“Say Hello, Wave Goodbye” by Soft Cell

"Say Hello, Wave Goodbye" is one of the high points of Soft Cell's Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret, the 1981 album where Marc Almond and Dave Ball played synth-pop as high drama. Almond sings, Ball supplies the electronics and everything else, and Mike Thorne produced, with Harvey Goldberg mixing, Don Wershba engineering and Vicious Pink on backing vocals. On the extended version, the clarinet you hear at the start is Dave Tofani.

As a single it went to number three in the UK. Rolling Stone later put it at 65 among the 100 best songs of 1982, and Classic Pop ranked it 12th among the 40 best synth-pop songs. In 1991 Julian Mendelsohn remixed it, Almond re-recorded his vocal, and "Say Hello, Wave Goodbye '91" reached 38 in Britain to promote the compilation Memorabilia – The Singles.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.