Human League

If there exists a musical, emotional and aesthetic compendium that ideally represents what the early 80s were, no record more than “Dare” can be identified with it. How else to describe a masterpiece that served as the beachhead of the second British Invasion on American soil? Without its ten songs, it's hard to imagine that leading bands like Depeche Mode, Soft Cell, Tears For Fears, Simple Minds, Duran Duran, Eurythmics – but also bands considered "minor" like A Flock Of Seagulls, Culture Club, Wham! and even one-hit wonders like Bananarama – would have broken through shortly thereafter, with laughable ease, on the Billboard charts.

There's even a precise date: it's July 3, 1982, when “Don't You Want Me” hits the top of the Billboard Hot 100 in the US, staying there for three weeks. From then on it's a flood in which "Tainted Love" happily splashes about (a full 43 weeks on the chart), along with all the Duran Duran singles from the "Rio" era, "White Wedding" by Billy Idol and "Addicted To Love" by Robert Palmer, just to name a few of the most illustrious examples. To cut it short, throughout 1983, 30% of record sales in the United States were accounted for by British bands.

Obviously, the phenomenon isn't due to some meteorite that fell without warning onto American soil - the story is more complex and starts in Sheffield in 1977, when the Human League, originally formed as The Future and made up of men only (Philip Oakey on vocals, Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh on synths/programming, and Philip Adrian Wright in charge of the visuals), made their full-length debut with the seminal “Reproduction”. It's often wrongly described as part of the New Romantic movement, because in reality the Sheffield scene (which also included Cabaret Voltaire) was more futurist, influenced by Kraftwerk and emerging artists like Gary Numan and The Normal. Being punk with synthesizers - that was the motto rising from the factory chimneys of the largest industrial hub in the north of England.

The lack of commercial success of "Reproduction" and its follow-up "Travelogue", combined with a perceived lack of confidence from the record label, are the fuses that — together with the sensational success of "Are Friends Electric?" in mid-1979 — lead to the band's implosion. Not even two brilliant songs are enough to keep the sinking ship afloat, songs that, ironically, would a few years later become the object of musical revisionism: the landmark "Being Boiled" and the irresistible "Empire State Human", both completely ignored at the time.

The always-turbulent relationship between Ware and Oakey grows even more bitter when it comes to deciding on future moves. The former insists on preserving the band's distinctive experimental electronic sound, while the latter wants fame & money, riding the wave of the most successful pop acts. The two hotheads keep clashing, reportedly even physically, and a split becomes inevitable. Under a Solomon-like agreement drawn up by manager Bob Last, Oakey keeps the name The Human League, while the departing Ware and Marsh go on to launch a brand-new project (which shortly thereafter becomes Heaven 17).

Keeping the name, however, comes at a very steep price for the ambitious Phil, who effectively becomes liable for all the group's debts and obligations, and on top of that has to pay the two departed members royalties on any future album, as stipulated by the Virgin contract.

And that's not all. Beyond the financial issue, a significant musical problem also emerges: there's no one left within what remains of the Human League to handle the machines, the sounds, the arrangements. So Wright, who has stayed loyal to the cause, is sent to synth primary school. The lad applies himself, shows real promise and will get there eventually, but that's still not enough to guarantee a rosy future — new recruits are urgently needed. Oakey, who at this point is obsessed with Michael Jackson's Off The Wall, decides the band needs a female falsetto voice to counterbalance his own dark baritone. And what better way to spend a Wednesday night in downtown Sheffield than going round the clubs looking for a backing singer? Two girls are dancing around their handbags on the dancefloor of the Crazy Daisy, unaware that their lives are about to change forever: Susan Ann Sulley and Joanne Catherall are in fact just two students out for a good time, with no dancing or singing experience whatsoever. Without a second thought, going purely on instinct, Oakey asks both of them to join the upcoming UK tour as occasional dancers and singers. But the girls are still minors, and their parents initially refuse to let them go. Just picture the scene — a masterclass in itself — with our Phil, lopsided asymmetric haircut, studs and lipstick, heavy make-up and towering heeled boots, turning up at the girls' front door to convince the parents to entrust him with their daughters!

The UK tour, still confirmed even after the split in order to avoid crippling penalties and bankruptcy, goes so-so, since those who bought tickets in advance understandably expect to see the old all-male line-up, not two greenhorns with no discernible talent shaking about on stage. There's almost constant booing and jeering, if not beer and even bottles being thrown. The intention, however, is to use female voices on upcoming recordings, and so Sulley and Catherall become full members of the band, paid on a salaried basis.

Given the credit it holds over Oakey and Wright, and tired of advances paid out with nothing to show for it in terms of sales, Virgin wastes no time sending the band into the studio to record a new single.

It's early 1981, and "Boys & Girls" is a cold, bleak track, with sampled church bells and an operatic choir that harks straight back to the band's earlier experimental period. It's recorded without any female vocals at all (the girls are busy at school...), even though both new arrivals are pictured on the sleeve and in the promotional material sent out to the media.

The label's top brass are convinced the band still needs guidance behind the mixing desk. The choice turns out to be easier than expected, since those very weeks see the release, again on Virgin, of the debut solo album by Buzzcocks' Pete Shelley, an excellent electronic pop record produced by up-and-coming Martin Rushent. Just to give you a sense of the man, we're talking about someone whose primary concern in life is definitely not his looks: photos from the era show him plump, with rosy cheeks like a Dutch farm girl and an unkempt little beard, topped off with a flannel tartan shirt. And yet — here's the twist — he has free access to London's Blitz club, the temple of the New Romantics, where an unyielding Steve Strange spends his evenings turning away VIPs and wannabe-VIPs deemed unsuitably dressed at the door. Rushent, on the other hand, is practically at home there, since the London office of his label Genetic is located right upstairs. And Strange and co., who may have a thousand flaws but certainly aren't lacking in instinct, butter him up with the aim — successfully achieved — of getting him to produce the first single under the name Visage, namely "Tar".

Getting back to our story, Rushent's first move — brilliant in sensing, ahead of so many of his peers and fellow musicians, the potential of synthesizers and a bright future for electronic pop music (the only other name that comes to mind is Daniel Miller) — is to summon the band to his Genetic Studios, far away from the homely, and by that point rather toxic, atmosphere of Monumental Studios in Sheffield, given the fierce rivalry with the newly-formed Heaven 17.

So, arriving before Rushent with the demo of what would become the first fruit of the new collaboration, "The Sound Of The Crowd" (originally little more than a jumble of hammering rhythms with no clearly defined melody), Oakey and co. wrongly assume they'll be calling the shots, convinced the man of the house will dutifully play along. Surprise: they find themselves facing a determined, immovable man instead. It has to be clear to everyone that he's the producer, he sets the direction, and they do what he says. A sort of democratic dictatorship, as Rushent would later recall. With the brash frontman and his acolytes duly put in their place, the demo is scrapped and the track recorded essentially from scratch.

The Linn LM-1 drum machine, the Roland MC-8 Microcomposer and the polyphonic analogue Jupiter-8 synth are behind the startling sounds and rhythms capable of turning what seemed like a barely promising embryo of a song into an explosion of synthetic vitality. Icy, robotic, groundbreaking notes, together with furiously pulsing patterns, give rise to an irresistible rhythm — standing still is not an option — and it goes round and round the room while you dance, dance... (op. cit.)

The track is also the first to introduce an original, if short-lived, marketing tactic, whereby singles were labelled with a red or blue sticker to help buyers tell apart the band's musical styles. Red was for dance tracks, used for "The Sound Of The Crowd" (and later for "Love Action" and, of course, "Don't You Want Me"), while blue was reserved for the more melodic pop numbers.

The run of singles the Human League deployed in the decisive battle for synth-pop supremacy has no equal, and no prisoners are taken. Take, for instance, "Love Action", a supremely classy uptempo number dominated by analogue synths and an irresistible melody, with a rapped interlude (though not a first — Blondie got there before them with "Rapture") leading into the grand finale. It's a new style of electronic pop advancing relentlessly, free of guitars and exhausting musical technicalities, and even the critics, bitter enemies up to that point, start to take notice. The lyrics are a sort of autobiographical account of Oakey's love affairs, in which he refers to himself in the third person. There's a curious line, "...but this is Phil talking", a nod to one of his teenage idols, Iggy Pop, who sings "Jesus, this is Iggy" in "Turn Blue" (from "Lust For Life"). Even the title "Love Action (I Believe In Love)" is inspired by Lou Reed's song "I Believe in Love", and the old man referenced in the lyrics is none other than the former leader of the Velvet Underground.

After going two for two in spectacular fashion, Virgin shelves its cautious, step-by-step approach and agrees to hand over a generous budget for an album: "Open Your Heart" is the new single, but also the first track written specifically for "Dare". Since its release comes almost right up against the album's, the song inevitably has to double as a powerful promotional vehicle, which is why a video is shot whose storyboard closely mirrors the album's artwork. It's also the first single to carry the blue sticker, and therefore delightfully pop, originally written on guitar and then developed electronically across two distinct melodic lines, with a chorus that only arrives halfway through the track.

The title, images, photos and artwork of "Dare" are the result of a stroke of genius by Philip Adrian Wright (responsible for the design as well as the live visuals), who took his cue from the April 1979 issue of UK Vogue, where the word "Dare!" glows in neon pink above a model's close-up. Each band member's face, made up exactly like the magazine's model, is framed in a rectangle, seemingly staring into the sterile white void surrounding it, almost underscoring the synthetic content that defines the whole album. Oakey alone looms menacingly on the front cover, with the girls featured on the inner gatefold sleeve and the rest of the band relegated to the back.

But don't think that the magnificence of "Dare" depends solely on the singles, because the rest of the material is just as strong, and perhaps even more so, steeped in atmospheres and sounds that are as forward-thinking as ever but darker, less mainstream, at times claustrophobic. "The Things That Dreams Are Made Of", for instance, tasked with the delicate job of opening the album, is carried by synthetic textures embellished by a chanting voice that repeats, in a peremptory tone, a series of slogans that could have come straight out of a travel agency brochure:

Take the time to see the wonders of the world

To see the things you've only ever heard about

Dream life the way you think it ought to be

See things you thought you'd never see

Take a cruise to China or a train to Spain

Everybody needs love and adventure

Everybody needs money to spend

Everybody needs love and affection

These are the things, the things that dreams are made of

A sort of metaphor for the ambition of Human League, who in that magical autumn of 1981 felt like they owned the world. Even more interesting is the central triptych, with "Get Carter", the theme from a 1971 crime film, which flows into a stern, unsettling "I Am The Law", where an increasingly self-satisfied Oakey, cast as a police officer, addresses citizens to warn them that Evil exists and that it's his job to protect them. This theme of the citizen before the law recurs, with even more sinister overtones, in the following "Seconds", a sumptuous track inspired by the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Wright is fascinated by the American president's life and political legacy, and had long harboured the idea of writing a song describing the killer in the most poetic and least obvious way possible: "It took seconds of your life to take his life, it took seconds" — this is the mantra that loops for almost half the song, underlining the temporal paradox at the heart of that fleeting act, a matter of mere seconds, yet enough to end a life that could otherwise have gone on for many more years. The Linn Drum programming and the menacing bassline chords immediately create a tense atmosphere, underscored by Oakey's vocals over a bed of synths that sound like sirens — an atmosphere that reaches its peak halfway through the track with an explosion symbolising the shots that killed JFK. There's a great deal of kraut-rock and a huge amount of Berlin-era Bowie in what is probably the creative peak of the record.

"Darkness", on the other hand, is the most melancholy track of the bunch, and represents a gracious concession to that new romantic style the League never identified with — a sort of toll to pay in 1981, when the charts were dominated by bands from that scene.

And what to say about the triumphant synthetic charge of "Do Or Die", built like a 12" with four different synth lines weaving together and a heavenly instrumental break — nirvana for any synth-pop lover — where the sounds re-emerge one by one, accompanied by the synthetic percussion of the electronic drums?

"Don't You Want Me". We've saved it for last because it's the perfect emblem of the randomness from which great works are often born. The story is well known: buoyed by the already substantial sales of the album (and of the previous singles), Virgin executive Simon Draper orders the release of a fourth single towards the end of the year. The choice inevitably falls on "Don't You Want Me", the only track left in the batch with commercial potential, though Oakey considers it little more than filler, having relegated it to closing-track status on the tracklist. Firmly convinced that "the public is by now sick and tired of hearing Human League" and that a poor-quality release would therefore be a disaster, jeopardising the band's triumphant path so far, the frontman eventually bows to the label's wishes, on condition that a large colour poster accompany the 7", so as to compensate the fans who "will feel robbed after buying such a poor single". Sic.

"Don't You Want Me" comes out in November, and helped by an expensive video, sails straight to number 1 on the UK chart, carrying the album through the decisive Christmas period of 1981 before going on to conquer the American market the following summer.

Oakey drew inspiration from a photo story he'd read in a women's magazine, and after watching the remake of the film "A Star Is Born", he decided to frame the song as a kind of conflicted duet with Sulley, writing lyrics that today could easily be branded as sexist:

You were working as a waitress in a cocktail bar

When I met you

I chose you, I shook you

And I made you turn things around

I turned you into someone new

Now, five years later, you've got the world at your feet

Success came so easy for you

But don't forget that I was the one who put you where you are now

And I can knock you back down again

The two protagonists of this soap opera in a British flavour ask each other the same question: “Don't you want me?”, but the disconnect between them is so deep that they can't even hear one another, as if there were an invisible barrier keeping them apart:

I was working as a waitress in a cocktail bar

This much is true

But even then I knew I'd find a much better place

With or without you

The five years we spent were so good sometimes

I still love you

But now I think it's time that I lived my life on my own

I guess that's just what I must do

The demo featured a harder, less pop-oriented sound compared to the final track included on the album, which Rushent produces masterfully, achieving a softer, more appealing sound, even if it was too poppy according to Oakey.

Interest around the track is such that Virgin grants A&M the license to release the single and album in America as well, adding the final exclamation mark to distinguish the US release from the European version. The second British Invasion can finally begin.

Today, on its fortieth anniversary, “Dare” stands at six million copies sold, making it one of the best-selling synth-pop albums of all time, second only to “Violator“. It gives Virgin its number one in Britain, something that hadn't happened since “Tubular Bells” by Mike Oldfield, back in 1973, while “Don’t You Want Me” is the label's very first single to reach the top spot. Moved by the enormous river of cash flowing into his pockets, boss Richard Branson decides to gift Oakey a big BMW motorbike, promptly sent back since Phil doesn't know how to ride it…

In July 1982, while Italy wins the football World Cup, the wildly pumped-up notes of “Love And Dancing” suddenly rise into the air, a remix album born from the brilliant mind of Martin Rushent and credited to the loosely defined The League Unlimited Orchestra, a tribute to Barry White's disco-era Love Unlimited Orchestra. The album, among the first of its kind and preceded by just a month by Soft Cell's “Non-Stop Ecstatic Dancing”, is entirely the work of the producer, who reworks the songs from “Dare” in dub style (adding only one unreleased track, “Hard Times”, actually the B-side of “Love Action”), turning them into nearly instrumental cuts. Rushent knows the potential of remixes well, and using nothing but the mixer, working on the original tapes with vocal effects, the scratching typical of 12-inches, and some cut & paste work, he creates thirty-five minutes of irresistible dance music that immediately becomes a reference point for every DJ and electronic manipulator.

The band obviously disagrees with the release, but Virgin rightly couldn't care less about Oakey's faint-hearted objections and opts for a high-impact commercial strategy, putting the product on sale for just 3.99 pounds. A brilliant move that will yield 300,000 copies sold and three platinum records.

There's still room, as an appendix, for two unreleased singles that help while away the enormous wait for the follow-up to “Dare”: “Mirror Man”, with its clear Motown flavour, closing out 1982 in style, and “(Keep Feeling) Fascination”, which ushers in 1983, both released while the band is already in the studio trying to find its footing for the new album. But repeating the feat, as Virgin instead demands, is shaping up to be a tough task. And indeed…

Almost paralysed, crushed under the weight of millions of copies sold and the pressure from the label and the media, Oakey and co. completely lose their bearings. The sessions are a disaster, endless time wasted just trying to get a single sound right, and indecision over which musical direction to take create irreconcilable clashes, and it's Rushent who pays the price, deciding to step aside. “Hysteria”, a title that perfectly captures its troubled gestation, is a near-flop, selling a tenth of what “Dare” did, partly due to the wrong choice of lead single, “The Lebanon”, a decent guitar-driven track that left longtime fans baffled.

The hysterical troubles bring the Human League back down to earth, after almost three years spent on a mission in space, and the landing is anything but smooth. The decline in popularity caused by a frightening creative void advances relentlessly, and not even the number one scored by “Human” in the US (entirely the work of Jam & Lewis, by the way) manages to lift the fortunes of “Crash”, an even bigger flop than its predecessor, though rock bottom is only truly scraped a few years later with “Romantic?”, an insipid, hopelessly out-of-time record devoid of anything worth paying attention to, which costs them their deal with Virgin (a sad fate also shared by former rivals Heaven 17).

It seems like the end has arrived, melancholic and inglorious, when “Octopus” (1995), which looks back to their illustrious past, and the bolder “Secrets” from 2001 forcefully bring Oakey and his inseparable vocalists, by now risen to milf status, back into the spotlight. Enough to secure a place in the global synth-pop Hall of Fame.

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16/10/2021