Sunday 1 February 2009

The Human League - Dare!

Question: What happens when two of your original band members leave to form their own group?
Answer: You recruit two schoolgirls you find in a disco as backing singers and create a genre-defining masterpiece.

By the end of 1980, having released two albums, the Human League had fractured after singer/songwriter Phil Oakey and co-writer Martyn Ware fell out due to differing ambitions for the group; Oakey wanted to pursue a poppier, more accessible pathway whilst Ware was insistent on furthering the group’s more experimental facets. With a UK and European tour perilously imminent Ware finally left taking other member Ian Craig Marsh with him (both going on to form Heaven 17).

Oakey remained the sole survivor of the Human League and was all but written off by the music press. That is until he hired two musicians to replace the departed Ware and Marsh but, more importantly, recruited two 18 year-old schoolgirls, Joanne Catherall and Susan Sulley, as backing singers/dancers, giving the seemingly moribund group a galvanising injection of glamour.

After completing an often tumultuous tour (the integration of Catherall and Sulley was not a smooth one due to an adverse reaction from some hardcore fans) the band went into the studio to record Dare!, the pop-influenced album which Oakey had wanted to record yet which had cost him his partnership with Ware. Cue huge success.

The album is an impressive display of crisp, hygienic production which, seemingly against the odds, manages to possess a degree of warmth and depth. Oakey’s heartfelt croon and intelligent lyrics lend the songs a passion which complements the album’s otherwise distant, often alien sounds. Unlike electro’s common tendency to sound like the artist in question is just discovering new sounds on his synthesizer and laying them down before your very ears, there is not a great deal of ostentation here; everything is in its place for a reason.

By the time you reach the album’s final track, the world-eating Don’t You Want Me, the ears have been tended to by ten crafted pop diamonds, each with their own story to tell. The kitsch boogie of The Things That Dreams Are Made Of is a cloudy-eyed paean to materialism; the elegant Darkness a fearful, paranoid cry for help; whilst I Am The Law is told from the perspective of a controlling lover (it’s chorus is the creepiest passage of music on the album).

Elsewhere, you can almost see the disco lasers swish and chop before your eyes on Do Or Die and the plaintive Seconds casts a nostalgic eye on the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The soap opera of Don’t You Want Me is still a superb pop song after all this time, despite Oakey’s initial reservation that it was merely an album-filler (thank God for record executives going behind artists’ backs and choosing the singles themselves).

A pre-requisite of any great pop album is that each song sounds utterly unique, creating it’s own individual imprint in your mind. In this department Dare! does not fail. Whilst it occasionally sounds like an 80s porn soundtrack there is a real sense of innovation throughout the album. It often sounds so simple, like the majority of great pop should, yet if you listen closely the construction of the album is meticulous and one can imagine Phil Oakey obsessing over what sounds should be where. It is fantastic pop music in all its catchy, hummable glory and despite being held to account for creating all manner of awful 80s electro groups is as big an influence on modern pop imaginable.

2 comments:

Wolfgang:Blogd said...
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Wolfgang:Blogd said...

Saw the mighty league at bestival, amazing