GIVE HUMAN LEAGUE A CHANCE

They live in Sheffield. Because they like it there. Because it's ordinary but sort of esoteric at the same time, straightforward but not stupid, arty without being, you know, arty. A lot like their music.

I’m sitting in Philip Oakey and Joanne Catherall’s fetching front room (gray carpet, black blinds, lots of machines, fresh coffee) in a nice Sheffield suburb, having been picked up at the station (almost three hours from London) by Susanne Sulley, who’s sitting next to Joanne on the sofa. Philip, on the armchair, is quiet and knowing and wary; the women are positive and talkative—funny how they don’t write, just talk...or maybe not so funny when you think of it. Whatever, it’s the combination and the contradiction of all these elements—the male-female thing, the aware-naive thing, the human electronics, the ordinary esoteric that makes Human League the band it is.

“I’m always surprised,” says Philip, early on, “at how we seem always to be regarded as just another group.” Oh? “When we’re really quite important. We started so many things that have gone on forever since arid no one seems to have noticed. We were like,” he searches for the words, as if the thought’s just popped into his head, “the turning point of pop music.” Meaning? “Before us was old-fashioned and since us is now.”

Before them, just before them—back in ’77 when Human League was all men and machines, multi-media with sci-fi slide-shows and One Of The First Of The Silly Haircuts—was punk, and “everyone was affected by punk in Britain, weren’t they?” They were no different. Though nothing was as affected as some of the rock-writing at the time—writers lauding punk as the New Age Of Innocence, when it was plain as the nose on Steve Perry’s face that it was as aware as a street-urchin conning the money out of your pocket. Punk did what it had to do. In a country where—despite what you may hear to the contrary about everything moving faster than the speed of whatever—a labyrinth of bureaucracy exists to shore up the crumbly edificies (literal and spiritual) of the past (as opposed to somewhere like the States, which eats up its history and shits it out as it goes on its merry way through time) we needed some sort of demolition-person. Even if what got built on the rubble wasn’t always much better—what started out as art principled Bauhaus ended up Milton Keynes new-town, new-romantic, Numan, cold and gray and inhuman. And those writers who lauded punk’s Noble Savage—the common-or-garden-prole-as-hero-schtick had obviously never been on the tube at 8 a.m. face-to-face and in close bodily contact with the very same, all off to their respective, grim and pointless moneymaking ventures; farcial it may be, ridiculous it certainly is, noble it’s not. Before punk, pop music was the bit of fluff meant to distract you from real life with the capital Hell. After punk, pop distracted and was aware that it distracted and was aware that you were aware that it distracted even though it purported to deal with the essence of this Real Life business. Endless convolutions, ironic self-consciousness.

“A triumph of natural organic feel over hi-tech,” said one review of the Human League way back, aware of the convolutions. ‘‘Deliciously crafted fraud,” said Dave Hill in his book on designer pop. ‘‘The Human League, from being the bit players of post-punk, were suddenly the Rolls Royce of BornAgain Pop.”

‘‘Before us,” Susanne is saying,:‘ you would never ever admit that you were a pop group. You’d got to be electronic or rock ’n’ roll or whatever, but you couldn’t be a pop group. And then all of a sudden everybody was saying that they wanted to sound like Abba.”

‘‘They might have been saying it,” says Philip, ‘‘but they w|re joking or making a big intellectual point about it. And then we came out and meant it. We did like Abba. We wanted to be like Abba.” And, like Abba, they got a couple of girls (when half the men left after a couple of albums to form Heaven 17), “and how many groups before we came along had two schoolgirls in?” asks Susanne “That were in the group, not just backing singers that they brought in when they wanted to.

“There were things in the papers back then like it was just amazing to have girls in a serious group. Now it’s gone so far that we did an interview recently where the girls said, ‘Don’t you think it’s sexist exploiting the girls in the group?’ So many other people use girls in different ways now that just to have girls as singers looks sexist! When we did it, it was an amazing opening of a door.”

“It was like,” Joanne joins in, “ ‘We’re a group of men, we’re going to go out there and conquer the world, we’re really good, we’re going to stick together and be macho’ and all this sort of thing. And all of a sudden: ‘There’s two girls in there! They can’t do that!’ We had people coming up, fans, saying ‘Why did they have to get two girls? Why couldn’t they get two men when Ian and Martin left?’ Before that, if you were a female in pop music you sang on your own or you were a session backing singer.”

“We changed all that,” says Philip. “We changed the attitude in Britain. I don’t know if it would have even happened if we hadn’t done it. Just through our success it became acceptable to see girls there. And there was a couple of years when every time you turned around and there was a new Human League.”

“A blonde and a dark-haired girl, all the time,” says Joanne. “We’d sit and laugh because they’d evert try and imitate us, which was highly amusing—-how we used to stand together and the way that we danced. It was really silly.”

No one ever quite managed to imitate the way the League played with and juggled the contradictions, though, the combination of natural earnestness and tongue-in-cheek humor of the videos and the songs. The unforgettable “Don’t You Want Me,” the usual supermarket-romance-novel-late-late-lovemovie plot turned on its head, Philip in an authorative voice telling Susanne how he’s the one who’s made her what she is, so how can she leave him? Susanne saying a gal’s gotta do what a gal’s gotta do. At a time (’81) when so much postpunk pop was every bit as pompous and contrived and selfindulgent as the pre-variety, this was a song that was synthesized and anguished, naive and knowing: brilliant. And quite rightly it was a massive hit in Britain and the States, and no doubt all manner of other places too. But then what? Faced with a new pop (instead of cult) audience and a drooling record company who wanted more of the same, they came out with something different. “And everything we’ve done has been so different,” says Susanne, “that we tend to collect fans and lose them along the way. I’m sure there are a lot of people who bought Dare who would never buy Crash because it’s so different. And because we’ve been labeled so many times as an ‘Industrial Group,’ because we come from Sheffield, some people won’t even give it a chance sometimes. I’m sure we’ve lost a lot of fans along the way because we’re not doing what they want us to keep doing.”

“If we didn’t have to have a name, if we didn’t have to be called the Human League and could put out a record and it would just sell or not sell on the merit of what it sounds like and if people like it, that would be brilliant,” sighs Joanne. “I think you can do that a bit more in America...”

They like America. Philip says he’d live there, L.A., if he had the money. Susanne’s not entirely unfond of the American Dream thing either: “How if you work hard and do well you’ve done what you’re supposed to do, whereas if you do well in England everyone wants to knock you down. If you work really hard no one wants to know.” Maybe the small-island mentality—-a damn sight more uncomfortable if people keep stepping out of line and jumping up and down than if they trundle along in the same direction. Maybe the class system. “New money’s no good,” says Philip. “America’s different anyway.” They recorded Crash, their latest album, there (except the beginning bit, which they did in England, getting more and more depressed, Ian Burden and Philip putting tracks down in London and phoning home to moan how badly things were going), in Minneapolis, with Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis.

“If we hadn’t gone with them I’d have been trying to imitate them,” says Philip. “Which is what I was already trying to do on some of the songs.” They put themselves into Jimmy and Terry’s hands “completely,” right down to doing a bunch of their songs (although the girls vetoed a particularly macho one) letting J&T use them pretty much as instruments, partly because that’s how they work, partly because they liked what they were doing anyway, and partly because making the album before Crash— Hysteria—was such a time-consuming, politically-debilitating and demoralizing experience (a couple of band members have since left) that they’d have broken up rather than go through it again. What got them into Jimmy and Terry?

"Before us was old-fashioned and since us is now.”

—Philip Oakey

‘Change Of Heart by Change—-an unbelievable album, full of sloppy love songs which I’d normally hate, but somehow they pull it off. And the SOS Band,’’ says Philip. “Everybody thinks we heard Janet Jackson and thought ‘OK, let’s go and make some money, folks!’ But we hadn’t even heard that then. When we went to work with them they were pretty obscure.”

What sound did they want to get out of it?

“Their sound.” The reviews might be mixed, but the band loves the result.

“When we started it with Colin Thurston we always knew, all of us, what it should sound like,” says Susanne. “But there was always something missing. You’d do another line of vocals or put a couple of Keyboards on and it wasn’t quite there. But you’d take it to Jimmy and Terry and straight away it’s got that sound.”

The three are positively reverential about the production team, adding, as if it’s barely to be believed, that they’re ‘‘really normal. They don’t drink, they don’t smoke,” says Susanne, “they don’t allow cigarettes in the studio; have you ever been in a recording studio where no one smokes?” No, and it doesn’t sound normal to me! “They don’t even drink coffee\” So they had to make this album without stimulants? “No, they’re not like ‘We don’t drink so you can’t drink,’” says Joanne. “They’re just dedicated to what they do and they don’t want to be sidetracked,” says Philip. “They’d actually got a coffee machine and didn’t know how to use it!” Susanne adds.

Are they religious or something? “Not really. They’re not weirdly straight or anything like that,” says Susanne.

“We thought it was going to be drugs and guns!” grins Philip. “Trapped in Minneapolis with strange people.”

“You look at them,” says Susanne, “and you think ‘Oh my God, we’re walking straight into the Mafia’—because they dress like gangsters and Jimmy is big, they both wear hats most of the time and they’ve got big overcoats on. And they’re so, well, normal.”

“They’ve got a horrible combination of confidence and talent,” says Philip. “They’ve got a good sense of humor— lately I think all you need is a good sense of humor and you can get on with anyone—and they’ve got that extra thing which most people don’t have, which is each other. They’re not like each other at all, but they just get on perfect.”

Can the same be said for Human League, I ask.

“We haven’t got that talent,” says Philip too modestly, “so that doesn’t come into it so much.”

“I think that has held us together, actually,” says Joanne. “Because we’ve all got on well together. And if anyone had any leanings towards becoming big-headed they’d be slapped down by the others. We’ve all stayed in Sheffield and just got on with what we do without all the other pressures.” Like having to open supermarkets and sign albums at Tower Records and be seen at the Right Nightclubs and all the things you’ve got to do for your record company, your public and the daily papers if you live in or near London. “You’ve got a good excuse, being in Sheffield,” says Joanne.

“I think if we went down to London we’d pull apart from each other,” says Susanne. “There’s a stability from being in Sheffield. Because it’s a normal town you’re not as likely to go off the rails or anything, because there’s nothing here to make you go off the rails. And in London there’s so many other distractions, and it’s so big, and you’re going to form new friends, you know.”

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“But Sheffield is a big city,” Philip points out. “The fourth biggest City in the British Isles.” And “it’s green,” says Susanne. “Not bleak and industrial like a lot of people think.” “It’s rich,” adds Phil. “More Rolls Royces per head than anywhere outside London.” And, at the same time, “it’s probably the most socialist town, apart from Liverpool.” More of those contradictions. The Sheffield Council has just built its own recording studio for the use of unemployed bands, so maybe before long there’ll be the Sheffield Music Scene that Human League have always wanted.

“That was one of the great contrasts in Minneapolis,” says Phillip. “Everyone’s in a group there and everyone’s proud of it. Around here there isn’t a music scene, and if you tell anyone you’re in a pop group they look down at you.” Their ambition, apart from getting their own studio together locally, is “to try to work with the local people and try and make a scene in Sheffield like there is in Minneapolis; to make people in Sheffield proud to walk around and say: ‘I’m in a pop group!”’

“I always thought it was in vaguely bad taste,” says Philip, “being in a pop group, having to do embarassing things onstage.”

“You read interviews,” says Susanne, “where people say ‘Ever since I was 12 / wanted to be in a pop group.’ When I was 12 all I wanted to do was play with my Sindy doll and go skating and swimming and things!”

And now they’re about to go on tour—the first in God knows how many years. Not a deliberate choice to keep away from playing live, just— like landing in a pop group in the first placesomething that happened. Not having the time “We were trying to go on holiday for four years as well and we never went!” Or, in the case of band defections, not having the players. Everything’s sorted out now. There was a time when Philip said he was about to chuck the whole thing; now he knows it’s going to go on for a long, long time.

“It’s a bit depressing when you get to the peak and you see yourself going down and down. Almost every day you think it must be easier to just give up than go on doing this.”

“Like in the rehearsals,” says Joanne, where they’ve spent a lot of time lately. “You’re down there, everyone’s screaming, there’s hardly a minute when there’s silence—even in the breaks, there’s someone bashing away on a guitar or a keyboard—and you’re thinking: ‘If he doesn’t stop now I’m going to get hold of that guitar and bash him ’round the head with it and walk out and never see this group again!’ But you don’t. You just sort of stick it out.”

“And it does work out in the end,” says Susanne. “Human League’s about individual people being able to get together and work together.”