THE HUMAN TOUCH


Was Crash really a load of old disco cobblers or is there more to it than that? Steve Sutherland
travelled to Sheffield, home of THE HUMAN LEAGUE, to discover whether Phil Oakey really has lost that
lovin' feeling.





Phil not looking like Danny Baker"AREN'T I looking handsome again?"
Well...
"I am. I was looking in the mirror this morning and thinking how handsome I looked."
Well...
"Just like Rudolph Valentino..."
Well, at least you no longer look like Danny Baker, like you did on that "Earsay" thing on TV when you came clean and told everyone how much you had in the bank.
"Oh that. I never really looked like that. Television has a way of making you look fatter. It was great though, that interview. People stopped me in the street after that and congratulated me for being so honest, and, d'you know, I'd lied."

I'm in a Pop God's kitchen in a nice suburb of Sheffield. It was his idea - something about seeing his group as they really are, how they really live. Or, more likely, something about avoiding sitting down to another interview, being asked the same questions, contradicting himself, being caught out.

I'm here because I love his band and...

"We shouldn't be talking to you. You hate us don't
you?"
I tell Susanne I don't, I don't.
"Well, you hate our LP."
I tell Susanne it's true.

Perverse or what? The first time I met Philip Oakey, four years ago, backstage in Bradford, I adored
everything he'd ever done and all he said was "Hard luck"...And now, here I am in his kitchen, on his
girlfriend's birthday, sipping champagne ("Not for me, I'm tea-total"... "Ooooh Philip, you liar!") getting
on nicely because his album stinks. This is the first time the band have deigned to talk to us for years
because a photographer once burst into their dressing room or some cub reporter ignored in them in a
restaurant and talked to Devo instead or...

"Oh no. We just think you're Jonahs."
D'you what?
"Everytime we talk to Melody Maker, our records don't sell but it's okay now, we've already got a hit so it
doesn't matter."

Charm itself. That was Phil talking. This is Susanne.
"Oh dear, the tape recorder's about to fall in the sink."
Don't you Run DMC me.
"What?"
They chucked some journalist's tape recorder against the wall.

Phil nods: "Yeah, I keep hearing bad things about Run DMC. A lot of people told me that single was great
but I can't get on with it."

And a lot of reviewers, hungry for an interview after two years' silence, told me I'd like "Crash" but I
can't get on with that either. It's an album of almost unadulterated disco drivel. I mean, I have to ask, after the epoch-making "Dare" and the smart-if-safe "Hysteria", whether this is really a Human League album at all.

"Yeah," says Phil. "It says Human League on the front."

But between the grooves it doesn't. Between the grooves it says Terry Lewis and Jimmy Jam, the
Minneapolis mafia behind Janet Jackson, Cherelle and the SOS band.

"What you're saying is true," says Susanne, a Sheffield Wednesday supporter with, incredibly,
boyfriend problems ("My Dad says it's because I talk too much"). Between discussing whether the guy who
stood her up last Saturday was a hunk or a gorilla, she elaborated: "Jimmmy and Terry took over far more
than anyone else we've ever worked with and they put their stamp on it. In the end, we just came away from
Minneapolis and let them mix it as they wanted to."

Jo & Susan
And so I say again, where are The Human League? Where's the technology used in a patently untechno manner that once charmed our pants off? Where's that authoritative, almost fascistic voice up front which,
without saying much, said everything pop's ever likely to say, big and brash and understated, unafraid to deal with the big ones like love and life and longing? Where's that cute marriage of man and machine, that harmony, that - yes - human element? I don't hear it. Why? Don't they care? Are they lazy? Or maybe, in awe of the Jam/Lewis talent?

"We had a musical difference of opinion," says Susanne. "They wanted to dosomething that we didn't agree with, so we thought 'What's the point of us staying? they're gonna do what they wanna do anyway.'
It wasn't nasty or anything but we ended up going back to Sheffield."

"We gave them the production," Oakey agrees. "There's no doubt about that, it's their record. That's what I
did with the Moroder record as well."

Ah yes, "Electric Dreams" - just Oakey and Giorgio but The Human League through and through.

"But totally different. Every Human League album up to then, I'd been in the room for every note or
drumbeat that had been recorded whereas, with the Moroder stuff, I wrote all the words in a week and
sang them in two days, even to the extent that he didn't care if I sang in tune or not. He said that
the public don't notice and don't mind and he's right.
That was a good holiday."

Talking of Moroder, what about Sputnik, Phil? I'd always reckoned the League had collared post-modernism
but the James' gang are even tackier.

"If I think about it intellectually, I've got to admit that I'm totally amazed, it just doesn't sound
anything like I'd have expected. It's not well-produced and I'd have thought that, at least, he
would have made sure it worked in a disco but I presume it doesn't. (Phil never goes out.) There's
no bass in it, is there? Still, I like it. I bought the album."

I come from an era in which production values were way down the list and I naively adhere to the notion that
a good song could be recorded in garden shed on a four track and still be brill. Producers in control seem
to me an excuse to formularise talent.

"The difference is that Jimmy and Terry see themselves as artists in the same way as we do," says Susanne.
"The other producers we've worked with WERE producers but Jimmy and Terry are musicians and songwriters and
artists in their own right, they feel their artistic input is just as valuable as the group's."

As confrontations go, this is turning out to be mighty friendly. Indeed, I'd say The Human League had grown
a mite cynical were it not for their amiable straightforwardness. It's time I asked the big one.
Do you really, honestly, actually LIKE "Crash" Phil?

"I think I do, yeah. I've got to really."

Crash provided a US number 1 with the single 'Human'
It's out, his name's on it and they'd already recorded an album with Colin Thurston which didn't work out, so "Crash" was recorded with borrowed money from Virgin and it's really a case of like it or lump it. Still, Phil maintains, it's not state of the art or anything, not a final arrival, just another album, nothing to
worry over. And yet, it's so slick, so infallible, so dead shiny, dead AND shiny, there's nothing to savour save "Human, a song apart, written by the production team but at least a ballad with a story, with personality, with purpose.

"What worries me," says Phil, "is that I think you fall into the Virgin Records way ofthinking about The Human League, which is 'They should carry on doing those great records like "Louise" and "Life On Your Own" and I don't wanna do them records."


Susanne agrees: " I get the impression that you don't want us to be a musical pop group. We've always had
this naivety and, as you say, the story-telling bit, the fact that Phil doesn't sing normally and that me
and Joanne aren't particularly fantastic singers and the plonking on the synthesizers and everything but,
all of a sudden, we're all coming together. We've been doing it for so long together now, me and Joanne
have got much better, Philip's singing differently, perhaps that's..."

Hang on. I've never been one to subscribe to camp, to the so-bad-it's-good mentality. It seems to be you've
tried to do something DELIBERATELY different.

"Tried to, yeah. The rule is, every Human League song should be good and should be different from every
Human League song before," says Phil."It doesn't matter if it sounds a bit like The Banshees like, say,
'Lebanon' did or a bit like KC, like 'Party' did, I just want people to say about Human League records
what they said about The Beatles. They didn't say every Beatles record that came out sounded like
'Paperback Writer' because they didn't. They were all different."

Sounds like a recipe for disaster, not playing to your strengths.

"We've put out songs that I don't like."

And I don't like "change" for the sake of it. It's not as good as the rest. I can remember when a Human
League release was crucial somehow to the zeitgeist, a reflection of the state of things and a stand for new
pop standards. Now you're not even modern anymore.

"We're EXTREMELY modern. That's why people don't like this LP, they've not caught up with us yet. I think
it's more modern than people know."

No, you're following fashion, not discerning it, not dictating it. Maybe that's too much to ask...

"You're looking at things as if some sort of decision's made and then we stick to that and write
songs that conform to it. That doesn't happen. We just write songs in DESPERATION because we've got to
write songs and that's it."

You sound as if you don't like doing it very much.

"I've not liked the way we've worked for the past two LPs, no. We got completely confused and I hope that,
seeing the brilliant way that Terry and Jimmy work, will change us."

"Yeah, they get on with it, they don't mess about. If the guitarist isn't in the studio, they play guitar
themselves. I think that's a good thing." Susanne stops and puzzles. "Well, I'm not sure, I'm trying to
work it out."

"We took two years to write six songs" says Philip, "and that means, if we had hated this LP, what would
we have done? We'd have to put it out anyway. That's why I say I think I like it, I HAVE to, I haven't got
anything else."

But surely you could have come up with something that expresses desire or dread or even despair - anything
but this sound of defeat. "Crash" is so lyrically banal...

"Yeah, it's banal, partly because lyrics are a real problem. I think that people have four or five bees
in their bonnet that they really care about but we're half-educated enough to say 'I don't wanna do the same
thing twice' whereas you ought to either be completely banal or prepared to repeat yourself. One of my big
things is people saying 'I want it'. The word 'Want' is the biggest word in the human language and it's
about everything that everyone does but, now, if I write a record that's got 'Want' in it, I think 'Oh my
God, everyone's gonna say I'm trying to do "Don't You Want Me" again' and I don't continue. That's occurred
to a lot of subjects and it makes lyric-writing very, very hard.

It's hard to believe this of a man who, looking around me, appers to have such impeccable taste. Okay, so he
doesn't like the first "Steptoe" film - thinks it's cruel. Okay, so he watches "Sorry", rates Ken Dodd
and Jimmy Clitheroe and is keen to build his George Formby collection ("I can't believe the innuendo in
his songs!"). Okay, so he's a little too hung up on Sherlock Holmes and all things Victorian right now so
he's straying into music hall but there's a complete set of "Carry On..." films on the video shelf, his
home computer's got the great Will Hay's career stored from Halliwell, he collects anything involving Shirley
Eaton and is quite possibly the only person in the world who doesn't consider Jack Nicholson THAT great -
"I hated 'Cuckoo's Nest' - I can't stand films where there's so obviously good and so obviously bad".

He, too, has rumbled Frankie Howerd (saw his cue-cards on "Wogan") and yet maintains great admiration for "Up
Pompeii", he rides around Sheffield on a bloody ridiculous big motorbike and is well into "The Dark
Knight". He even tells me he's got a list somewhere of video cliches The Human League won't use -
"Smashing light bulbs, that sort of thing" - so how come, with all this going for him, he's succumbed so
willingly to lyrical cliche?

"The lyrics are the last thing that go on and, as far as I'm concerned, they aren't important really, it's
the music that's important. Y'know, criticising from a lyrical point of view is like criticising Beethoven
because it hasn't got any great poetry in it."

"There WAS one song we recorded that we just couldn't put on the album though," Susanne admits, "because
Jimmy and Terry's lyric was so offensive. They had the man as the dominating person, the woman
subsurvient blah blah blah and it was so bad that me and Joanne, who were doing quite a lot of the vocals,
just couldn't have let it go out because it would look as though we believe in that sort of thing. I agree
'Love On The Run' is cliched too but it's just a pop song and, sometimes, pop songs aren't supposed to have
really meaningful lyrics."

JUST a pop song? I can't believe this fronm the band who took "Lebanon" onto "Top Of The Pops". The day
you admit pop ceases to matter is the day you betray all those people who care.

"Who are these people," asks Phil, "and where were they when we brought out 'Hysteria'? You say there's
a lot of people but there isn't, there wasn't. I would have presumed that a Human League fan would probably
be a Phil Oakey fan but the last single I put out with Giorgio Moroder got to 98! That doesn't smack of
hoardes of loyalty out there to me."

You sound bitter.

"No, they're right and I was wrong to think that there ought to be."

You were presumptuous?

"Yes, certainly - until we put out 'Hysteria', we just thought everyone would buy everything we put out."

Will they buy the dumb disco of "Crash"?

"I thought we always made disco albums."

"We always aim at the dancefloor," says Susanne. "'Sound Of The Crowd', 'Love Action', 'Hard Times'
were dancefloor hits ages before they were hits in the charts. And, years before me and Joanne joined the
group, they always said they wanted to make records like Donna Summer; they just didn't know how to do
it."
Philip: "Still don't."

But, in my fondness, I always considered you were doing something with disco, sonmething slightly
wicked. Like "Mirror Man" was a brilliant Motown pastiche, affectionate, efficient and cheeky, using
its model for its own ends. I don't think you're doing that anymore, I don't think The Human League
have survived the deliberate mechanisations of disco.

"We have lost one member of the songwriting team - that could have a lot to do with it. Jo Callis used
to blatantly rip things off and he didn't care because he could do it in such a way. This is the first thing
we've ever done without Jo." Susanne looks sad.



Adrian Wright's also taken a walk, it seems. An original member, the one who messed with the slides and gave the original League their wacky sci-fi overtones, has just gone missing, presumed retired and
yet, on "Wogan", on "Top Of The Pops", the band still looked classic - Oakey imperious and impassioned, the girls slinky and natural as ever.

The look of the League's still a talking point where I come from.



Part 2

"The clothes and everything just come together on the day," says Joanne, being made up for the
photo-session. "It's not really thought about - we don't all dash down South Molton Street."


Possibly the League's worst single: I Need Your LovingWhen Joanne and Susanne joined up just before "Dare", plucked from the obscurity of a local disco and pushed straight into the limelight, The Human League became about as perfect as any pop group I'm ever likely to swoon over. They were nervous, no-one could play, the moves were all wrong and yet they had the SONGS, they
survived, they SUCCEEDED - a sexy, smart and exhilarating mix of genius, guts and gumption. These days, though, the girls resent the role they've been manipulated into.

It gets up their noses that certain papers still harp on that they haven't got any talent, that, no matter what they say in interviews, they're still portaryed as silly, spiteful lasses who, were it not for fate and Phil Oakey, would probably be lurking
around the make-up counter in Miss Selfridges, offering you trial samples of eyeliner. It seems some hacks just don't understand that pop's so much more than remixes and rhythm tracks.


"We are normal but we have got opinions on other things," says Susanne. "We're not just two stupid
girls who go out shopping, do the Hoovering and stuff. It really annoys me when people come with that idea.
I mean, we can't have been in this group for six years just because we're completely useless...I'm waiting
for Philip to say something sarcastic now..."

The wisecrack never came. Philip's too busy arguing with Joanne about her jeans. "They make you look like
a SKIN girl from the Seventies."

"If there are any prats to be interviewed by, me and Joanne always get 'em," Susanne continues. "I think
they feel as though they can insult us."

"They don't think they're insulting you," Philip interrupts. "They think they're flattering you."

"Yeah, I suppose so. It's really nice now though, me and Joanne being able to go on a radio tour of the
Midlands and Yorkshire and people don't say 'Where's Philip, we want to talk to HIM'."

"I don't think that's nice," says Philip. "I don't think that's nice at all." I think it's even harder for men than for women to look different these days.

"Yeah, I'd like to wear more make-up but since Boy George, it's not worth it. He spoiled it, he made it acceptable to grannies, it's neither attractive nor outrageous anymore. There's a lot changed in that seven years. I was just thought of as weird - I don't think anyone thought I was effeminate despite the fact that I wore a ridiculous amount of make-up and had a VERY silly haircut. Now it's just sort of queenified."

We drift into talking about Julian Cope, a man who, through madness or cowardice, traded in his position
as crown prince of the early Seventies' new pop dream for the less demanding role of court jester, cult
casualty and psychedelic fool. He's on the come-back and Oakey thought he looked great on "Wogan",
especially when he ended up spread-eagled on his perch as if crucified. I thought he looked a prat, the
typical 30-year-old male's idea of what's good-looking, a real hangover from the Sixties when
the tortured consumptive artist look was de-rigeur. I reckon kids of the Eighties find those hollow eyes and
cheekbones a daft affectation when half their mates are smacked out and look like that anyway. We argue a
little and put it to the girls who, I'm glad to say, agreed with your truly. Susanne says Cope looked
druggy and daft and that her ideal man is the hunk who plays guitar in Go West. I'm horrified. I thought
she'd say Prince but then everything's so much more NORMAL these days because normality's the only
reaction that's new. I this, I wonder, good or bad?

"It's just that I knew what the pop that I went into was for," says Philip. "It was to help people grow up
and away from their parents and it's not like that anymore. It's been absorbed, especially with things
like The Prince's Trust and Live Aid."

What's pop for now then?

"Making money."

Susanne goes into a rant about how the business has ceased to care about acts anymore, record companies
now are perfectly prepared to sign up groups, wack out their two best tracks, get a couple of hits and then
drop them because there's plenty more in the woodpile. She bemoans the lack of record company support and
the reluctance to help groups gtow and develop. I say it's always been that way, that the healthy survive
and the process ensures novelty and sometimes, revolution.

"It's exactly the opposite," Phil disagrees. "The new groups coming in are able to be pressured to fit
exactly into whatever gap there is in the market. It's the long-lived bands, normally, that change and
innovate."

Bands like The Human League? Is that your motivation?

"That's so hard to tell now."
"Sometimes," says Susanne, "there isn't any."

"We started out as six people against the world and I miss that. I now feel very lonely in this job."

Why not pack it in then Phil?

"We've no money, we HAVE to make records. We can't do anything else."

Are you still interested in pop? Do you read the gossip columns or anything?

"No. I don't listen to the radio often either."

Don't you think you should?

"Yes, but that's your fault."

Why? Because we're not good enough?

"Yeah, and it's pop music's fault because it's not good enough either. In America it's fascinating, you
turn on the radio and you'll hear two or three great tracks in a row but not here."

"It's really strange that the only people who are making decent records are people who've been around
for 10 or 15 years," says Susanne. "People like Queen, even Bryan Ferry."
"That's because of the death of independent records and the death of the live scene. Wasn't it weird that
year when the best single out was by Foreigner?"

Every hit's from a film soundtrack now.

"Yeah, it's all backhanders and dirty little deals. I shouldn't say that should I? I was on one once." He
grins. "No, there's horrible dirty little deals and you find groups being managed by people with interests
in films and suddenly groups that have got about as much music in them as our cat's bum are having Top 10
records."

"There are a few people I like," says Susanne. "I really like Madonna but she doesn't make INSPIRING
records does she? They're just great to sing along to in the car..."

Which makes it all the more unforgiveable that you've released...oh hell, we've been all through that. What
was the last record you bought?

"The two Five Star albums. I'm so sad we're not gonna be here next Tuesday. I wanted to go and see them but
we're in Italy."

"You know their latest single, the one I thought I didn't like? Well, I heard it on the radio this
morning and it IS good."

Philip also likes Zapp, Cameo, those couple of Noo Shooz records, the first Sly Fox single, although the
follow-up, he says, was terrible. Farley Jackmaster Funk...

"You say we should be interested in music," says Susanne. "Well, I don't know what it's like in London
- perhaps there's a more healthy scene - but in Sheffield there's nothing. You can't go to a
nightclub and listen to decent music. You turn on the local radio and it's just adverts, you listen to Radio
1 and all you'll hear is Peter Cetera and Huey Lewis 94 times a day."

Philip says it's because there's no competition here, that, in America, the radio stations have to
experiment and choose the commercial cuts off an album because they're in combat with one another whereas
here, the record company decides.

"That's part of what goes wrong at Virgin - they send the record round and everyone likes the most wimpy
Simon and Garfunkel crap that we put on it. No-one wants any of the funky stuff cos they don't know what
it is."

As we speak, they're in dispute over the next single. What can they do?

"We don't let them put it out. We don't give in. We can't legally stop them of course but they'd have an
empty video and no-one on 'Top Of The Pops'."

Al least the League are dtermined, as always, to do things their own way - even if it means making
mistakes. For the forthcoming tour, they've recruited a band locally rather than session men from London.
For one thing, says Philip, it's quicker and easier to work that way, and for another, he loves Sheffield.

"We wanna make a scene. If there's anything good we can do, we can start a Sheffield scene again. I wanna
be able to walk around the centre of Sheffield and be recognised and for people to look at me and for me to
say 'I'm from Sheffield and I'm a musician and I'm proud of both these things'. I'm not ashamed of making
pop records but most people think you ought to be because, in Britain, it's new money."

So you must still care.

"I care much more than ever before," says Susanne, "because I think we've got much more to lose than ever
before."

"Yeah, but we've already beaten that," says Philip. "We're here now. The success of 'Human' and the LP
proves we're here, we've now made it. Up till this point, I've always thought we might pack it in soon
and now I know we won't. That's quite a big thing to get past."

Why?

"Because seven years on, we're still doing it, we haven't given up yet. If no-one had bought this
record, I think that would have been in doubt. But enough people have bought it, even though it should
have been number one."

Why?

"I think money's really only secondary in most of The Human League's minds. We want success and we want to
get through to the most number of people and we want to beat all the other creeps who are making those
terrible records."

But you won't do that by making terrible records yourselves. I wonder if you know what goes to make a
great record?

"If we knew that," says Susanne, "we'd have made enough money to never have to do it again, surely."

Oh, I dunno. You've made a few... "Seconds", "Fascination", "Love Action"...

"Yeahs" says Philip, "we've made a few but that was totally by accident. What time is it?"

Very interesting interview handsome

luv4u said:

yes it is cutie

"Are you still interested in pop? Do you read the gossip columns or anything?

"No. I don't listen to the radio often either."

Don't you think you should?

"Yes, but that's your fault."

Why? Because we're not good enough?

"Yeah, and it's pop music's fault because it's not good enough either. In America it's fascinating, you
turn on the radio and you'll hear two or three great tracks in a row but not here."


wow have things changed.. now music sucks in America

I remember Jam or Lewis (cant remeber who) saying that working with the Human League was one of their worst experiences as producers. Something to the effect that when they went in to produce the album, THL had nothing ready. No songs, no ideas...nothing. Jam and Lewis felt like they had to do all of the work.

Five Star!!!

sosgemini said:

All fall dowwwn-a

found1 said:

After reading this article... I believe it.

I don't wanna read all that, can ya just highlight the important parts?