Don't You Want Me, Baby?
THE HUMAN LEAGUE, top pop sound of the early Eighties, are back in the charts.
Miranda Sawyer talks to singer Phil Oakey about
SYNTHESISERS,PSYCHIATRY AND HAIRDOS
You wonder, when you see the Human League, if they exist outside pop.
They are so studied and they seem to take it all so seriously. What do
they do when they're not in videos? The video which accompanies their
latest hit, 'Tell Me When' (taken from the band's new album Octopus),
is classic Human League: meaningful over-the-shoulder glances, inch-
perfect hairdos, inch-and-a-half-perfect make-up, chorus swept out in
a dimly lit ballroom, whilst our angst-ridden hero and heroines stare
dramatically, unironically at a half-shut patio door. The song, too,
is pure League. Call-and-response between Phil Oakey and the girls
Joanne Catherall (dark) and Susan Sulley (blond), with a hookline that
is as basic as it is brainwashing; it's all so familiar, you forget
it ever went away.
'Tell Me When', however is the Sheffield group's
first Top 20 hit since 'Human' eight years ago. These days, there are
only three of them - the one's you don't remember have conveniently
scarpered - and the 'girls' are thirtysomething. This year Phil turns
40. He's had 18 years of the pop life. How has he stuck it out? 'I don't
think that we ever generally thought we could do anything else,' he says
gravely. 'We decided a long time ago we'd only give up when we went
bankrupt.' And there have been times, he admits, when the debt
collectors were leaning noisily on the front door bell. Over the past
six years the 'joint partnership - not quite a limited company' that
is Phil, Joanne and Susan has only survived thanks to the deftness of
its solicitor, Stephen Fisher.
The group were not flash but, over the
years, the cash has been spent: on employees; on building a recording
studio; on the break-up of Phil' and Joanne's eight year relationship
(I'm mortgaged up til the next century,' he says, without bitterness).
Plus of course, they never quite matched the mammoth success of their
third album, 1981 six-million selling Dare, with its glam, vogue-
style cover and definitive number-one anthem of hairstyle pop, 'Don't
You Want Me'. The singles 'Mirror Man' and Fascination' followed; but
it wasn't until three years later that the album Hysteria appeared.
It was commercially disappointing, and the 1986 LP Crash sold even less
- although its first single, 'Human', was a US number one (number eight
in Britain). At that stage, although the commercial curve was definitely
downhill, the band's future did not seem irrevocably dumped-bound.
They had, after all, outlasted New Romanticism and held their own against
Madonna and Wham!. So it must have been an appalling shock to realise,
in the early Nineties, that apart from a singalong Greatest Hits package
- the public really didn't want them baby. At all. We watched Romantic
[the band's seventh album] disappear without a trace,' recalls Oakey,
evenly enough. 'Gone, gone into the pat with all you've hoped for.
So you go into the studio and throw a few more songs together...
About that time, I think, I had a low-grade nervous breakdown.' His
digestive system went haywire. Having just passed his driving test, he
found he couldn't drive. ' What else? I've got a habit of throwing knives
up in the air and catching them by the handle and I stopped being able
to do it. Oakey went to three psychiatrists.
The first pointed out that he'd spent a long time working very hard:
'She was the first person who'd ever said that to me - everyone thought
I was just taking limousines to stand by a piano and go,
"Yes that's alright I'll sing a bit later, now take me to a restaurant.
" Shrink number two didn't help; the third, a
drama therapist said, as a drama therapist will, that she saw Phil 'as a
tree on a hill without roots'. She meant that he wasn't really settled.
Phil was single, without children, living in a house that few people
visited. 'I thought, who did I put pictures on the wall for, who are they
supposed to impress? I didn't know who or what I was doing anything for.'
Though he tries to keep his house neat, Oakey is a compulsive hoarder:
of hi-fi equipment, of videos, motorbikes, Star Wars figurines and, strangely,
the Radio Times. His psychiatrist insisted that was his attempt to create stability,
to build a world of his own. Phil now thinks she's probably right.
His parents belong to a generation still affected by two world wars, and
Oakey, born in 1955, feels their attitudes have passed on to him in some
way. 'Whatever they are [his mother, whom he adored, died two years ago,
at 82; his dad - the most fantastic person that ever lived - is still
alive], I feel them sitting with me,' he admits. ' I think the whole
British society was twisted to give a n artificial authority in order
to win those two wars - and now those structures of authority have gone.
It freaks me out when I turn on Radio 4 and I hear swearing.'
'The Human League are the sounds of 1980,' opined David Bowie in 1980.
And so they are. Fifteen years later, the League recording rules stand
unaltered. Every single noise on a Human League LP, apart from the vocals,
must originate from a synthesiser, 'It has purity,' insists Oakey.
He believes that the reason the band lost their way with Hysteria and Crash
was because they dared to stray away from their own creed; and he says this, as he
says almost everything, in utter seriousness. In a arch age, when even
Take That perform with a knowing nod and sideways wink, the Human League
remains entirely sincere. Pretentious was too modest a word for their
lyrics. Morbid too jolly for their painted demeanour. It must have taken
a massive humour bypass to be serious about those clothes, that one-curtain-
drawn-one-curtain-open hairdo.
'Probably the second most famous haircut in pop,' says Oakey, with - yes! -
a trace of a smirk. 'The Beatles' mop- top being the first. But Ken Dood had
a few hits, you know.' Phil Oakey now wears his hair slicked back.
His face is fuller. But his voice is still dramatically ropey. His lyrics are still
spectacularly laboured: 'I've got a pile of rhyming dictionaries at home.
The penguin's the best,' And he and his band somehow still manage to make
tuneful, strange, memorable records. Proper pop music - the type that Neil
Tennant once describes as making you utterly happy and indescribably sad at exactly the same time.
Article Transcribed by Tom Ashford
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