INTERVIEW WITH A HUMAN

Just when you thought the last decade was dead and buried and safely ensconced in its gruesome coffin for all eternity, along comes the evil vampire Phil Oakey with his moussed jet black hair and velcro cape and presses his Revlon-painted lips onto the body. It is the kiss of the undead.

Everywhere you look, from Top Of The Pops to HMV, civilisation as we know it is in ruins.They have taken over the play lists of our radio stations; they have invidiously infiltrated our music magazines. Beware, for they stalk the earth once again. Beware the Old Wave Of New Romantics is upon us!

Phil Oakey, O diabolical one, you sit here now before me with your two partners-in-heinous crime. What would thou sayest? Speak or forever be damned!

“If we could, we’d forget the Eighties.”

Eh? What’s that? Forget the Eighties? But surely you’re just riding the crest of the Old Wave with your Octopus now that the tide has come in again? Susanne, you were working as a waitress in a cocktail bar, how do you plead?

“I was working as a waitress in a cocktail bar. That much is true. But we nearly brought out the album six months ago which wouldn’t have coincided with the Eighties revival. It’s never been contrived. People like to put things in boxes. Most of the stuff that they say is Eighties revival that I listen to doesn’t sound like Eighties music. The new Siouxsie And The Banshees record, in my opinion, couldn’t have been made in 1980. It could only have been made in 1995 because of the technology that’s gone into it.”

“The Eighties look really tacky to me now, when I look back on them,” says Phil.

“But the Seventies probably did in 1985,” retorts Susanne, offering plenty of food for thought before the sandwiches arrive. It becomes increasingly apparent that I won’t be needing my ACME anti-vampire kit of wooden stakes and triple portions of garlic after all.

“Maybe, but the clothes that we were wearing in the Eighties!: wet look PVC tunics and things!” exclaims Phil, recoiling in horror at the memory of past crimes against common decency.

“I wear them now!” confesses Susanne with a mixture of acute embarrassment and headstrong resilience at her chartered flight in the face of fashion.

So while The Human League may indeed serve as a vehicle for the current nostalgia trip, they are paradoxically its most unwilling passengers. Nowhere is this contradiction more apparent than on ‘These Are The Days’ which musically, like the album as a whole, is cut from the same diamond as synth pop’s most precious jewel, 1981’s Dare but which lyrically issues a prescient rebuff to that most peculiarly 90’s phenomenon – the retro junkie: “Here’s a song about living in the past/If it was so good/Then how come it didn’t last/Why waste time looking back for things to praise/Those were the times/But these are the days/You’re longing for a time there never was/Hey! Live today.” So the Eighties revival is not as dodgy hair cut and dried as some would have you believe.

“You always tend to look back on things with a rosy glow and when you actually think about it, it was horrible,” says Joanne, echoing the song’s sentiments. “And the reason it sounds like Dare is because we used the same instruments as we did on that album – all the same keyboards and synths. We just emptied the memories and reprogrammed them.”

So while The Human League are intent on pursuing the first principles of ‘pure pop’ that made them instrumental in forging the golden age of British pop, they want to leave the cultural baggage of that decade behind. Unfortunately, their detractors, being all too keen to get rid of the dirty bathwater that surrounded much of the Eighties (Reagan, Thatcher, leg-warmers etc.) are also intent on washing Oakey and co. down the drain too.

Indeed, no sooner had the first glimmer of the revival appeared on the horizon than the fashion police were mobilized and dispatched to give it a lash back! But this obsession with bottling and labelling each decade and its art like a wine, as if it was a wholly self-contained entity is, at best, lazy journalism, at worst, the symptom of a neurotic desire to control and master the past. The reality is that while he was the synthman of his generation, Oakey’s much derided, er, chic lipstick schtick was really a modern version of Seventies’ Glam Rock (see Bolan, Marc; Bowie, David; Music, Roxy)

“The whole punk thing in the North [of England] definitely grew out of Roxy Music,” says Phil. “The London journalists didn’t understand that what was happening in the North was deeper and less surface-based. We followed Roxy Music, we followed David Bowie but quite soon we were into The Clash, The Damned, The Pistols; but at the same time your David Bowies were moving into synth. Side two of Low is four synth tracks and Eno was doing all that sort of stuff so, to me, it all mingles together.”

So The Human League still held true to the punk aesthetic?

Susanne: “It’s just a philosophy more than anything else. It’s that working class ethic that you don’t have to be trained or specially educated to do something; that you can just get up and try it for yourself. Before, music was very middle class, very stylised which, in a way, is what’s happening now. It’s all really calculated.”

“I bet we look calculated to a lot of people,” muses Phil thoughtfully.

“If only they knew what terror is going in in my head as to what I’m gonna wear!” retorts Susanne to hysterical laughter all round.

But the biggest influence on Oakey came from Germany.

“In 200 years time, people will look back and say, ‘who were the important group of the 20th century?’ If’s Kraftwerk – the first ones to get hold of the new technology and do something fantastic of their own with it.”

Their presence was most notably felt on The Human League’s first two albums Reproduction and Travelogue and the EP The Dignity Of Labour Pts. 1-4, all moody avant-garde meisterwerks for tomorrow’s world.

The original line up for the band (“We called it The Human League as a joke cos it was all machines!” says Oakey) included Martyn Ware and Ian Craig-Marsh who left to form the British Electric Foundation (BEF), which later evolved into Heaven 17, as well as Philip Adrian Wright, whose increasing participatation in the group is cited by Oakey as one of the main reasons for the split.

With Wright fully on board, teenagers Susanne Sulley (Ms Blonde) and Joanne Catherall (Ms Brown) were recruited and with the help of producer Martin Rushent went to work on the premier League album Dare which, it is no exaggeration to say, redefined the genre of pop as we know it and spawned the world’s greatest Christmas No.1 ‘Don’t You Want Me’.

Most bands crumble under the pressure of expectation that follows such phenomenal success, others emigrate to Wales, but Sheffield’s shiniest silver spoons followed up with the sublime singles ‘(Keep Feeling) Fascination’ and ‘Mirror Man’ and in 1984 released Hysteria, an album that sounded nothing like Def Lepperd whatsoever, and which included gems such as ‘Louise’, ‘Life On Your Own’ and ‘The Lebanbon’. After a longer hiatus and amidst the ever growing domination of British pop by Stock, Aitken and Waterman – whose Fun, Love And Money manifesto was, in essence, the cultural wing of Thatcherism – the League drafted in top American writers/producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis to give them a face-lift. The album was called Crash. And it did. The single ‘Human’ did alright though.

Oakey admits that with bankruptcy staring them in the face, they compromised. The question mark at the end of the title of their 1990 album Romantic? could be seen to reflect a band unsure of its direction – or its future – at a time when, in the changing musical climate, The Human League were no more than an anachronism. “It was all guitars and grunge,” explains Susanne, “we couldn’t find a place to fit into that.”

Er, but what about the raging, manic guitar assault that was ‘The Lebanon’? “We wouldn’t do that again. Never,” says Susanne defiantly.

Now all’s changed, changed utterly. Signed to eastwest (after ending a lengthy sojourn with Virgin) The Human League are now a threesome with their own recording studio in Sheffield, where they recorded their new album with ‘fourth member of the band’ Ian Stanley. Octopus is, for the most part, a sparkling return to form, and with songs like ‘One Man In My Heart’, ‘Words’ and the single ‘Tell Me When’ it’s like they’ve never been away. And they’re glad to be back too – and on their own terms.

“We can still look back on all of the records we’ve made and know that we’re proud of them,” enthuses Joanne determinedly.

And the future?

Here the conversation touches on everything from the inevitable demise by the end of the millenium of the very concept of fashion per se to, er, shiny cars.

“New cars have always been shiny throughout the history of the car and at some stage somebody’s going to come up with the idea of having a dull car or a car with bumps on the surface,” predicts Phil Oakey.

Mmm. Maybe I’ll need that ACME kit after all!