Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the high-art synth-pop of the Human League’s Dare, a prismatic album that all pop music would soon pass through.
In late 1980, the singer Philip Oakey was scheduled to go on tour and make a third record with his band the Human League. The problem was that there was no Human League. The founding members had departed acrimoniously, leaving Oakey with just the name and a lingering associate, Philip Adrian Wright, whose only role was to project slides of rocket schematics and stills from old movies behind the group’s live performances. Together, Oakey and Wright had to somehow make a new band and a new album out of nothing.
Oakey didn’t have any finished songs, just a few disconnected ideas. The recently departed synth technicians Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh had written most of the music for the first two Human League records and, as far as critics were concerned, they were the real talent of the group, the masterminds behind the eerie yet often danceable synthesized music which sounded like it could’ve emanated from a post-apocalyptic nightclub or a dark alien obelisk in the desert.
Oakey, by comparison, was a pretty face, a deep voice, and an eye-catching asymmetrical haircut—one side cropped close, the other a dark waterfall of hair. He and Wright were the visual element of the band, the kitschy surfaces that made even their bleaker electronic ruminations pop. Oakey could sing but he didn't have much in the way of musical talent, and he was anxious about writing a new Human League record on his own, especially with the added pressure of delivering something more successful to the record label than their previous album, 1980’s Travelogue. “I thought we were going to fail and everyone was going to laugh in our faces,” Oakey told the Sunday Herald Sun in 2009. But Dare, the album he made with the ruins of a broken band, was a paradigm shift: It signified the end of something old—the original Human League—and the beginning of something new—synth-pop—all at once, a kind of prism that all pop music would soon pass through.
Three years earlier, Oakey had just been hired as the singer of a band called the Future, whose other two members, Ware and Marsh, had run in the same Sheffield arts circles since they were teenagers. They were all obsessed with science fiction, and many early Human League songs—for instance, “The Black Hit of Space,” about a song so dull it opens up a black hole that swallows the listener and the world around them—read as if they were pulled from a Philip K. Dick story collection. They grew up on glam rock, whose influence lingered in Oakey’s appearance, his features softened by makeup, his ear often sporting a long shimmering earring. But when Ware and Marsh heard German electronic group Kraftwerk, along with Giorgio Moroder and Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love,” they thought they were hearing the future of music. They noticed that the future didn’t seem to have any guitars. The future was a vortex of processed sound.
With the addition of Oakey’s shadowy, handsome voice, they renamed themselves the Human League and started to reconceptualize themselves as a pop band. Befitting their avant-garde origins, they worked from an indiscriminate definition of “pop,” covering advertisement jingles and themes from film scores, absorbing and refracting every kitsch artifact in their grasp. But their approach proceeded from a true love of pop culture and its ephemera; the cover of the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling” on their 1979 debut album Reproduction, manages to be truly heartfelt and warm through the cold glitter of its instrumentation. Human emotions were timeless, the League seemed to say. Only the technologies that conveyed them changed.
But Ware and Marsh’s departure in 1980 left Oakey without even that bed of technology. So Wright was promoted to occasional synth player, and he and Oakey searched the Sheffield streets for new band members. Oakey had been listening to Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall and wanted to incorporate a high, androgynous falsetto into the Human League’s music, something that could hover like a spotlight over his own dark baritone. A few weeks before the tour started, he visited the Sheffield discotheque Crazy Daisy, which was hosting its “Futurist” night. Through a tangle of chic glittery people dressed like Gary Numan, Oakey glimpsed two girls—Joanne Catherall and Susan Ann Sulley—dancing in the lights. Something about their appearance and the way they moved—angular and awkward, charming and unselfconscious—mesmerized him, and he invited them to join the band even though they were both still attending high school. They were also fans of the band, and had purchased tickets to a Human League show on the very tour they were being hired for.
Catherall and Sulley were neither trained singers nor professional dancers. Their voices wavered through notes, but they glowed around Oakey’s gloom like museum light on a sculpture. Their presence added an ineffable layer of glamor to the group—where the old Human League appeared inflexible and robotic on stage, this new League blushed with movement and color. Oakey’s method of saving his band wasn’t necessarily creative or musical but utterly visual. Could anything be more pop?
Regardless, Oakey still needed to put together the pop music that would reinforce the visual shift. After the tour ended, Virgin Records sent in producer Martin Rushent to help shape the new Human League material into something not only professional but commercial. When he arrived, the band had just started work on a track called “The Sound of the Crowd,” a song Oakey and recent Human League recruit Ian Burden were building on synthesizers around a very simple, lopsided figure of thumping tom sounds. When Oakey first played the demo of it for Sulley and Catherall, it sounded simplistic and a little rickety, but they knew it was a hit—they could envision themselves dancing to it. Rushent wasn’t as impressed; he wanted more. He threw the demo out and insisted they start from scratch.
What Rushent turned “The Sound of the Crowd” into remapped the world of pop music around it. He programmed a song without much potential into a chain reaction of synthesizer and drum patterns, all pulsing together in white space. Nothing on the radio, beyond Gary Numan’s geometric synth constructions, sounded quite like it. Each sound is so clean and separated you can hear them leave different impacts on the blankness. It’s also a staggeringly simple composition, a verse and a chorus culminating in a breakdown where Oakey, Sulley, and Catherall’s voices build to a scream. But in Rushent’s hands, it’s shaped into something as modern and distinct as space-age furniture.
During the recording process, the band fused two different songs into “Love Action (I Believe in Love),” its synths sinking and creeping through like water leaking through a tar roof. Oakey broods through the whole thing, except for an abrupt monologue between the first and second chorus (“I believe, I believe what the old man said”) that reels out of him nearly at the speed of rap. None of them—not even Burden and Jo Callis, experienced touring musicians whom Oakey and Rushent had planted in front of unfamiliar synthesizers—knew exactly what they were doing, or if anything they were writing would work as a song. Rushent would listen to the rough mixes of Dare songs when he returned home from the studio and couldn’t figure out whether the album they were making was brilliant or terrible.
This is, incidentally, why Dare works so well. The songs are simple, sometimes containing only one or two melodic ideas, and synthesizers connect in lattices around them. Opener “The Things That Dreams Are Made Of” is just a few sing-songy sequences stacked on top of each other, while Oakey sings lyrics that have all the frenzied energy of travel brochure slogans: See the world—Berlin or New York! Spend money and acquire new friends! “Dare to feel! Take the chance! Make the deal!” he sings in “Open Your Heart” as two-note synth chords drone around him like rays of daylight. It works almost like an advertisement: Very little is happening, but there’s just enough to catch your eye. Dare’s title and art were modeled after an April 1979 Vogue UK cover where the word “Dare!” glowed in neon pink above the warm blush of a model’s face; in all of the variations of the album’s cover design, a member of the band presses their face against a narrow rectangle, staring out into the same glossy white void it feels like the music was born in.
But Dare is more than an advertisement for itself. There’s a hole at its center where the band abruptly slips into a dark glimmer of the old Human League. A spare cover of the theme for the 1971 crime film Get Carter opens the second side, retaining only the harpsichord line from the original, transposed here to a synthesizer so high and keening it sounds like a disembodied cry in the dark. Then the dystopian “I Am the Law” slithers into view, Oakey seeming to sing from the perspective of a police officer who believes he knows what’s best for the people he’s supposed to protect. It’s sinister and terrifying—the instrumentation creeps like the shadow of a hand over an insect. “Seconds” seems to snap the album out of this black mood, but its lyrics depict John F. Kennedy’s assassination, and eventually, the song just lapses into repetitions of the chorus: “It took seconds of your time to take his life.” Oakey runs through the shared cultural memory over and over again as if he were circling it on a track, trying and failing to see it from a new angle.
Of course, Dare isn’t remembered for the darkness that engulfs its middle, but for the frozen glow of its singles, which presaged the dawning of a new era in pop music, one where synthesizers and drum machines processed the flutter and ache of crushes, romance, and heartbreak. But the League never again achieved the world-blanketing success of Dare, especially not its fourth single and final track, “Don’t You Want Me.”
Oakey didn’t want “Don’t You Want Me” released as a single, and fought with the record company when he learned they’d selected it; needless to say, it’s ironic that the song on Dare that most wants to be wanted would be the one Oakey was most embarrassed over. For the lyric, he rewrote the plot to A Star Is Born as a duet of intraband drama between himself and Sulley. It’s perfect: the thick fog cast by the opening synth line, Oakey’s stone-faced gloom quickening into desperation in the transition from the verse to the bridge, the way Sulley’s voice gets shaky as if it’s feeling the desolate cold of the song. They ask each other the same question, yet the disconnection between them is so profound that neither person can hear it, a lonely signal sent into darkness as vast and quiet as space: “Don’t you want me?”
Oddly, the League didn’t get to participate very much in the strain of pop they helped develop. “(Keep Feeling) Fascination” and “Mirror Man” were released over the next two years, but the sessions for the follow-up, 1984’s Hysteria, were so torturous and overextended that Rushent abandoned his role as producer and was replaced by Hugh Padgham. A few years later, the band would enlist Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis to write and produce one of their signature songs, the redundantly-titled “Human,” which plunged their voices into a liquid R&B soundworld and gave them another hit.
But the aesthetic and commercial successes of Dare were unrepeatable; the Human League could never be as unaware of the music they were making ever again. It’s the unconsciousness, that not knowing, that makes the record so great, that makes it sound like it’s beamed in from some vast emptiness. It was pop music that resembled the most enduring pop culture in history, things that didn’t know what they were until it was too late—the Beatles, Marilyn Monroe—massively popular figures that were absorbed as images before they were ever accepted as art. In making a record that no one involved could tell if it was any good, they made something unprecedented.
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