2018 marked the 40th anniversary of Soft Cell, one of the most colourful and charismatic bands in the history of popular music. To celebrate this landmark, singer Marc Almond and musician Dave Ball reunited for an emotional, sold-out, farewell concert at London’s O2 Arena that September. With unprecedented access to Marc and Dave, this film follows the build-up to that gig and provides an intimate retrospective portrait of one of our greatest bands and most iconic singers. It shows rehearsals and preparations for the O2 show and footage from the actual concert itself, woven in with period archive and music videos. The film covers Marc’s formative years growing up in Southport and Dave’s in nearby Blackpool and how the two met as art students at Leeds Polytechnic in the late 1970s. We filmed Marc and Dave in The Fenton pub in Leeds, where they went as students, and they perform an early Soft Cell song, A Man Could Get Lost, on Dave’s original keyboards especially for the BBC Four audience at The Warehouse Club where the band did their first-ever paid gig. Soft Cell burned brightly between 1981 and 1984, after their gritty but stunning cover version of Tainted Love became a massive hit, the best-selling single in the UK of 1981 and a number one hit in 15 other countries, including the USA. Dave plays from the master tapes of that era-defining song for us. But Soft Cell were always more interested in using their success to subvert the mainstream than in becoming pop stars, as they tell us in relation to Marc’s groundbreaking, androgynous debut on Top of the Pops. It was the beginning of a controversial career that deliberately defied and flouted convention. Soft Cell were influenced as much by punk as by Northern Soul and Kraftwerk, and refused to be pigeonholed by anyone, bringing a punk ethos to synth-pop while busting taboos along the way. In their heyday, even while refusing to compromise on their musical vision, the pair produced numero