Don’t you want me, baby?
It seems we did want them: they couldn’t really play or sing, but they pioneered synthpop and they’re still going. It’s The Human League. reports.
Imagine, if you will, a peacock, strutting through one of the bleaker cities in the north of England. A riot of colour, style and grace, moving through those grey stone and concrete canyons.
A flamboyant exhibitionist, stalking between crumbling steel foundries, his sartorial finery raising a middle finger to the grimy utilitarianism of the Industrial Revolution. What an amazing thing to behold!
‘‘Actually, I was painfully shy,’’ recalls Phil Oakey, lead singer of Sheffield synth-pop veterans The Human League, who play New Zealand for the first time in December. ‘‘The only reason I used to dress up so much was because I couldn’t really talk to people.’’
He laughs at the memory of it: the over-compensating introvert who looked so striking, a couple of ‘‘much more talented’’ musicians nudged him into the spotlight as frontman for their band.
‘‘They thought I looked like a pop star, so they helped make me one,’’ says Oakey, now 61.
‘‘I was incapable of talking to people, so I decided I’d better look good instead. I used to hang around in the background at parties in my wild clothes with a strange haircut, because I couldn’t really speak, you know.’’
Oakey was approached by former schoolmates Martyn Ware and Ian Marsh, two computer operators who made ‘‘weird synth tapes’’ in their spare time, jamming in an old cutlery workshop.
They called themselves The Future, and thought a dramatic-looking frontman might make record companies take more interest.
Oakey was working as a hospital porter at the time. He’d never sung in public before, and couldn’t play any instruments.
He did, however, have lop-sided hair that was short on one side and long on the other, and high heels, and dangling diamante earrings, and he sometimes went clubbing wearing a household extension cord coiled around his throat as a necklace. Perfect! He was in. ‘‘It’s a funny way for a band to form, I admit, but really, pop music is about spectacle as much as skill. Everybody in Sheffield was listening to the Sex Pistols and The Clash back then, but I told those guys I liked their synth tapes when everyone else was laughing at them. That endeared me to them, so they invited me to join.’’
That was in 1977. Oakey is as amazed as anyone that the band’s still going 40 years later, albeit that he’s the only original member.
‘‘We loved glam – David Bowie, Roxy Music, Iggy Pop – and we put all that together with our own ideas during a time when synthesisers first became affordable.
‘‘These new programmable instruments meant that we could plan the sounds we wanted to make beforehand, rather than have to play them live, you know… with our fingers. If synths hadn’t come along when they did, so that someone like me could become a pop star, I would have probably ended up in an office or driving a taxi.’’
Recorded on a domestic tape recorder in a disused factory, and released in June, 1978, the first Human League single, Being Boiled, remains a mind-boggler of epic proportions.
Marsh and Ware pieced together an ominous, fizzing, robotically funky backing track, then invited Oakey to cobble together some lyrics. He went home, and weirded out royally.
‘‘Listen to the voice of Buddha!’’ goes the opening line, delivered in a stentorian baritone. ‘‘Saying stop your sericulture…’’
I’m sorry… what? I had to look up sericulture in the dictionary the first time I heard it. Silk-worm farming, if you’re wondering.
‘‘Little people like your offspring boiled alive for some God’s stocking…’’ continues Phil, and your brain explodes that such madness can end up in the pop charts.
Here, after all, is a synth band from industrial South Yorkshire, singing about an oriental holy man taking a dim view of the cruelty to insects inherent in the hosiery industry.
‘‘It is pretty weird, I’ll give you that. And to be honest, I used a dictionary to find ‘sericulture’ in the first place. Really, Ian and Martin didn’t know what the lyrics meant, either, but they liked them regardless, and there it was. And you know what? That song’s STILL a hit in our city! It’s Top 10 in Sheffield, that is. Still in the charts, mate, after 40 years. Horrifying!’’
Early Human League gigs were a blast. Oakey would be up the front, his long hair a snub to the short-and-spiky sensibilities of punk. In the background, a bank of slowly revolving reel-to-reel tape machines, with Marsh and Ware hunched over keyboards, punching out icy cyborg-soul riffs.
They landed support slots for Siouxsie and The Banshees and Iggy Pop. David Bowie turned up at one show and told NME magazine they were ‘‘the future of pop music’’. Sex Pistol John Lydon dismissed them as ‘‘trendy hippies.’’
And in 1980, in their hit song My Perfect Cousin, rising Ulster band The Undertones took an affectionate swipe at their perceived pretentiousness: His mother bought him a synthesiser / Got the Human League in to advise her / Now he’s making lots of noise / Playing along with the art school boys… .
But after two albums, the band started to disintegrate. There was shouting. Doors were slammed. Mascara was smudged by tears. In the end, Marsh and Ware broke away to form a new synth-pop outfit, Heaven 17. Oakey got to keep the name and recruited a guy he was sharing a squat with who played bass. Then he went into town to seek bandmates who looked interesting. On a bleak Wednesday evening, he bowled into the excellently-named Crazy Daisy Nightclub and spotted Susan Ann Sulley, then 17, and Joanne Catherall, 18, giving it heaps on the dance floor.
They looked good. They could dance. They could ‘‘sort of sing’’. Trouble was, they were still in high school. Oakey had to beg their respective parents to let them wag classes to go on tour.
One of the girls’ dads noted that Oakey looked too effeminate to be a sexual predator, and reluctantly agreed. They were in!
"If synths hadn't come along when they did so that someone like me could become a pop star, I would have probably ended up in an office or driving a taxi." Phil Oakey, lead singer of Sheffield synth-pop veterans The Human League