But wasn't there also a musical reason for scrapping the guitars?

Gore: The guitars were getting rather boring. They've got just one sound all the time, and though you can flange it and do things like that; its still basically the same sound.

David Ball(Soft Cell): I originally started with guitars but I got board because there really wasn't much you could do with it. I was interested in different types of sound, so I got rid of the guitar and got a synthesizer.

Was Soft Cell always a duo, as it is today?

Ball:We did start out as a duo. Mark (Almond, singer) and I started working together in 1979, when we were both in college at Leeds. Mark was in a performance that was more like cabaret, and I was doing soundtracks with him. Then we decided to do something more commercial. We came up with about ten songs and played our first gig in the autumn of 1979.

Chas Gray (Wall Of Voodoo): We also started out doing soundtracks. Stan, our guitar player, Marc Moreland, and I rented an office off Hollywood Blvd. in late'77 specifically to do film soundtracks. We had a couple of two-track tape recorders, a file cabinet, a desk, and a light - no typewriter, and we were kind of low on clients too. But we made a lot of tapes.

Stan Ridgway (Wall Of Voodoo): Eventually, the company turned into a band.

Were the instruments you used on the soundtracks similar to what you later used onstage?

Ridgway: Not really. Onstage there's so much you have to do, but when you have the freedom of tape You can do a lot of manipulation with acoustic or electric sounds. We used to specialize in slowed-down or sped-up tapes sandwiched in between real-time stuff, because we couldn't really play fast enough on the keyboards to get the speed we needed. We used to play it at a comfortable tempo, then get it faster on another track, and it sounded pretty good.

Do you feel that your experience with soundtracks gave you any insights with synthesizers that you might otherwise have lacked?

Ridgway: Well, we always felt that music was for generating moods, and trying to play fast in a virtuoso type of thing wasn't something we were interested in. We were more interested in a feel that had nothing to do with musicianship.

Do you feel that keyboard virtuosity is not as important to now styles of synthesizer playing as it was in the past?

Ridgeway: Yeah, and I think I understand why. When the synthesizer first came out, it was looked upon pretty much as a crazy organ. You had players like Chick Corea and Jan Hammer trying to make it sound like a guitar. But in formal music people had been using the instrument for a long time before that, and it just took some time for the two ideas to catch up with one another.

Barbieri: I think people tend to use synthesizers in a more subtle way now.

Ball: The technical skill now lies in actually programming the synthesizer, rather than in playing the keyboard. I think of synthesizer players as keyboardists, actually. There are keyboard players who play piano and organ, and there are synthesizer players who are more like technicians. Of course there are really good piano players who can do great things on synthesizers too.

Ryser: It's more a matter of good taste now, or just generally being creative. I don't think it's as necessary as it used to be to have lots of impressive licks. Some of these new synthesizers, like Sequential Circuits Pro-One, will play arpeggios for you. My sequencer is Sequential Circuits too, and I can program it at a snail's pace then just speed it up to whatever tempo I want.

In that sense, you really differ from the bands of the '60s, with their extended solos.

Ryser: Yeah. It's more important to me to contribute to the sound or the band than to play a solo. When any of us do solo, it's more to create a dialog between the instruments, as opposed to just sticking one player out in front.

Simon: Exactly. Solos should be pertinent to the vocal line and the message you're trying to get across. When you have singing involved, belaboring an instrumental section just takes away from the song. And the kids get a little bored, even if someone is excellent on an instrument, all the licks start to sound the same if it goes on and on.



Ryser: In the '60s people got outside of the structure more, and now it's a thing of getting back into the structure, making the players in the group work really work together

Simon: As soon as synthesizers came along, everyone said, "oh, wow, outer space!" and that type of thing. That lasted until the players matured, and then synth started to take on a different meaning: horn lines, guitar lines, background noise, or what have you, rather than the Keith Emerson "Lucky Man" standard glide.

What are your thoughts now about people like Emerson and Rick Wakeman?

Simon: They were very good keyboard players, that stands by itself.

Ryser: For my part, I think my style is a reaction against guys like Emerson and Wakeman. When they first came out, I really liked them, but after a while it got too pretentious.

Ball: I really used to hate the kind of things they were doing, because it was just impressing people by how fast they could play a riff. To me, that doesn't mean anything. There's no feeling there; it's just technical brilliance.

Is having that kind of technical skill in any way a liability in your music?

Principle: No, not at all. I couldn't imagine anything that would be a liability if it comes talent. Its not what you have, but the way you use what you have, that makes good art.

Ridgeway: But in a lot of ways I think having a knowledge of music has helped us out a lot more than having a knowledge of the keyboard. It's interesting to be talking to a keyboard magazine, because we never really considered ourselves keyboardists at all.

Yet there is a lot of synthesizer on your albums.

Ridgeway: I know, but it's still funny. We've played them, but our area of expertise is different. The idea of a monophonic synthesizer, where one note is played at opened up a whole different approach to the keyboard. For centuries, the keyboardist was a two-handed thing. You worked in an orchestral sense. Then when a keyboard came along that was just a trigger to generate sounds out of a synthesizer, that completely changed things.

Gore: When you use a lot of sequencers and things like that, you don't really need much technical playing ability. But you still need some sort of know-how, some sort of musical knowledge to know what sounds right. When a note sounds wrong, you should know how to change it accordingly. When people talk about just leaving a sequencer running to finish a song, it's not that simple.

Ball: Groups that are dominated by sequencers I find a little boring, actually. I think a lot of people are possessed with the idea that because machines can do that kind of thing you've got to let them steal the limelight. Those people seem to be into the idea that the medium is the message. Kraftwerk is the perfect example.