But when they splinter instead of split and die it can get odder still. Half of 10CC kept the cute while Godley and Creme branched out to bizarro world. Chris Bailey kept the Saints name while Ed Keupper took the sound of the later albums and developed it further. But there's none more strange than the case of The Human League. By 1980 and a level of success that might only ever register as ok, founders Martyn Ware and Craig Marsh left, agreeing to leave the name with the singer they had recruited, Phil Oakey. Oakey took the debts and label commitments and had to work out how to start a band with only a name. So he did but in doing so he lost a few anoraks and gained the rest of the world.
The Human League, like a lot of off centre outfits in the mid-'70s, took form from within a scene that was indistinguishable from an art collective. Ware and Marsh had an enthusiasm for electronics, computers and music and a great love of pop music. But, while they did incorporate the latter into their repetoire it never quite broke the surface. Getting Oakey in there helped the image with his looks strong voice and avant-hair. The two albums as the extended trio, Reproduction and Travelogue growl and drone with darkness and the kind of wit that time bombs rather than flaunts it in the moment. If Kraftwerk were Teuto-pop, Human League were from the moors and shadows of the North of England and sounded like a musical interpretation of J.G. Ballard (even creating the brilliant Zero as a Limit i tribute to Ballard's Crash). Even when they covered the ubercamp Glitter Band's Rock and Roll it sounded spidery and sinister. No one bums you out more than someone creative from the north of England.
So, in the months between the frowning Travelogue and Dare, Oakey made it out of the chrysalis with a record that looked like an issue of Vogue and sounded like a soft drink commercial. All of it was an essential part, from the androgynous image of Oakey's face on the front cover surrounded by noiseless white, to the font that disturbed the name by varying the size of the words and the album name, a single syllable which appeared to state the record's purpose as an all or nothing risk, this was an album of ground-up reconstruction. This extended to the band's ease into the realm of the pop video at a time when that medium was gaining its own auteurs, one of whom reproduced the cover art for the clip of Open Your Heart. Almost no one on earth between the ages of 15 and 25 did not own this record or at least a cassette of it. A rejuvenated Human League lifted the style of this album cover for a tour in the late '00s, near thirty years after its appearance in record shops.
So, all sorts of crap can be popular; is this any good?
The Things that Dreams are Made Of plunges into synth rifferama with splonking keyboard basses, screechy and ringhy high parts and Oakey's certain tones telling everyone to get off the couch and sieze the world. It's a thrill ride that yet manages to name check comedian Norman Wisdom and members of The Ramones. Open Your Heart softens things into a kind of teen opera that could also be a plea to love this new version of the band. It introduces the newly added female vocals in the chorus which can melt at twenty paces. Softer but not slower, the floating waves of electronic percussion and flute-like keyboards is still at a decent BPM, it's just the emotion left and it would have surprised anyone who knew the band in their Circus of Death days.
The Sound of the Crowd is a dance number but it could be declaring a kind of collective obedience or lampooning it. Either way, the incorporation of the call and response with Oakey and new members Joanne Catherall and Susan Ann Sulley add to the intensity and bloom fully in the chanting chorus: "Get around town. Get around town. Where people look good and the music is loud." Kind of like a retake on Downtown but this has a minor key sternness and a strange marching rhythm that takes it out of that tradition. Third song in and what would seem like a lot of light pop is already revealing shadows and frowns. So, they might let you use their songs to sell your new bubblegum flavour but you won't just be getting the tunes. The old League had done ads but the irony blasted from the grooves. This approaches portfolio territory.
Darkness opens with drum machine less synth riffing and Phil heavily reverbed singing a wordless prologue. The song proper kicks the percussion into life and the rich electro bass and gorgeous riffing from the beginning returns. He's read a book which has left a disturbing impression and haunts him when the sun goes down and the shadows of the house darken. No reason to think that this is anything but a literal description, especially since the sounds of the synths and the timbres so clearly evoke the kind of music then being used for horror movie scores, most notably John Carpenter's own music for films like Halloween and The Fog. The punch to major for the first line of the chorus comes just in time to save the song from saturating the minor key tonality.
Do or Die starts with the programmed drums that had by that time become unremarkable and no barrier to punters judgement. A small explosive sound provides a kind of cymbal sound and a blippy organ tone gives a kind of strummed texture. Oakey comes in high in his range, describing someone whose power knocks out guard dogs just by being near and who can bring governments down. But the images of subversive action and intrigue are mixed with some darker sexual hints, the blend doing much of the talking. The chorus urges escape as well as risk. Again, this could easily be a case of Oakey thinking of what he has staked in the rebirth of his band. Will it be a punch or a punchline?
Side two opens with a stinging slow electronic reading of the theme from the movie Get Carter. No accompaniment, just the high pitched pierce of the one finger tune. It nevertheless perfectly precedes I Am the Law. A prologue that sounds like a gangster talking to the object of his affection and capture. The tone changes again with a deep thick drone for the chorus: "You know I am no stranger. I know rules are a bore. But just to keep you from danger I am the law." There is such a smooth malevolance here and it doesn't allow any kind of Alice Cooper camp, there is something distressing and powerful in the relationship and the fourfold repetition of the final chorus against the coagulating drones make it both magnetic and severe. It promises bad but you can't take your ears from it. The song ends on a high searing synth string section note which bends down sickly, is clipped and gives way to one of the saddest and most beautiful songs of the early '80s.
Seconds opens with a soothing drum pattern. A shifting delay setting adds some stuttering and the effect is bouyant, almost narcotic. A deep bass plays a two note figure before the string synth comes in with a four chord figure whose extra intervals like sixths and ninths render it both sparse and rich and a great sadness builds over the repetitions. Oakey's voice comes in, serious but delicate: "All day, hiding from the sun, waiting for the golden one." It's about an assassin whose life's blackest moment is building with unbearable intensity. The lines are spare, intoning over the wash of the irreparable grief that is about to find cause. A brief jubilant figure rings out high on the keyboard before being hauled back into the rushing surface of the strings. "Your knuckles white as your fingers curl... the shot that was heard around the world ... for a second." And just before the intensity becomes too much we finally get to teh chorus: "It took seconds of your time to take his life. It took seconds." The weight of an irrevocable act of violence in a few words. A brief breakdown towards the end and the chorus with its reminder of the horror and fragility of the action repeats. A major factor in why this song works so well lies in the judgement of where to allow room for breath and where to overwhelm with emotion. The four chord figure is too powerful to play constantly without pushing the listener into numbness. So it is sometimes there and sometimes absent, perhaps like the waves of determination and doubt frying the brain of the killer who puts whoever it is in the crosshairs of his rifle. On that, this was less than a year after John Lennon's murder but the picture sleeve of the Love Action single (of which Seconds was the B-side) had photos of JFK. But really, it could be any such killing and all that's left is the lives affected by the one taken. This song has a sting but also clear compassion and its appearance on a record often recalled as a dumb-downed foppery from a once serious outfit. The thing is that as serious as the old band was it still would not have broken out as emotionally as this song does. Going big and bright clearly has its advantages.
What's left is the pair of singles that have currency to this day.
The squirmy synths at the start of Love Action and the build up with synthesised wukka wukka guitars are alsmot the stuff of self parody but the vocal is clearly without irony as the arrangement takes on a kind of electro funk. The verses are a confession of sorts about the notion of love and where it leaves us, subscribers or clowns. The melody is the closest thing to bluesiness on the record, having a Motown suavity to it. The chorus is purpose-built catchy with a hooky lyric line and cool synth descending figure. What breaks this is the breathless declaration in the middle of the song where Phil (who has already namechecked himself in the second verse) comes out with some great lines: "I believe, I believe what the old man said though I know that there's no lord above .... I believe in truth but I lie a lot". To remember to be funny when you're being serious is part of that Northern expression I mentioned earlier. This resolves to chorus repeats until the fade with the stacatto disco riff sounding high as the synths swirl around like dancers. Born to be a hit single.
Don't You Want Me is like that only with a lot more drama as the dialogue between Oakey and a singer often assumed to be Sulley but was in fact an uncredited jobber. That sounds strange when you know that Sulley mimed it in the clip and it's so forward and expressive that doesn't fit as a session voice. The bouncy setting tells of a big shot (could be movies or music or maybe even modelling) who discovered the girl in a bar and made her a star and now she's at the top she's left him far ... behind. Each has a verse. He's all "don't be ungrateful" and she's "I was working as a waitress in a cocktail bar. That much is true." The song resolves in the repeated chorus of the title. It's fun, it felt like a little more than an assembly line pop song but shot to the top like it was written in the Brill Building.
Another aspect of this reinvented Human League is the producer. By 1981 Martin Rushent had a few important notches on his holster. with the likes of The Buzzcocks and the first three Stranglers albums. He'd worked his way up from tea boy to producer over the '70s and at the dawn of the '80s he was increaingly interested in what the future might or should sound like with investments in gear like the new Linn drum machine and banks of the new synths on the block and went digital. Ex Buzzcock Pete Shelly released the Rushent produced Homosapien album with the title song leading as a single. If you don't know it Youtube it and bliss out in the textbook plate example of infectious synthpop that has been conceived of without reference to luminaries like Gary Numan or past masters like Kraftwerk. It drives on the same Autobahn but the engine is not about the medium and message it's just pop and as pure as it could be made. Taking a colleague's recommendation, he got the job of producing Dare.
The difference between this and what might have been a third album from the old lineup is that there was probably a lot less aruging. Between Rushent, Oakey and their collaborators the audio part of the band's reinvention was set to set what synth pop was in concrete. Phil could still take his concerns about the way of the world out for a drive but all of it (even the mighty melancholy of Seconds) still sounded and felt like pop music and was form fitted for dancing. New Order were soon to pursue the same territory along with a regiment of other lights and this became a defining characteristic of the era to the extent that the notion of guitar bands was growing visibly old.
There were three singles taken from the album which I remember feeling was a cash-in (not suspecting that at the end of the following decade acts like Moby and Massive Attack could licence every track of an album and still be cool). If it was it must at least felt like a sweet relief to Oakey to receive such success along with the attention after years as the darlings of a coterie of art students. And he and the personnel rose to the fame by looking like they were made out of marzipan icing in neon lurex, having started (or restarted) as a market-calling institution in waiting. For their part Heaven 17 did ok with songs both innovative and politically forceful (first single protested Ronald Reagan's election: Fascist Groove Thang) and they effortlessly adopted the dance-fever production that Oakey and Rushent almost patented. But, love or hate, Oakey and co's insistence on embracing the money and the fame was a lesson that stirred frowns from the post-punk punters but also a game plan for the likes of Ultravox (who'd also rejuvenated after an unresponsive '70s) or U2 (one of the few guitar bands allowed to be rock stars at the time). The whole question of selling out was made moot but not by the arrogance of a kid with a lucky break and funny hair who finally got to be a pop star but one who reserved his right to sing about what he wanted ... and some of that was love.
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