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There is something almost indecent about hearing Soft Cell look backward with this much grace. For a band that once made sleaze, synthetic dread, cheap rooms, lust, humiliation, and metropolitan bad behaviour feel like the natural furniture of pop music, The Rainbow Room finds Marc Almond and Dave Ball staring across Manhattan from 65 floors up and realizing that memory can be every bit as dangerous as desire.

The song comes from Danceteria, Soft Cell’s sixth and final studio album, completed shortly before Ball’s death in October 2025. It’s set in New York in the early ’80s, when Almond and Ball were recording at Mediasound, running around clubs, meeting Warhol, dancing near Madonna, and absorbing a city seemingly built for people with nowhere respectable to be. The Rainbow Room catches that romance at the point where exhilaration develops a crack.

Ball’s arrangement is spacious, elegant, and slightly narcotic. The electronics drift rather than stampede, giving Almond room to sing as though he were paging through photographs nobody else can see. His voice carries wisdom and gravitas; every phrase has the peculiar steadiness of a man who knows how unreliable memory can be yet still chooses to trust it – albeit with rose coloured glasses. This is, in short, Almond’s My Way.

The central image comes from Almond’s own birthday visit to Rockefeller Center. “… I did celebrate my birthday – my 21st or 22nd – at The Rainbow Room in the Rockefeller Center… The story of that view is true, too, I really did think: “Imagine falling down there” at the time,” Almond muses. “It was important to mention the Twin Towers, to acknowledge that this song about the future had a poignancy to it, knowing how dark that future would become.”

That line about falling is pure Soft Cell: glamour sharing a table with dread, champagne beside the abyss. The Twin Towers turn the song’s future tense into something brutal. Young Almond looks across New York wondering what comes next; older Almond sings from a world in which several answers are already known, including the death of his musical partner.

That knowledge changes the record’s emotional gravity. Ball heard the finished album before he passed away, and Almond has said no further Soft Cell recordings are possible without him. The Rainbow Room therefore carries a strange double exposure of youth and aftermath: two men in New York discovering possibility, then those same lives heard decades later through distance, death, and accumulated history.

The Rainbow Room takes nostalgia somewhere quieter and more devastating. The city still glitters below, the party is still downstairs, and Almond stands at the window remembering when the future looked endless.

Listen below:

With the untimely death of Dave Ball in 2025, the band’s sixth and final album, Danceteria, finally arrives on September 25, 2026. You can pre-order Danceteria here.

Marc Almond has announced another live run, this time in South America in late November to December. Prior to that, Marc will be playing more European shows in Italy and Poland from late September to October.

In early November, Marc returns to the States for a second time this year and will be touring as Soft Cell. The tour begins November 8th in San Diego and includes the Darker Waves festival in California on November 14th. Check out the full listings and ticket links here.

• Nov 8      San Diego, CA  – The Magnolia
• Nov 10    Napa, CA – Uptown Theatre
• Nov 11    San Francisco, CA  – The Regency Ballroom
• Nov 13    Reno, NV – Grand Sierra Resort/Casino
• Nov 14    Huntington Beach, CA – Darker Waves
• Nov 15    San Luis Obispo, CA – Fremont Theater

Follow Soft Cell:

• Website
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• Facebook
• Spotify

The post Soft Cell Shares Moving Synthpop Ballad “The Rainbow Room” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.

A previously unreleased Van Halen song is to be released as a 7″ picture disc. The 1974 live recording, Glitter – made with the band’s first bassist, Mark Stone – will be packaged with Van Halen, a limited-edition anthology written by drummer Alex Van Halen.

1500 copies of the anthology will be published by Genesis Publications in November. A Deluxe boxed set edition of 350 is already sold out, but the Collector boxed set run of 1150 – yours for a trifling £345 ($525) – is still available.

Each Collector copy is quarter-bound in black vegan leather with silver page edging, and features a silver debossed Van Halen logo. The book is housed in a black clamshell box with silver foiling.

In addition to the Glitter picture disc – which is backed by spoken word excerpts from interviews with Alex Van Halen – the package includes a Van Halen Productions keychain, three replica Eddie Van Halen stage-used guitar picks, and six 6″ × 4″ art postcards. Each copy of the book has been personally signed by Alex Van Halen.

While Glitter has not been officially released before, a demo has circulated widely as a bootleg, notably on the unofficial Van Halen/David Lee Roth CRr compilation Back In Circulation. It was also released in 1998 via the Dave TV section of David Lee Roth’s website, alongside another demo from the same session, Gentlemen Of Leisure.

These recordings were originally made at the home of David Lee Roth’s father, Dr Nathan Roth, a prominent Pasadena ophthalmologist. The tapes were then distributed to club bookers in the Los Angeles area in the hope of securing live shows.

Alex Van Halen published a memoir, Brothers, in 2024.

They were in two bands together before Mr. Joel became famous, and briefly fell out over Mr. Joel’s affair with Mr. Small’s wife. Mr. Small later found success as a director of music videos and concert films.

Live Review: Drug Church – Gorilla, Manchester

7th September 2026
Support: Downward, Liquid Mike
Words: Matthew Williams
Photos: Tim Finch

Sometimes in life, the best nights out occur when you least expect it, and a Monday evening gig in Manchester, the day after coming back from holiday, was not one that I was immediately looking forward to. However, that all changed after watching over an hour of the mayhem and carnage caused by Albany, New York’s post hardcore band Drug Church. I knew very little about all 3 bands, as post hardcore isn’t my favourite genre but wow, what a show they put on at a sold-out Gorilla.

The night started with Michigan’s Liquid Mike, a quartet on their first ever tour of the UK. The rock band have a variety of good sounding songs, from “K2” to “Drowning Machine” and mix it up with synthesizers and a few trumpet sections from Monica Nelson. Vocalist/guitarist Mike Maple takes centre stage, and with plenty of vocal harmonies between the two, it’s an effortless performance, with fun visuals on the screen behind them, and I find myself nodding along. They have elements of wonderful melodies in songs such as “Crop Circles” and “AT&T” with rockier compositions being heard in “USPS” and the excellent “Hell is an Airport”. Let’s hope that they return soon.

I was somewhat indifferent on Oklahoma’s Downward, whose brand of alternative rock, didn’t really capture my attention on the evening. They offer lots of slow, rumbling noises, nice guitar harmonies and solid rhythms, but only get going sporadically. I don’t know enough about the band so might be doing them a great disservice, as some parts of their melancholy sombreness were enjoyable, but not memorable. When they do get heavier, it’s good to listen to, as they create tension and drama with subtle tempo switches and crushing musical crescendos, but these were all too infrequent for me.

With a disco song playing, the screen lights up with the Drug Church logo, and they walk onto the stage. Frontman Patrick Kindlon stands and says “Manchester, you know what to do, no encouragement needed” and with that, the chaos begins as they start with “Million Miles of Fun”. I’ve been to Gorilla more times that I care to remember, but I’ve never seen anything like this, it was sheer bedlam from start to finish and doesn’t ease up during “World Impact”.

Kindlon is a bundle of energy but informs us that doing two shows in one day at Leeds was “a bit rough of my voice” so wants us to help him out, which off course the packed, energetic crowd do in their robust manner. There are stage divers and crowd surfers galore, so much so that on times I struggle to see the band from my vantage point near the back, but this is a high energy show and “you have to feed the pit monsters” as they are whipped into a frenzy with the stunning “Slide 2 Me”.

Franklin informs us that he’s wearing a long sleeve shirt as he needs to “drop some weight” and wants to feel “physically exhausted” by the end of each show”. Even slower songs such as “Hey Listen” don’t deter the stage divers, as the band continues to pump out a metronomic sound that encourages further bedlam, especially during the superb “Demolition Man”. He asks for “a stupid circle pit for stupid people running round” and he gets it, before telling us a story about Deftones, which is richly applauded.

He wants more stage diving and gets it during “Learning to Speak British” as he queries some of our customs, especially when so many push back his offer of the mic and continue the stage onslaught. “Unlicensed Guidance Counsellor” keeps the energy high, as the band are giving it everything, with their tight powerful melodies exploding across the PA. “Sing along if you know it,

I could do with the help” the frontman politely asks before the anthemic “But Does it Work?” and he wants the crowd to “express yourselves” as that’s what “it’s all about at our shows”.

As they build towards the end of the show, there’s the slower, bass propelled “Tillary” which is full of melody as the non-weary punters grab the mic to sing the words, before they play the monstrous “Myopic”. This is one hell of a song, but they leave us after the thunderous “Weed Pin” which sees wave after wave of stage divers, people jumping all over the place as the venue becomes a room of frenzied, sweat drenched bodies. This was a performance that I won’t forget in a hurry, as it was truly epic and I’ve been converted into a Drug Church fan for life.

Photo credits: Tim Finch

For all the latest news, reviews, interviews across the heavy metal spectrum follow THE RAZORS’S EDGE on facebook, twitter and instagram.

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The post 10 Best Rock Songs About Mistakes appeared first on ClassicRockHistory.com.

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