The veteran trio, back with their 10th album, tell of their latest bid to escape the 80s nostalgia tour circuit
The Human League, formed over 33 years ago in Sheffield, have made a new album, their 10th, and their first since 2001's Secrets. It's called Credo, and it's produced by younger, fresher Sheffield technicians I Monster, and released on the erratically adventurous Wall of Sound label. What you think about this will depend on whether you think of the Human League like Wall of Sound do, as one of the great pioneering electronic acts whose sound and aesthetic has had a positive impact on successive generations of liquid modern dance pop, or like I do, as one of the most brilliant and strangest acts of all time, or as a tired, faded and mostly irrelevant group who never made it beyond a gaudy, defective 1980s.
If you think of the Human League as stuck in the 80s, occasionally enacting some kind of futile comeback, a new album will not be much of an event. If it knowingly updates their sound so that it fits in with the stylised electronic pop soundscape they helped influence, one that stretches from Madonna to Black Eyed Peas, from Pet Shop Boys to La Roux, from Trevor Horn to Xenomania, then that will merely seem desperate. If it faithfully reflects their original sound, an experimental English form of fantasist sonic engineering, which at the time, immediately post-Kraftwerk/Roxy/Bowie/glam/punk/disco, was irresistibly new and inventive, then it will seem at best quaint. It will, perhaps, sound like an affectionate, technically deft I Monster interpretation of an ideal Human League sound: for electropop specialists, fastidious geeks and ageing experts only.
The pop that the self-consciously futuristic Human League helped predict, an ideologically defiant non-rock combination of glamorous spectacle, abstract visuals and electronically constructed pop sensation, now dominates what is left of the commercial mainstream, but the group poignantly spend their time exiled from fashion, appearing to ironically lose touch with modern realities. They started out with a mission ? Phil: "We really wanted to reject rock. I didn't want to wear dirty old clothes and be macho playing a guitar. For us, you could make pop music without instruments and we thought as much cinematically and theatrically as we did musically." Now the task, more mundanely, is to "stick to our guns and survive".
The group have been a trio for 23 years now, pretty much since their sixth album, Crash: Philip Oakey, sole survivor of the 1977 Human League, with Susan Sully and Joanne Catherall. It's been a long, difficult journey. Joanne: "At times, one of us might have wanted to quit. Maybe two. But never all three at the same time." Old Smash Hits readers might like to know what food they order for our interview: for stubborn, lovely, slightly dotty Phil, the Cronenberg/Moroder/Boosh pilot spirit of the group, a basic ham sandwich, for bossy, mouthy and fantastically intolerant Susan, sticky chocolate cake, and for rational, down-to-earth Joanne, just a drink. "None of us," says Phil, "thought we were going to be in a pop group until we were."
Oakey was originally hired as a flamboyantly dour northern frontman with a legendary lop-sided haircut and a surreally awkward croon because founding members Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh's original choice, Glenn Gregory, was not available. In 1980, when Ware and Marsh dramatically left the Human League, taking a good amount of what had been avant garde with them to BEF and Heaven 17, Oakey notoriously found the two schoolgirls dancing around their handbags in a local nightclub, just days before a tour the Human League were obliged to undertake. As Phil now notes, it was very unusual back then to have girls in a group ? "it was mostly men. Apart from Fleetwood Mac" ? and the very act of hiring Susan and Joanne instantly and controversially moved the group from the Zappa end of the pop alphabet to the Abba end. Susan admits their skills, decades ahead of Sugababes, Girls Aloud and Katy Perry, lay in getting dressed up, going out and listening to pop music. The perversely fascinating Oakey-and-sixth-form-amateur-girls-Human League defied expectations, and had million-selling hits, including a gorgeous soap operatic song that seemed to describe the way he found the girls and absurdly turned them into pop stars, "Don't You Want Me". "If you came home now," says Susan," and told your dad some guy had come up to you in a club and said 'I can make you a pop star' it would be the cause of celebration. Back then my dad wanted to find Phil and kill him. He thought the worst. I was meant to go to university and get a proper job."
Dad might have been right. Top of the Pops 80s stardom has now been replaced by routine, a sense of duty, even service. The hits have trapped them. No one wants new Human League. They want old Human League, or they just don't want them at all. Pop constantly moves forward, obsessively creating novel excitement, and it stays exactly where it is, sentimentally recapturing lost youth. I complain to them about the embarrassing packaged nostalgia tours they appear on. I would still nominate them as one of the greatest British pop groups of all, for the bright, stimulating conceptual design of their first few albums and hits, and the way they perform to this day even in cultural exile as though they are still at the zesty high minded centre of the pop fantasy. Appearing on shoddy seaside tours with 5 Star, Bucks Fizz and Dollar has made it extremely difficult for those of us that might want to put them on a list of preeminent prescient pop guides and messengers alongside Bowie, Bolan, Joy Division, Roxy and the Smiths. Susan, resigned to her fate but as bloody-minded as ever, comes out fighting: "I hate doing them with all my soul. I'm miserable all day doing them. But we need the money and everyone has to do something they don't want to do. We earn more in one day doing them then all of our own tour. It's a simple economic fact. We make sure we do not use the house band or do medleys or hug everyone at the end."
Phil listens, the disappointed romantic wearing a brave face, someone who has spent three decades getting accustomed to gruelling pop realities, constantly searching for new refreshed signs of that original pop life that led to the deliriously infectious Being Boiled and the hyper-seductive Dare. Is this it for ever now, I ask? Half has-beens, half legends? Half stoic, half heroic? Where will they be in 10 years' time?
"Well, I'll be 65," admits Oakey the realist. But then the great ambitious, determined Yorkshire pop artist appears, still dreaming dreams and audaciously imagining being ahead of his time. "Actually, we've never had a No 1 album in America. There are still new places to go. Even now."
Amerie Rachel Bilson Karen Carreno Bijou Phillips Marika Dominczyk
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