I’m in The Leadmill in Sheffield city centre with girlfriend Terri on a chilly October night. It’s the third week of a nuclear autumn since my home town was vaporised by a Russian attack in the savage, horrific ‘Threads’ film, shown on BBC 2 on a Sunday night. The end is nigh, and it begins twenty miles up the road at RAF Finningley. 

So the parfum de saison is Apocalypse, with its signature notes of cold sweat, stale liquor and involuntary human bowel movement. It’s the smell of fear and it’s everywhere, even if it’s just a discreet dab behind the ear. Or perhaps, like me, you’re doused in a rancid cloud of it. It’s here in The Leadmill tonight, mixed in with the potpourri of Clove ciggies, patchouli and Pernod and black. 

The last time I was here I was onstage with The Box, playing a July gig with support from our pals Hula to promote our new album. I note with some jealousy that the familiar room is much, much busier tonight, fearing that in the course of eighteen months, our band has gone from being the best thing since sliced bread to a loaf that is approaching its sell-by date. 

Nevertheless, putting the imminent Armageddon aside for the evening, we’re all gathered here hoping to soak up a different kind of radiation. To bathe in the nuclear star power of one of the UK’s biggest new pop personalities of recent years, Mr. Marc Almond - recently of Soft Cell, now embarking on a proper solo career. 

I liked Soft Cell’s first five singles: ‘Tainted Love’ and 'Bedsitter' in 1981, then into 'Say Hello, Wave Goodbye', 'Torch' and ‘What’ the following year. All of them UK Top 5 hits, in what was an undeniably impressive run. But I’m not an überfan, unlike Terri. She’s got the Soft Cell singles, their albums and both of the subsequent Marc and the Mambas records. This drug-fueled side-project of obscure cover versions and his own songs eschewed the synth-pop of Soft Cell in favour of soul-bearing, self-flagellation - set against an arcane mix of chanson, tango, showtunes and grubby industrial rock. 

Terri feels right at home amidst so many kindred spirits. The majority of the audience are young women: an excitable fandango of crop-tops, bandanas, fingerless gloves revealing inky-black talons, jangly bangles and hoop earrings big enough for small dogs to jump through. Their meticulously applied eyebrows have the artistic touch of Leonardo da Vinci, and heart and dagger motifs abound. These girls are The Gutter Hearts, members of Marc Almond’s fan club, christened by Lydia Lunch, the New York witch of the ditches, who looks like an authority on matters both sordid and subterranean.

Gutter Hearts, Venom-ettes, the Mambas, the Ruined and now the Willing Sinners. Marc Almond is brilliant at creating an us-against-the-world gang, of which he is naturally the leader. He has cast himself as a Northern Orpheus, returning from the underworld to share his breathless, seedy stories of tormented characters he’s encountered in the decadent fleshpots of Barcelona, Tijuana and Marrakesh. These tales are told with good humour and a keen self-awareness. 

He’s probably lost some of the casual Soft Cell fans for whom his immersion in drug culture and S&M dungeons is a bit too dark. Indeed I’d venture that for the vast majority of devotees here tonight, their only encounter with opium has been from a perfume bottle. But it doesn’t matter how vicarious the experience is, for compared to the scary reality of the Brighton hotel bombing, the ongoing miner’s strike and World War Three on the BBC, Marc Almond’s lurid theatre of dissolute imagination is a welcome escape for a couple of hours. He’s funny, self-deprecating, relatable and vulnerable, a real pal in the midst of all the palaver. 

I never saw Soft Cell play live. While they played the small Porterhouse club in nearby Retford (population: 20,000) no less than five times, visits to Sheffield (population: 550,000) were more infrequent. In fact, their touring strategy in the course of three years of global success on record would be politely described as sporadic. Managed by the capricious Stevo Pearce; Soft Cell, in common with his other charges - Cabaret Voltaire and Matt Johnson’s The The - were lesser spotted species at Watford Gap, Leicester Forest and their overseas' equivalents. 

Stevo has just managed to get a deal for enthusiastic South London panel-beaters Test Dept. with Phonogram Records, home to Dire Straits and Big Country. There’s more chance of Arthur Scargill appearing in Debrett’s than Test Dept. appearing on ‘Top Of The Pops’ but the Epping Forest Epstein is uniquely skilled at getting the major label bosses to take a chance on uncommercial music because he might, just might, have found the next Soft Cell. I do wonder if he gets bored once the record deal is done, or if the real hard bastards on the live music side of the business are less persuaded by his eccentric, unpredictable approach to promotion.

For his first solo tour, Marc Almond has assembled a new five-piece backing band called The Willing Sinners, young men and women with good bone structure and even better hair. Terri tells me that some of the Willing Sinners used to be Mambas but have since shed their old skins. The electronic pulse of Soft Cell has been banished. Instead his new songs, which feature piano, real drums and electric guitar and bass, hark back to the sweeping Tin Pan Alley pop of the Sixties, with diversions into brassy, sleazy blues. Having seen him on 'The Tube' on Channel 4, I'd dismissed him as a Cow & Gate Nick Cave, but I'm very happy to be proved wrong tonight. With his earrings, chunky finger furniture and spangly, sequinned game show host jacket, Almond looks like Querelle of Brest presenting the quiz of the week. It’s a shame Soft Cell didn’t play live more, because from the moment Marc appears onstage to deafening squeals, it’s obvious that he has a tremendous stage presence - Judy Garland meets The Jean Genie. 

This is the first night of the tour designed to promote Almond’s upcoming album, ‘Vermin In Ermine’, so the show is a bit chaotic and haphazard in places. With recent song titles like ‘The Art Of Falling Apart’, ‘Mr. Self Destruct’ and ‘A Million Manias’, Almond can be relied upon to make a drama out of a crisis. And, Marc being Marc, he will of course have bought the stage and film rights, work-shopped it upstairs at The Royal Court, before a triumphant transfer to the glittering West End. Okay, so there are some first night nerves on display here, but Almond is nothing if not an eager-to-please trouper, keenly attuned to his fan's reveries. And the Gutter Hearts wouldn’t have it any other way. You want slick? Go see Nik Kershaw.

For Terri and the rest of the Soft Cell/Marc & The Mambas fans here tonight, most of these songs present limited opportunities for a sing-along. The anticipated new album won’t be in the shops until next month. Almond opens with his solo return track ‘The Boy Who Came Back’ and adds recent single ‘You Have’, both of which are known to this none-more-dedicated audience. There’s a long, ponderous new song called ‘Ugly Head’ which at least allows the crowd to chant back its repetitive one-note, one-word chorus. 

He also plays a couple of covers: a song called ‘The Plague’, which Terri tells me was originally recorded by Scott Walker; and a sultry reading of Cole Porter’s ‘Love For Sale’. But he doesn’t go anywhere near his old material. Which is a shame, as through Terri I’ve discovered the brilliance of obscure Soft Cell songs such as the laugh-out-loud, kitchen-sink drama ‘It’s A Mug’s Game’ and the surging, hypnotic, gift-shop trash anthem ‘Memorabilia’. Not to mention his heart-stopping solo rendition of a beautiful love song called ‘Vision’, which I learn was originally recorded by old proggers Van der Graaf Generator. 

You’d think Almond might reward the faithful for their loyalty with a blast from the past. But if ‘Tainted Love’ was a brick that smashed through windows all over the world, there’s a sense that he fears it might yet drag him under - if he keeps it in the pocket of that glittery game show jacket.

Nonetheless, Terri and her cohorts, freshly coated in Almond dust and light-headed from sharing the rarefied air with their impish hero, are beside themselves with happiness. Approaching global conflagration notwithstanding, this new tour will see Marc Almond and the Willing Sinners play more dates around the UK in the next two months than Soft Cell managed in either of the previous two years. It looks like The Boy Who Came Back is here to stay. 

Meanwhile, Terri and myself head down the road to the Pond Street depot, to catch the last bus back to my little terraced home in the Sheffield fall-out zone.

Remembering Dave Ball of Soft Cell, The Grid and 'In Strict Tempo'.

With thanks to my editor Nigel Floyd.

Coincidentally, before 'Threads' was first screened in late September, there had been a conference at the Town Hall in Sheffield in June called 'The Nuclear Winter: The World After Nuclear War.' I assume the first speaker stood up and said: "We're all fucked", and the gathering went over the road to The Brown Bear to get absolutely hammered on Sam Smith's.