NOBODY IN HERE BUT US HUMANS!

NOBODY IN HERE BUT US HUMANS!

FEATURES

by Richard Grabel

Phil Oakey, Joanne Catherall and I ride the elevator up to their record company’s offices together. We’d never met, but I knew they were pop stars right away. I could tell by their sneakers.

These sneakers were covered with some kind of shining, shimmering reflective glitter. Dazzling. Only pop stars, in my mortal reasoning, could have such sneakers. But though I knew these must be pop stars, I doubted they were the Human League ringleaders I’d come to interview.

The Human League, after all, had been the first of the British style-and-synth-pop bands to break big in America. When they toured in support of the phenomenal Dare album, Joanne appeared as a disco doll perched appealingly between glamorous and cute, while Phil sported a dashing haircut with a fringe flopped over one eye, eyeliner and clothes that at least tried to convey the impression of elegance. Definitely an image band.

And now here was Joanne—yes, it has to be them—looking early-morning bedraggled and casual. But the real shock was Phil. He is wearing greasy, almost disheveled long black hair, a stubble of beard, a cartoon T-shirt and a black leather jacket. He looks, in fact, like a refugee from the Ramones fallen on bad times.

But then I remember that one of the Human League’s best songs, “The Things That Dreams Are Made Of,” contained a reference to “Johnny Joey Dee Dee.” And it turns out the suggestion that he now resembles a Ramone is one that does not cause Phil Oakey to take offense.

“Well, that would be alright, wouldn t it? I wouldn’t mind looking like somebody from the Ramones.”

But it’s odd for someone once known as the leader of a very style-conscious band.

“Well, there was a stage when I was actually dressing down. I was dressing up to go out on the street, and then thinking it was pretentious to do that for the stage, so I was dressing down for the stage. But, once you’ve been a pop star, it’s sort of...it’s been a matter of work for two-and-a-half years. And when we started, we were the image

band. In Britain, our image was way beyond everyone else’s. But since then, everybody’s emerged that does it better. And like Ken Livingstone in London says, there’s no point engaging the competition if you’re not going to win. But I’ve got some ideas for being the top again.”

“/ opened the paper one day and there’s my wife saying rude things about our sex life. It got crazy.” -Phil Oakey

Which brings us to the saga of the rise, disappearance and—they hope and I will bravely pronounce as quite possible—the reappearance of the Human League. Back in 1982, the League were bold, brave and

innovative. They had a new look (flashy), a new sound (synth-based, melodic and very pop in a dance-oriented mode) and they had songs. Real songs, great songs.

“Don’t You Want Me” was the single that paved the way for the likes of Duran Duran and the Eurythmics to storm the U.S. charts with songs that said far less. The video that accompanied it was one of the leaders in short-form storytelling that helped set (please forgive them) the MTV style.

But Dare, the album, was much more than that one single. Most of the record was made of clever, catchy, finely-constructed pop tunes whose veneer of up-to-the-minute modernity only made them that much more timeless. In Dare the League had made a record to be proud of. That they seemed almost too trendy to be serious, that people latched onto their eyeliner and haircuts as much as their lyrics and melodies, was hardly their fault.

“We didn’t have quite the number of magazines and badges and T-shirts and poster sales that, say, an Adam Ant had,” Oakey recalls. “But we had the biggest record sales of anyone for five years. If you want to go into influences, I can’t work out where I’m getting bigheaded, but I think we changed, absolutely, the course of British pop. We went on tour for a year, and when we came back suddenly there were so many groups with a male singer and two girl singers. When we first did it, you should have seen the papers. They couldn’t understand why you would have girls in the group if you were serious. If you did that you were Abba or something. And then there were groups doing very well who are based on the Human League. I shouldn’t mention names again. I got into trouble last time. I got told off by my nine-year-old niece who likes one of them. You look at some of the images and you’ll see. They sat down at a table somewhere and said, ‘how can we be like the Human League?’ ”

And then, having changed the face of British pop, the League led the march of the painted popsters across the ocean.

“I don’t think we so much paved the way as someone made the pavement. The American record buying public had made the pavement and we were damn lucky that we were the first to cross it. I think it’s more likely that we were the first rather than we were what broke the mold. Timing was very lucky with us. If we had not existed I think you would have found that, say Duran Duran or the Eurythmics would have broken through anyway.

“It’s complicated. Duran Duran based their recorded sound on a record that we did. Not by the Human League. We did one by a group we called the Men. This was back when the old Human League was first signed to Virgin. We released a disco single by a group that we called the Men, because it wasn’t all synths, so we gave it a different name. And Duran Duran went to the producer of that record to get a sound the same as that. I was interested to see them admitting that in the paper the other day.”

But life as a pop star has its special demands, and Phil and Joanne, who seem to be essentially quiet and private people, took it especially hard.

“We were too popular,” Phil says. “In Britain, it was like maybe the way it is for Michael Jackson now, only on a smaller scale. The sort of things that were happening at that stage in our career, because we were so big, were ridiculous. The guy that ran our fan club died. The newspapers sent people there to search through the wreathes at his funeral to find out if there was one from the Human League. And when there wasn’t...”

Joanne: “They phoned up my mum at work and asked her why not. They sent people over to my grandparent’s houses to find things out.”

Phil: “And then they got my wife, when I used to be married. I open the paper one day and there’s my wife saying rude things about our sex life. It got crazy.”

So the League decided to take a year off. And when they finally got around to recording, they found themselves fighting with their producer Martin Rushent, the man who had given Dare its brittle sonic brilliance. When Rushent finally quit, they scrapped the tracks done with him and started over again with Chris Thomas, who does the Pretenders. But then the recording ran over schedule, and Thomas had a commitment to go work with Elton John, so the League had to carry on with Hugh Padgham producing. Along the way, a couple of singles— “Fascination” and “Mirror Man”—filtered out. But for all intents and purposes, the Human League followed the acclaim that greeted Dare with a two year absence.

“When we decided to take a year off, it seemed like a good idea,” Phil says. “But then we thought we’d spend six months recording and come out with an album. We didn’t know that producers were going to start going crazy and all that.”

Does it piss them off that while they were gone people like the Durans took a formula based on their work and brought it to the arena-circuit?

“Well, you can’t really afford to do that, can you? It’s only pop music after all. I mean we do on occasion get worried about it, but you have to stand back and think.

“And groups like Duran Duran, they’ll do things that we frankly felt too proud to do. They’ll do any TV show, they’ll do record shop appearances, and we won’t do them. We wouldn’t go in the teenage magazines in Britain. There are these magazines, like Jackie, which are basically for persuading 12to 16-year-old girls to conform. The basic message there is, you have got to find a boyfriend. He has got to be as good looking, according to our image, as you can get. Then you will settle down and get married and have babies and not go out to work. So we refuse to do all those. And Jackie sells a million copies.

“Anyway, when it comes down to it, people will buy records just for the reason that they want the record.”

And so to Hysteria, finally finished and ready for your judgement.

When Phil and Joanne talk about the recording of this record, it does not sound as if they had a good time. First, there are the problems inherent in going through three producers to make one record. But there is more. Little bits and pieces keep coming out, references to how “confused” they were while making the record, what a mess everything was by the time Hugh Padgham entered the picture, with unfinished songs spread out over endless reels of tape, almost impossible to sort out.

TURN TO PAGE 60

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 36

And, clearly, Hysteria is no Dare. It completely missed that stylistic surety, the confidence and sense of vision and purpose that made Dare so distinctive. A lot of this can perhaps be attributed to producer trouble. And some of it certainly can be traced to a sense of confusion within the band, a lack of direction.

It comes out when Phil says, “the songs that stand out on the album happen to be the sort of slow and soppy ones, like ‘Louise’ and ‘Life On Your Own.’ ” To my mind, calling these songs slow and soppy is being extremely kind. These songs are dead-in-the-water jokes. And it comes out when they tell me they have high hopes for the disco remixes being done for “I’m Coming Back” and “Rock Me Again And Again.” These songs are repetitive, essentially boring takes on riffs that were old before they were born, and no amount of remix jazzing is going to breathe life into them. Caught somewhere between their desire to be sharp-eyed chroniclers of the vicissitudes of romance ala “Don’t You Want Me” and their desire to be dance floor heroes, the Leaguers seem to have lost sight of their essential strength.

Which is to be makers of simple and strong pop tunes that carry biting, worthwhile lyrics.

And to my mind, the single “The Lebanon” is the only song on Hysteria which does that. It adds an insistent rhythm guitar to the Human League’s usual all-synthesized instrumentation to very good effect, and has the advantage of at least trying to say something. The group, oddly enough, never saw it as a single at all.

Joanne: “We meant for it to be considered in the context of the album. But Simon Draper, who’s Managing Director of Virgin, said it would be really good for our image, that we didn’t come back with just a little pop tune. We were worried that people would say, oh, there’s another pop group singing about politics and things they know nothing about, why don’t they stick to pop music?—which is what I always used to think about groups singing political songs. What do they know about it? But then you realize that it’s not what you know. If you have a feeling about something, you should express it.”

I think that at heart the Human League are an honorable pop group. When Phil says, “we try not to do anything exploitive of anybody,” he seems to mean it. With Hysteria the group hit a period of confusion and setbacks and came out with a very flawed record that still reveals, here and there, an underlying talent for making the kind of songs that catch you the first time and stick with you. A little rethinking, a little concentration, and they could regain their former stature the next time around. Up