’s 2022 release explores the state of the world across 12 dystopian-leaning tracks, including the bleak Heart Like Chernobyl and the Pet Shop Boys collaboration, Purple Zone.
The result of Soft Cell’s long-standing working practice of Ball recording backing tracks to 12” single length, before then editing them down to three or four minutes, is the sister project, ‘*Happiness Now Extended’, which offers a fresh take on each song as it was originally intended and, in doing so, enables the material to breathe with a more consistent flow.
“Many of the ‘*Happiness Not Included’ tracks were originally much longer, but Philip Larsen and I edited them so that they would fit onto a single vinyl LP,” says Mark of the remixed – or rather pre-mixed – album. “Spreading them across two vinyl LPs means we can now include the full versions.”
Meanwhile, a third counterpart, ‘*Happiness Now Completed’, brings together B-sides, alternate takes and in-house remixes, along with 10 unreleased tracks from the original album sessions, giving the most comprehensive overview of their work yet.
Opening with a cover of First Hand Experience In Second Hand Love, originally recorded by Giorgio Moroder, the set is notably more upbeat than its parent album, while lyrically tackling typically Soft Cell themes, including relationship breakdowns (Jukebox Head), doomed romances (You Kill Me) and the judgements of society (Defiant).
Arguably more instant than some of the original album cuts, tunes like the pulsing Strange Kinda Dance highlight the duo’s commercial edge, while a cover of X-Ray Spex’s The Day the World Turned Day‐Glo again sees them revamp a classic track with their signature sound.
Their omission from the original release is choice; some of these outtakes (all fully-formed and produced pop tracks) are as strong, if not more so, than previously-released tracks, but thematically they don’t quite fit the bill. It’s that brutal approach to editing down the LP that made ‘*Happiness Not Included’ so brilliantly slick and conceptually focussed, with the latest chapter in the story laying out various facets of the creative process that resulted in the final record.
Designed to sit alongside the original, ‘Extended’ and ‘Completed’ are superb additions to the wider universe of Soft Cell’s fifth album and a testament to the prolific creativity that occurs when Dave and Mark enter the studio together – here’s hoping there’s even more on the horizon.
