Sunday, May 24, 2026

Smart ’80s Dance Throwback: Soft Cell and the Pet Stop Boys Get Out of the “Purple Zone”

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Soft Cell (“Tainted Love”) and the Pet Stop Boys (“West End Girls”) were everything in the dance crazed 80s. They made smart,classic music that is played everywhere forty years later.

Now they’ve combined for this effortlessly catchy single, “The Purple Zone.” If Z100 played this, they’d have cars bopping up and down freeways. Great single!

The song will be included on Soft Cell’s much anticipated fifth studio album Happiness Not Included which is now scheduled to be released on May 6th. They haven’t released a new album in 20 years. How crazy is that?

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Roger Friedman
Roger Friedmanhttps://www.showbiz411.com
Roger Friedman is the founder and editor-in-chief of Showbiz411. He wrote the FOX411 column on FoxNews.com from 1999 to 2009 and previously edited Fame magazine and wrote the "Intelligencer" column at New York magazine. His bylines have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the New York Daily News, the New York Post, Vogue, Details, and the Miami Herald. He is a voting member of the Critics Choice Awards (Film and Television branches), and his movie reviews are tracked by Rotten Tomatoes. is articles have appeared in dozens of publications over the years including New York Magazine, where he wrote the Intelligencer column in the mid 90s and covered the OJ Simpson trial, and Fox News (when it wasn't so crazy) where he covered Michael Jackson. With D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus, he co-produced the 2002 documentary "Only the Strong Survive," which screened at Directors' Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival.

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