Human League, classic or dud?

The Fast version of The Circus of Death, available on the Reproduction CD, has this spoken intro:

"This is a song called The Circus Of Death. It tells the true story of a circus we met. The first two verses concern the actual arrival at Heathrow Airport of Commissioner Steve McGarrett. The third emotionally describes a map showing the range of the circus. The fourth and fifth were extracted from an article in the Guardian of March the 19th, 1962. The last is a short wave radio message from the last man on Earth."

The new album Secrets is pretty fine, but it's retro-synth production tends to make me wish I was listening to Dare instead. It's better than Ladytron, anyway.

"blah blah blah, I reached for the arm, which was less than one micron long, but weighed more than Saturn, and time stood still..."

All about a record whose popularity gives it enormous mass and it destroys everything, or summat. "The black hit of space/Get James Burke on the case/How can it stay at the top/When it's swallowed all the shops?" "It got to number one/Then into minus figures/And nobody could understand WHY". Genius.

Actually, Ian, I think we've already discussed that...? At Peter's. We were pretty wasted, but I think that came right after fighting over the Clash, because Human League was in the jukebox at Peter's so we played that song (it was virtually the only acceptable CD). I can't possibly be thinking of someone else, who else would I say that to? None of my friends know who Jarvis even is. Listen, we need to never again base any get together around drinking, cos I can remember fuck all about what we talked about besides Dead or Alive.

But no, this would be the best thing ever, and it'd be a good way to break Pulp in America as well! This has to happen now, who do we call to arrange this? I like it too because it really brings the creepy element of the song to the fore, I always saw it as a song about a much older man and a young ingenue and it always freaked me out, so putting Jarvis, who looks like a dirty old homeless man these days and is about 50, with Britney would be really creepy.

"This is a song for all you bigheads out there who think disco music is lower than the irrelevant musical gibberish and tired platitudes that you try to impress your parents with. We're The Human League, we're much cleverer than you and this is called Dance Like A Star..."

I can never decide if I prefer Reproductions-era or Dare-era or even now-era. Apparantly their REALLY early stuff was even better but you sound like a wanker if you say things like that so I won't.

The Human League may well be my favourite band of all time. But they might not.

I saw them about a month ago at G.A.Y. (immediately after seeing Fosca, so there was a kind of "THIS is how it's done" feeling) and they rocked. Especially as they did Don't You Want Me as the World's Most Obvious Encore.

I will burn from the inside until this duet gets made, you realize.

And yes, we fought about the Clash, because you said they sucked and I said, very logically and not at all shoutily, they are great because I heard them when I got my tattoos. Then we all went home and Stephanie played "You Spin me Round" 800 times in a row. Though maybe that was a different day. God. DON'T START DRINKING, KIDS.

I think this live video of "Human" from 2001 is pretty much the dope:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rw341LDpomI

I mean you've got the brunette, you've got the blonde, you've got him. What else do you need?

Doesn't anyone care how much I love this song?

Man, the song "Human" - such a beautiful series of melodies

as much as 13 year old in me is pleased that the girls continued to dress and wear makeup like that well into 2001, honestly it's a bit embarassing

Leave your cornflakes in your freezers,
leave your chocolates and your cheeses.
Give to Ceaser what is Caeser's,
Give your soul what'er it pleases

God, I love this band, Happily I love this single too, the 30 second fade out is just synthpop heaven.

Excellent long article.

Gather up your skirts and trousers
Put on your best frocks and blouses
Time to go our from your houses
Must we creep round like the mouses?

Damn, quite excellent indeed.

I'm having a listen to Reproduction now, and something that's always mystified me about the track 'Austerity/Girl One'... is the part when Oakey sings "you're a lonely little girl" an intentional Zappa reference (to the song 'Lonely Little Girl' on We're Only In It For The Money? It's the same melody and everything!

Never noticed that before, however Martyn Ware was/is a Zappa fan and picked out "Peaches en Regalia" when he was on BBC R6 a few years ago playing his influences etc.

I just discovered that Ian Craig Marsh did some of the programming on Right Said Fred's 'I'm Too Sexy'... hahaha... what the fuck?

Nice tidbit haha!

I'd like to read Thomas R. Fischer's post from 13 years ago, but I'm physically unable to look at it for more than a few seconds at a time.

The "Human" 12 inch has been in the stack nearest the turntable and I've listened to it on the reg recently. I know it's considered by many to be a real dud, but I just love that Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis production so much. Presets never sounded so moody.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X58g1HKxXPo

Like that's making the rounds. It's by V/Vm.

No love at all for "Fascination"? I think it's one of the great dance singles.

As soon as I saw this thread pop up, I knew why. Cocktail Bar is my current favorite song. It's some kind of weird masterpiece. Plus it's a trenchant takedown of the economic circumstances that hinder upward mobility. Which explains why she'll always be working as a waitress in a cocktail bar.

xpost. The 12 inch/mini-album "Fascination!" is my favourite thing they released.

As soon as I saw this thread pop up, I knew why. Cocktail Bar is my current favorite song. It's some kind of weird masterpiece. Plus it's a trenchant takedown of the economic circumstances that hinder upward mobility. Which explains why she'll always be working as a waitress in a cocktail bar.

It's sheer genius. 'I guess this is what I must do'

The "Human" 12 inch has been in the stack nearest the turntable and I've listened to it on the reg recently. I know it's considered by many to be a real dud, but I just love that Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis production so much. Presets never sounded so moody.

Nobody here does!

"Fascination" is my favorite Human League song by a jillion miles.

Almost every song they recorded between 1981 and 1983 was so good and original that I could vote for anything tbh

and Crash had loads of good bits. I like this one, not written by Jam-Lewis:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdpbXaeFnHU

No love at all for "Fascination"? I think it's one of the great dance singles.

― hardcore dilettante, Friday, July 31, 2015 6:47 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I love it!

Basically I love pretty much everything they did from the beginning up until '(Keep Feeling) Fascination'... Hysteria was patchy, but had its moments, and I like the odd song here and there after that, but not the albums in full.

Reproduction is probably the album I play the most.

Crash should be re-named Gash, although either title is fitting.

appreciate cocktail bar

Getting rid of Martin Rushent was probably one of the worst decisions The Human League ever made.

Doubt the album would have been amazing with Rushent at the controls either - the songs are pretty weak. Not sure how much he knocked their stuff into shape but you can't polish a turd as they say.

Interesting to consider who would have been a better alternative choice for producer for Crash? Trevor Horn (no), Stephen Hague (possibly)...

It would have been interesting to hear what a Trevor Horn-produced Human League album would have turned out like, him and Rushent seemed to tackle production from completely different ways. Martin Rushent once famously said: "In my experience, the longer you spend making a piece of music, the more likely it is to be a pile of shit! Stuff that's written, organised and put down very quickly seems to have an energy" - whereas Horn legendarily liked to labour over everything for months and months.

...says the guy who edited the League Unlimited Orchestra disc by hand for, like, months.

If Love and Dancing contains as many tape edits as Rushent claims, then I'm not surprised!

Not sure how much he knocked their stuff into shape but you can't polish a turd as they say.

Compare the demo of Don't You Want Me to the version of the song that everyone knows, and you'll understand exactly the difference that a great producer makes.

Let me help:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o19RDxjoZ6w

the definitive Rushent interview is in Simon Reynolds' book.

Yeah, it's amazing how the big intro hook was originally the bassline of the bridge(!)

Not saying Rushent is not important to the Human League - he was! Would love to hear eg. "Party" produced by him. But it's not like everything he touched turned to gold. He was quite capable of producing patchy albums by great bands who were not delivering good songs or performances - eg. The last batch of Buzzcocks releases prior to their breakup in 1980.

They were low on ideas without Jo Callis, who contributed a lot imo and Wright, who apparently didn't do much.

Basically they were not in a place to deliver a decent album at this point and I doubt Rushent would've changed that much.

Yeah, Callis did a hell of a lot on Dare - Ian Burden, too.

>>Like that's making the rounds. It's by V/Vm.

Is it really?
http://www.vice.com/read/the-guy-who-remixed-human-leagues-dont-you-want-me-is-working-on-a-remix-to-aquas-barbie-girl-0804

A shimmering, ardent review from Brad - everything I live for in music writing.
https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-human-league-dare/

That's a great piece! Putting it on again now.

thanks y'all! sort of a miracle i ever finished it, thank you for reading

Yeah, really enjoyed this piece. Haven't listened to the albums since Astralwerks reissued them almost 15 years ago, but your version tracks with my memories.

Yeah, great stuff, Brad, thanks.

Yep, props, Brad!

that really is an exemplary piece, kudos

Rushent would listen to the rough mixes of Dare songs when he returned home from the studio and couldn’t figure out whether the album they were making was brilliant or terrible.

Remember having the same thought when they first performed 'The Sound of the Crowd' on Top of the Pops. 'Genetic Engineering' by OMD would also produce the same baffled reaction from my friends at school, before we finally decided on 'brilliant' for both tracks.

Would love to see it expanded into a 33 1/3 book. Just such an extraordinary story; loses the key talent in the band, recruits two schoolgirls and a couple of refugees from post-punk bands and ends the year with a decade defining commercial and critical success.

Yeah it's an incredible story, looking forward to reading this. I always wondered if it was true that the sleeves were painted white, twice over so the cover stood out next to the other records. Certainly sounds good.

Wow, Brad. Superb.

I think I first learned the extent of Rushent's involvement in Reynolds' Rip It Up and Start Again.

As I said above, I think that "Don't You Want Me" is the perfect example of the difference that a great producer can make to a band's fortunes. I'd been thinking about the subject again recently after happening across a fascinating interview with Jo Callis. Although he was an accomplished guitarist, he recalled that he knew so little about keyboards on his arrival in Sheffield, that Martyn Ware took pity on him and brought him to a music store to buy a "piano chords illustrated" book. (Incidentally, I think it says much for Ware's good nature that he helped out a newcomer who was aligned with the "opposing" camp.)
This is not to deny the originality or creativity of the band members, but none of them had the anything like the technical ability to have refined DYWM into the world-beater it became. Such is Oakey's vocal charisma that it wasn't until I heard the song in an instrumental form (via the Love and Dancing remix), that its musical complexity jumped out at me. It's a mosaic of interlocking parts which must have been a true labour of love to sequence together with the technology of the era. In a time before DAWs and synthesiser presets, when every sound had to be set up from scratch, somebody needed to be able to imagine the song's entire structure in their head in order to bring it into existence. My guess is that the visionary was Martin Rushent!

Jo Callis was brought in for his pop songwriting track record rather than as a musician presumably. He wrote almost all the Rezillos songs including their big hit, and co-wrote about half of Dare including Don't You Want Me.

he was indeed hired for songwriting and just kind ended up joining the band

i had that detail in my piece but it got lost between drafts

this is next level.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JR4WCPY4mBY

The first two albums were almost entirely made with a Roland 100M, which was all they had at the time:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/37/Roland_System_100_in_use.jpg/640px-Roland_System_100_in_use.jpg

The chief innovation with Dare was a Roland MC-8, an early digital sequencer:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/77/Roland_MC-8.jpg/640px-Roland_MC-8.jpg

One of the things that really separates 1970s proto-synth-pop from 1980s synth-pop is the sequencing, because once it became easy to synchronise a digital sequencer to a click track on tape there was nothing stopping a producer from layering an arbitrary number of perfectly synchronised rhythm tracks on top of each other. The difficulty then became in coming up with an arrangement, but that could be achieved by sequencing lengths of tape, which is how records were extended in the early 1980s. Before that point bands had to be very careful how they sequenced things, e.g. Kraftwerk's Computer World has a surprising amount of manual keyboards. "Computer Love" is almost entirely played by hand.

I occasionally think about post-Dare Human League. They still had some good songs! "Fascination", "Mirror Man" etc. But they let time slip by, and instead of just knuckling down and putting those two tracks on an LP and adding some filler they waited three years and put out Hysteria, which had a completely different sound - basically commercial New Wave of British Heavy Metal. "Animal" and "Pour Some Sugar on Me" are great songs, but they aren't The Human League.

And yet I heard "One Man in My Heart" on the radio a few weeks ago and liked it. I remember that they had a brief renaissance in the late 1990s and then bounced from one failing record label to the next.

I actually like Hysteria, it's after that I get off the bus. that probably works for both the Human League and Def Leppard tbh

i always totally forget about 'Tell Me When' and then one day i'll hear it when i'm out somewhere and it's like being hit in the pleasure centers of my brain by a multi-coloured laser

and c'mon, they also had a song off the same album called John Cleese, Is He Funny?

I don't think I've ever heard that album but yeah I like Tell Me When

think this one was the same sort of era, house version of the YMO classic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tCbp6k3WYw

saw them a few years back and think they played that iirc? they were really good

sorry that is Behind The Mask

I’ve surely said it elsewhere, but “Seconds” will forever and always be my favorite song by the Human League. The propulsion of the LM-1 drums, the round of sustained synth chords, Oakey’s lyrics painting the scene in Dallas are all so evocative. But while the drama may be canned, it’s unbelievably effective. The muffled synth noise representing the gunshot is legitimately terrifying, and Oakey desperately repeating the title refrain goes on for so long it becomes an almost perfect representation of how one moment changed history.

I love it.

Oakey sounds fabulous on it.

"Tell Me When" was a sweet comeback. Sounded like St. Etienne.

Octopus is a great album. I still revisit it a lot. The singles still stand up and there's album tracks like These Are The Days and Houseful Of Nothing that are really excellent.

Saw them live for the first time in December and I'm still floating. One of my favourite shows I've ever been to. They all sounded great and were so likeable on stage. I felt a bit chocked up when Susan was thanking the audience for sticking with them over the years. Just a class act.