Don’t you want them, ohh?
How do the Human League feel about their runaway hit 35 years later?
UK Christmas No 1s in the first years of the 1980s were hit and miss affairs – but standing out between the novelty acts of St Winifred’s School Choir’s version of There’s No One Quite Like Grandma and Renée and Renato’s Save Your Love was a stunningly moody piece of storytelling synth pop.
Don’t You Want Me, by the Human League, spent five weeks at the top of the UK charts and five more at the top of the New Zealand charts from May 1982.
It made the Sheffield group the pinnacle of androgynous New Romantic chic – even though the track wasn’t totally representative of the sort of music they were putting out at the time.
Frontman Phil Oakey’s story of turning a “waitress in a cocktail bar” into a star had a clever mix of power trip (“But don’t forget, it’s me who put you where you are now/And I can put you back down too”) and that plaintive duet chorus of “Don’t you want me, ohh?”
And, yes, time may have turned it into something of a radio-play cliché, but that doesn’t diminish the power of that synthesiser hook and the poised video of Oakey and fellow singer Susan Ann Sulley pouting for England.
After all, 30-odd years before Lorde got the David Bowie seal of approval, the spacey oddity told NME he’d “seen the future of pop music” after catching them supporting Siouxsie and the Banshees.
The Human League’s announcement that they’re coming to New Zealand for the first time in December, on what Oakey calls the latest leg of “an extended greatest hits tour that’s lasted about 30 years”, is a good chance to quiz him on what it’s like to have a 40-year career spanning nine albums but to be remembered almost exclusively for that one track.
“I don’t see it as an albatross,” he says. “We aren’t serious musicians; we never had ambitions to do the most obscure jazz album ever – I just see that song as a safety net where we can go and do a show and we can go into some of the more weird or heavy stuff, but we know that we can pull it out towards the end of the show and chances are that the audience will love it.”
The Human League may be remembered for that one song, but in their heyday they pushed musical boundaries too. The album Dare – from which Don’t You Want Me is drawn – was reworked into Love and Dancing, a series of remixes inspired by New York hip-hop godfather Grandmaster Flash.
“It was sheer inventiveness and the joy that we were starting to understand programming and synthesisers and it was an absolutely new thing,” Oakey says. “To take sounds and reveal the stuff you have hidden away on a record and make something new of it was a blast – there wasn’t any marketing idea, just this huge joy of making noises people hadn’t heard.”
“The joy that we were starting to understand programming and synthesisers … it was an absolutely new thing.”
The Human League play at the Logan Campbell Centre, Auckland, on December 6.