Mystery of the Duke
David Bowie’s presence lives on in a cabaret spectacular heading for the first - and last time - to our shores, writes
The new lineup’s first album, 1981’s Dare!, was their breakthrough. Three sparkling singles nudged it up the charts – The Sound of the Crowd, Love Action and their best known song, Don’t You Want Me?. Oakey was amazed. He thought Don’t You Want Me? was a shocker.
‘‘Martin [Rushent, producer] and [guitarist] Jo Callis put the backing track together in just one day, and I didn’t like it at all, but they forced me to write some words for it. What made the difference, I think, is that we didn’t mess it about too much. It’s always tempting in the studio to overelaborate something, but we just did the good bits and then we stopped, while it was still sounding pretty raw.’’
The song is now ‘‘the safety net’’ in their live shows. As soon as Phil starts in with ‘‘You were working as a waitress in a cocktail bar…’’, people start losing their minds.
‘‘If you’re not a born musician, it’s great to have a song like that waiting. We can tease people by playing some of our tougher, more obscure things, too, but you always know that people will love that song when you do it. That’s why half of them have turned up!’’
In truth, The Human League have more great songs than you can shake a stick at.
Love Action might just be their greatest record, with the giddy abandon of disco married to a melancholy lyric about the ups and downs of romantic attraction. When Oakey delivers the line ‘‘This is Phil talking; I want to tell you what I found to be true…’’ like some clubland evangelist with a floppy fringe, well, you just love him all the more.
‘‘Evangelist is the perfect word, actually. I’m still an evangelist for synth-pop music, after all these years. We did the synth thing for five or six years in the late 70s/early 80s, then things got more sophisticated as people brought in samplers and other technology. But I was always still thinking – ‘we haven’t done everything we could do with synths yet!’ So any time anyone gives us a chance to record, I’m back in there, bangin’ away at the old synth. It’s still very exciting to me.’’
Oakey is refreshingly free of hubris, putting much of his band’s success down to luck, fashion and great producers rather than any blinding brilliance at singing or playing their instruments. But after the 80s golden years, things took a serious dive.
He has admitted the 90s/early 2000s were tough times to be in a ‘‘poofy synth group’’. Oakey started to get chubby and lose his hair. No one bought their records any more. They came close to bankruptcy. He got depressed and started taking Prozac.
But things gradually came right. They hired a sharp new manager, Oakey started swimming and walking to get fit, and a steady stream of other musicians – Madonna, Lady Gaga, Little Boots, Depeche Mode, Moby – began to talk about how influential Human League had been for them.
On one level, the adulation was amusing. As bandmate Susan Sulley once said: ‘‘Two of us have never written a song and are pretty average singers, plus we’ve got a lead singer who doesn’t consider himself a singer at all and can’t play any instruments very well.’’
And yet, somehow, despite having what Oakey calls ‘‘really limited talent’’, it works.
‘‘Yes, and that’s the joy of pop, isn’t it? You can spend 40 years having a bit of vision and grabbing other people with the skills to help make it happen! Pop music is about fresh ideas, and difference is more important than skill. People wouldn’t put up with it now, because the music industry is more driven by economics. If me, Susan and Joanne walked in to audition somewhere these days, they would throw us out. They would say we were rubbish and tell us to get a real job.’’
The band has released nine studio albums, the most recent, Credo ,in 2013. They’ve sold more than 20 million records. But they were lucky, he says, to have started out when you could still be an inspired amateur.
Oakey was romantically involved with Catherall for eight years, and also had a short fling with Sulley. These days, he’s more private about his love life but says he has never wanted to have children.
‘‘No, but I had a dog for nine years, and he just recently died. I spent the last eight years walking three miles a day with him, and now suddenly, I’m not, and it feels very weird. Walking that dog transformed me. I don’t believe in sport or any sort of organised exercise, but I’m quite skinny and muscular because of that dog. Now I’m getting back into the chocolate, and it might all go downhill if I’m not careful. I miss him, I really do. I’m looking around, a bit bored without him, and thinking – Right! Maybe it’s finally time to get The Human League back in the studio to do some more recording!’’
The Human League play Auckland’s Logan Campbell Centre on December 6, with Pseudo Echo playing support.
As the David Bowie song goes ‘‘There’s a Starman waiting in the sky’’. After a few unsuccessful attempts to connect with Sven Ratzke, whose cabaret show Starman kicked off on New Zealand shores this month, there’s also a journalist waiting to talk to him as well.
When we finally catch up, Ratzke has just come off stage and is profusely apologetic.
Looking at his hectic global tour schedule, it’s no wonder the 40-yearold Dutch-German singer and entertainer has trouble working out where he is and when he’s supposed to be somewhere.
Described abroad as the ‘‘love child of Eddie Izzard and David Bowie’’, Ratzke’s an in-demand name, having had a successful stint at the worldfamous Edinburgh festival.
The Starman show is described as a ‘‘wild, irreverent and scandalous ride into the centre of one of the world’s most bohemian and exceptional rock artists’’. But, in his lilting DutchGerman accent, full of gentle pensive charisma, Ratzke is insistent it’s no straight tribute show to Bowie.
‘‘What we did with the show is we took the music, and we took the universe of the Bowie, especially in the 70s when he was all these alter egos and constantly changing his appearance and character because, for me, that was very theatrical, almost like an opera. He had a lot of mystery.
‘‘I mixed that with my own kind of performance and my own kind of style, so I take the audience on a sort of a trip.’’
Taking in figures like Andy Warhol, Elizabeth Taylor, telling stories, flamboyantly patrolling the stage and making Bowie’s iconic music the soundtrack to the whole thing, make this night of cabaret into something entirely different, but yet also familiar.
Ratzke’s a life-long entertainer, discovering his joy for adopting the persona of others from a very early age.
‘‘I was always in the middle of the attention when I was a child and I gathered all the grown-ups together and wrote my own plays – everybody had to do what I told them.
‘‘I never wanted to box myself into one thing – but I think cabaret is a very fertile style, you have to be smart in all kinds of stuff to be musically very good, and you have to be fast.
‘‘You have to be really personal, and I think that is why cabaret is now a very important genre, because we have all this mediocrity and all this stupid stuff going on; a lot of people don’t want to stand out any more and, in cabaret, I think a lot of people do, you need a voice.’’
The show had to seek approval from Bowie himself, and Ratzke believes that was forthcoming because Bowie saw something of a kindred chameleonic spirit in Ratzke.
‘‘You know, I think what it is all about to be an artist is not to sit there and sing over and over the same material where you already know that it works. But it’s to take all these risks and say ‘You know what? I had a big success with this, but now I’m going to do something else’.
‘‘But even as we speak I am doing this - I’m only coming to your
Darren Bevan.
wonderful country with this show for the first time and that’s it. I could do this for six or seven years. I could tour the world with this Starman show but there’s a point when I say ‘No, you know, I have done it and I wanna do something completely different again’.’’
The Thin White Duke’s death in January 2016 didn’t cause Ratzke to think twice about whether to continue with a show he’d first performed the previous October.
‘‘It’s a very personal show, I would say – I’m not pretending to be Bowie or anything, I bring his songwriting to life.
‘‘Of course, there was another pressure on the show because before he could have walked into the room every night, it could have happened. Now he was gone, it gave the show a different layer, an emotion.’’
Regardless of the emotional weight now imbued in the show after Bowie’s passing, Ratzke is hopeful that audiences will simply just have a good time. As ever, we have some way to go to live up to our trans-Tasman cousins, who’ve already embraced the show.
‘‘I hope I don’t offend you, but what I like really about Australia is the audience is really open-minded and they’re really into personalities. They really like you when you are standing up out there and have mixed theatre with entertainment.
‘‘In Europe, there is always this attitude of ‘You have to be a theatre guy, or a cabaret guy or a pop guy or whatever’ and I really like to mix all these genres. We got a nomination for the show there, so really that was incredible. As for New Zealand, who knows?’’
No pressure then ....
plays the Taranaki Arts Festival tonight, then heads to Christchurch, September 8-10, before finishing in Auckland on September 14, 15 and 17, as part of the Auckland Live International Cabaret Season.
Starman