THE HUMAN LEAGUE – “Don’t You Want Me”
It’s almost a shame that after three years making records concerning sericulture, medieval time-slips, singles-as-singularities, assassinations, Judge Dredd, Dr Who and whatever the hell “Crow And A Baby” was about, the Human League get to #1 with a straightforward song of embittered romance. They maybe felt the same: “Don’t You Want Me” was the fourth single off Dare, released at the insistence of the label. Who of course were quite right.
Their cosmic imagination was only part of what made the League’s records good, though. They made their synthesisers slam together in an awkward but still addictive dance, and they had Phil Oakey’s marvellously rigid voice. Which you might not have thought was suitable for a song as directly emotional as “Don’t You Want Me”, but no – its limited range and perpetual tetchiness are ideal for a record about a man who simply won’t or can’t acknowledge the reality of the situation. Nobody else could have made the chorus sound quite so honestly uncomprehending.
For all that the guy in “Don’t You Want Me” is obviously a bit of a shit – “and I can put you back down too” – there’s something so hangdog about Oakey’s delivery that you feel sorry for him, like you might feel sorry for Alan Partridge or David Brent. Susanne Sulley’s polite and pitying dismantling of his perspective – blankness masking obvious irritation – leaves you in no doubt whatsoever that this is indeed a full stop.
As with “Tainted Love”, this is not a record I expect to stop meeting any time soon. I don’t think it’s as good as “Love Action” or “Sound Of The Crowd” – to be honest by now I’d even prefer to hear “The Lebanon” if I’m out of an evening. But it’s also easy to hear why it did so well: even beyond the all-too-yellable chorus, its clear-sighted outline of a whole romantic history makes it one of the most complete number ones.
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re that shropshire temperature — it was recorded at cosford raf station, which is about five miles from newport, and was colder that day than at the SOUTH POLE at that same moment! my mum — a surprisingly patriotic shropshire lass given she was born in newcastle — was always especially delighted by this fact
Was 1981 a white Christmas?
It was indeed, Conrad. At least in Cambridge. The only white one I can recall in England in all my 54 years.
Quite a few Christmases in the Popular years ahead I spent in upstate New York, where white Christmases are the rule not the exception, and that of course is what the song is all about.
Yes, it’s the only one I remember too. I was 8. It snowed, we sledged down the hill near my Gran’s house, I got a load of Dr Who stuff for Christmas, Dad got a ZX81, this was the No.1…. frankly, best Christmas ever :)
““Don’t You Want Me” was the fourth single off Dare, released at the insistence of the label.”
I was thinking about this last night – I bought “Dare” the weekend it came out. That was very rare for the small me: my brother and I had worked out that you didn’t have to wait very long for the sales to get twice as many records for your money. Nevertheless I simply had to have “Dare” that week.
I’d adored the singles (a pocket money friendly £1.15 each for the 12″s of TSOTC and LA/HT if you bought ‘em fresh) but I remember being amazed that the obvious stand-out pop hit hadn’t been a single up to that point. We decided they were obviously waiting to make a bid for the “coveted” Xmas #1 spot, and then when that happened, we decided we had obviously been correct.
(Where “they” = some unknowable mixture of band and label, I guess.)
Ah thank you. I’m not sure if it ever snowed in Southsea, but we must have had a drift or two that Christmas.
I went to vist my Uncle and Aunt in rural Wiltshire (near Devizes) just after Christmas and stayed into the New Year, and the fields around the cottage were knee deep in snow. It made for a truly spectacular midnight walk, as the moon lit up the snow and it was so bright you could see exactly where you were going. The sound was muffled by the snow so it was eerily quiet – it was like being in a fairytale.
Yes, a wonderful Christmas – although I was still reeling from the double blow of Avon shooting Blake and Julia rejecting Charles the week before…
i *think* this was the winter the whole family went skating on the frozen severn flood-plain out by shrewsbury’s berwick road — we were the only people skating and the area of ice was VAST — it was pond-style skating, in that the edges of the ice (except at the river end, which we avoided) got thin and crackly and had tufts of grass and seft poking through, but the “pond” was several fields-worth in size
now the flood-plain is all built-up with housing that floods every other year (another thing which sparked my mum’s glee: she was cross they spoiled the flood-plain and felt anyone who bought a house on it DESERVED to be flooded for being so silly)
seft is a country word for sedge er er
Andy #46: True, but I couldn’t think of another term for the working class version. Loadsamoneys?
Rosie #50: I think when it comes to lager they all taste pretty much the same so image and marketing play a huge role. Through the 80s there was at different times a vogue for Sol (Mexican, and you could stick a lime in it), Budweiser (American, you could pretend you were James Dean), Sapporo (Japanese, had a cool steel can) and Grolsch (had a weird bottle)
haha lee re lagers all taste the same — er no, no they don’t* (unlike beer which all tastes the same viz HORRIBLE)
*might not have been true in the 80s when i was rigorously teetotal and despised all alcohol as the TOOL OF COUNTER-REVOLUTION — this was a bit embarrassing at the wire, which was a niche-advertising haven for aspirational booze of many weird kinds**, owing to a faintly bizarre perspective marketing had on jazz back then
**luckily this empire of signs fell in 1987, along with the market crash, which as a result nearly wiped the mag out also
Shows how one-track I am: I can’t understand anyone not rating this one of the best pop singles… ever! Its ubiquity at the time (and, in some sense, since) cemented it in my head as a template for chart excellence, but I loved it for itself too. Love how Susanne’s voice cracks on “better place” – THAT says real emotion to me even if she sounds detached otherwise. I think detachment is her default style; then again, the voice cracking could just be lack of real facility.
I can play this on the piano, of course. I suspect we all can.
Re #61: Was it that particular late 80s advertisment where the old black saxophonist bonds with the young white one over a bottle of lager which inspired you to renounce teetotalism to attain absolute jazz credibility, then?
I find being drunk helps when listening to Free Jazz.
i doubt i ever achieved even compromised jazz credibility!
It’s difficult for me to make an objective assessment of “Don’t You Want Me”, as my connection with it is primarily a social one. Multiple copies of Dare were floating about our shared student house, and as such it soon eclipsed Heaven 17′s Penthouse And Pavement as Most Played Album. Several friends adopted “Don’t You Want Me” as their official Favourite Song, and it became inescapable at student parties, university discos and club nights in town. Oh, and everybody did a special little hand movement to the “working as a waitress in a cocktail bar” bit: raising an oustretched palm horizontally above the corresponding shoulder, as if to support a tray of drinks. (I still feel a slight involuntary twitch, even now.)
As I’ve said before, this era was my generation’s coming of age: chart pop was being made by people like us, and people like us were its primary audience. It’s curious that we’re almost halfway through the Popular story, and also at a point where my personal and social relationship with pop is peaking. I’ve always loved pop music, but mostly as an observer; perhaps this marks the point where I most felt like a participant.
(Actually, hold that thought: there’ll be another distinct and separate period to come, where I’ll feel equally connected.)
Anyhow, it’s a subjective 10 from me, over-played or not.
As for S.Sulley’s vocals, don’t read too much into their “cracked” quality – I recall reading that it took multiple takes to get her part down, and that the final version was stitched together from the best bits of these.
Thanks v much Erithian at #49 for the research. No-one believes me these days.
I vividly remember the -24 reading on the Guardroom thermometer in nearby Hereford. (Not a night for being a gate guard!)
I always thought that my memory was playing tricks on me as the years have flown by. Even Chris Bonington was struggling!!
Re #66: ‘Dare’ is, of course, the album (briefly) played at the student party in the 1982 first series of ‘The Young Ones’;
RIK (putting ‘Dare’ on turntable): Let’s have some music! Who here likes The Human League?!
(The first second of ‘The Things That Dreams Are Made Of’ plays. Instantly a squad of policemen break into the room and smash up the album and the record player with their truncheons.)
POLICEMAN: Stop the noise! There’s been a complaint!
‘Dare’ was also the album that Lester Bangs was playing on the day that he died.
re 36-38 I was pleased that the HL played ‘Louise’ (in the ballad spot, replacing ‘Human’) on the recent Sheffield Steel City tour and disgusted to discover just now that the only version of it I have is the recent Tony Christie version (that said, Tony’s cover is probably why they started playing it again). Listening to it now on Spotify, I see it works perfectly as a sequel to DYWM.
I remember the first time I heard DYWM, playing on Radio One one afternoon in the hospital house I shared with the girlfriend I was about to leave. Still poignant for me and the cracked singing is what gives the songs that extra element of punctum, making it transcend the HL’s other singles to reach a wider audience and ensuring them their place at the top of the bill 25 years on.
For “Louise” to be a direct sequel to DYWM we’d need a lot of backstory-imagining, mostly why these successful people (in DYWM success has been so easy for her, and he presumably has some foundation for thinking he’s had some hand in her success – she doesn’t directly contradict that) are hanging around bus stops looking a little rough.
Maybe the bus is doubling as a dressing room / trailer on a film set?
She doesn’t have to be famous, necessarily, to be successful.
Maybe he helped her set up a PR business or something?
How about “Life on your own” as part three of the trilogy?
(It was a single before Louise, but comes after it on Hysteria)
“Re #66: ‘Dare’ is, of course, the album (briefly) played at the student party in the 1982 first series of ‘The Young Ones’;”
I seem to recall Alexei Sayle breaking into a few bars of “Don’t You Want Me” during one of his solo spots in a Young Ones episode.
The League were also immortalised in 2000AD as the name of an anti-robot movement in the “Sam Slade, Robo Slayer” strip.
Re #68: ‘The Things That Dreams Are Made Of’, surely the track off Dare that should have been a single, but wasn’t.
And to go off on a Human League-related tangent, it was this sort of electronic pop, and the League in particular, which provided the inspiration/basis for those fantastic Richard X bootlegs at the turn of the century.
some great quotes from Phil Oakey in Simon Reynolds’ new book ‘Totally Wired’ such as:
“If you want to make a lot of money out of pop, be number 3 a lot. Like New Order did. Or The Cure. Because when you’re number 1 you’re everybody’s; nobody really cares about you any more. Everyone and their grandma knows about you, so nobody wants to wear your badges any more.”
There’s even an explanation of Crow and Baby if you’re curious.
Martin Rushent is interviewed as well and gives a good account of the making of Dare and Love and Dancing.
Phil’s great. I always liked “I never thought I’d be in a group. I thought people in groups were stupid.” And pretending to Smash Hits that he collected models of Tom from Tom & Jerry: “I now have 245″ or some such…
Phil also has a deceptive vocal range – I did this at karaoke for about the third time in a row on Friday and WHEN WILL I LEARN MY LESSON.
I’d like to see Phil and the biscuit tin…
The main riff – it’s a steal from “Eagle” by Abba, isn’t it?
I’ve always wondered why no one seems to mention this. Perhaps it’s just so blatantly obvious that no one’s ever thought it worth mentioning.
NMEWatch: 28th November 1981, Julie Burchill;
“Samson Oakey – who resembles Phil McNeill at the height of punk – needs to have a haircut and the stuffing knocked out of him. But it takes two to do it (duet) wrong. This could be a swinging little song if given to two black singers with GREAT VOICES. Phil and moll sound sallow and callow. So many people should be silent songwriters. You could be in folklore instead of on Top of the Pops. Look at Phil Spector. No, don’t look at him like that!
The Human League must stop using the singles chart as an agony column sometimes. And my scout tells me that there are no cocktail bars in Sheffield. And they’re too sensitive. They could learn a lot”
Burchill awarded no single of the week. Also reviewed that week;
Rip Rig & Panic – Bob Hope Takes Risks
Barry Manilow – The Old Songs
Elvis Costello & The Attractions – Sweet Dreams
Kiki & Elton – Loving You Is Sweeter Than Ever
Fogwell Flax & The Freehold Junior School – One-Nine For Santa
Gary Numan – Love Needs No Disguise
Madness – It Must Be Love
Vic Goddard – Stamp Of A Lamp
Channel 4 Top 100 Watch – this is the 25th best-selling single of all time in the UK.
#80, I’d like to hear some Vic Godard some time. Is he any good? Been reading about him in “Rip It Up and Start Again” whic I have finally got round to buying.
NB – It’s “Stamp of a Vamp” isn’t it? Although “Lamp” is arguably better…
Life Imitates Art-Watch:
DYWM has now become the unofficial theme-tune to the split of Ronnie Wood (65) and Ekaterina Ivanova (21).
@Taylor, 79. Holy sh**, you are right. The difference between the riffs is really quite subtle, but it’s quite enough to throw one off. I look forward to figuring out the difference exactly hence how all that works! I confess to being a little staggered by your observation: the DYWM riff has always sounded so singular to me! Some of the very best pop (not coincidentally) seems to play tricks on your perceeption like this: the main riff from Smells like Teen Spirit is so utterly singular and convincing sounding that it comes as terrible shock (or at least did to me) when you hear a guitarist run through its changes and, by just changing one or two notes, turn it into More than a Feeling, or by changing two different notes turn the riff into Wild Thing! These small differences spread out by performance quality and timbre make for enormous differences experientially. Amazing and shocking. Anyhow, congrats again on a good catch! I’ll hear both DYWM and Eagle quite differently from now on.
This is a 10 for me. The true dawning of the age of UK synth pop that would dominate the world for the next 5 years. A US # 1 to boot. The two national charts were about to begin synching up in a way they hadn’t since the mid 60′s. It was also a time in which the people making pop music still had just a little cred from dues-paying (SAW would wreck that for good). Heady times to be in a British pop group.
I think the synth riff from DYWM actually adds something to the riff from Eagle; DYWM is more menacing (different key?) and the wrap-up at the end is different (and varies). I think I heard that Phil Oakey copied the lyrics from a photo love-story in a magazine.
@Brooksie, 85. You’re absolutely right that the riffs aren’t identical, and the basic keys overall are different (DYWM’s in C, Eagles’s in D), and, in general, Eagle’s saturated with SoCal languor whereas DYWM bounces from chord to chord throughout (quite Motown-y really).
Still (i) the riff melody’s *initial rhythm* is the same, (ii) the *initial notes* are essentially the same (pounding the A then noodling around it), and (iii) both riffs eventually resolve to Am. DYWM *starts* on Am too, so its As and noodles preserve a cleanly minor quality. Eagle’s initially on Em so its As and noodles significantly thicken the sound, giving the riff its brassy, adult quality. (Eagle’s officially about nature, but I’ve always thought of it as having quite a louche, almost druggy vibe about it too – the song scared me a little as a kid!)
Anyhow, in the grand scheme of things this is insignificant. I hear something, but it’s hardly Oasis-style strip-mining of influences!
This discussion inspired me to dig out Eagle and have another listen…
it’s really not a steal, though it’s a great spot – the first half of each riff is similar, but Abba’s is more classic blues in origin, and the second half of theirs is a standard, and fairly uninteresting blues lick. The Human League’s is a much more defined melody in the second half and resolves strongly, which is why it’s so memorable.
@Conrad, 87. Well-judged comment, with which I completely agree. (I probably overegged things back at #84.) Heh, well, at any rate there’s an fun mega-mix arrangement for some basement party band where you start off playing DYWM, modulate via the bluesier Eagle riff into playing Eagle, which, noodling around a bit now, I find can be rocked quite nicely into Being Boiled. Yee-haw.
Technically speaking, Dignified Don, the single was credited to “Human League 100.” The “100″ tag stems from the Human League’s inclination throughout 1981 to colour code their singles; thus “Red” signified dance (“The Sound Of The Crowd,” “Love Action”) and “Blue” meant post-Abba pop (“Open Your Heart”). The sleeve of “Don’t You Want Me” was decked in striped purple; the “100″ may have been a nod to the Haircuts. As with the Next clothing chain, the Human League as directed by Phil Oakey and produced by Martin Rushent aspired towards the profound in the clothing of the functional; unlike Next, the League have endured aesthetically and may yet still have been proved to have won.
And it was so fantastically clear throughout the Christmas of 1981 – one year after music seemed to have been killed off forever – that we had won; we had come through, and triumphed. I am unlikely ever to forget the first time we listened to Dare, in our college rooms, and how our jaws initially dropped at how cheap the production of side one, track one, “The Things That Dreams Are Made Of” sounded, especially in comparison with the slick and sly production of Penthouse And Pavement by their erstwhile brothers Heaven 17. Two minutes later we were singing along with the song heartily. That’s when we knew the Human League had won.
Abandoned by its two actual musicians a year earlier, Oakey was left with the guy who did the slides for their stage show, and augmented the ashes with two girls he spotted dancing in a Sheffield nightclub. It seemed hopeless but in fact it was the most ingenious reinvention in pop since Bolan plugged into his amplifier.
Suzanne and Joanne danced in a together of sorts, but not together as such; they improvised, gave the League the vital amateur facade (in the sense that “amateur” is translatable as “lover”) in order to accommodate the equally vital professional undertow of ex-Rezillo Jo Callis, who, cheerfully bypassing Oakey’s “all synths” rule, plugged his guitar directly into the synth keyboard, translated the physical strokes of chords and left the attack evident – listen to the main treble verse riff of “Don’t You Want Me” and imagine it being thrashed out on a guitar – but more importantly understood the technique of writing pop songs as well as the art. Then there was Martin Rushent, whose production style was, in its unassuming way, as decided a break from history as Trevor Horn’s; whereas Horn is a maximalist, Rushent stuck doggedly to minimalism. He was interested in how much emotion could be compressed into so few notes and rhythms; on his productions for the League, as well as those for Altered Images, Leisure Process and the post-Buzzcocks Pete Shelley, we note the very clear and precise definition and separation of instruments, voices and rhythms (particularly his favourite trick of dividing up Linn drum fills between left and right channels). Everything is pristine, unambiguous, and exact, but not clinical.
It worked with brilliance. “The Sound Of The Crowd,” “Love Action” and “Open Your Heart” are as great a triptych of singles as has ever occurred in pop; sharp but humble, knowing but naive (“But this is Phil talking!”) and their success proved that miracles could still occur in pop. Was the secret of Dare’s magic its style being all content, or vice versa – for much of the album is far from content, and sometimes very dark; fellow Yorkshireman David Peace would understand “I Am The Law” in a second, “Seconds” itself (tellingly, the B-side to the “Don’t You Want Me” single) is one of the subtlest of all Lennon tributes, and even the heightened spirits of “Love Action” incorporate the post-Joy Division warning of “I’ve lain alone and cried at night over what love made me do.”
To the public at large the Dare League came along as something entirely new and blessedly different; of course there was New Romanticism, but with the Human League you didn’t really need the capital letters – with them the romantic was inherent and intuitive. Their triumph over that year’s Christmas competition – a particularly competitive field including among others Cliff Richard, Abba, Adam and the Ants and Madness – was the noble triumph of New Pop; and when I arrived in New York the following June to find “Don’t You Want Me” at number one on Billboard, it was hard not to feel akin to stout Cortez, surveying all this territory he has somehow conquered.
So yes, the Human League deserved to have, not only 1981′s Christmas number one but the longest run of any single at number one since “Bright Eyes,” one of only two singles released in 1981 to top a million sales (“Tainted Love,” fittingly, being the other) and the year’s most popular single and album by any yardstick (only Adam and Lennon from the other side of the year could claim equal commercial status). Funnily enough it was about the only song on Dare which we didn’t really like. We thought it a rather obvious and disappointingly conventional pop song with a fairly corny lyrical set-up, and its placing at the album’s end suggested an imminent narrowing of horizons and polishing off of edge, as a rather overblown effort to make a genuine crossover hit. It also bears some thought that it may have been the last song Lester Bangs ever heard – when his body was discovered in his apartment, a copy of Dare was on his turntable, the needle ceaselessly running over the runout groove. It may additionally be relevant that Oakey himself had serious misgivings about the song, wanting to make it more “icy” and less “pop.”
However, this is to diminish the song’s impact as a pop spectacle; Steve Barron’s astute video – who’s watching who, why does Adrian Wright raise his eyebrow at us at his console, playing God, at the end, the lights, the make-up – helped the League to turn nascent MTV memes against themselves (though definitely helped sell the record in the States), and Suzanne Sulley’s vital verse, which she sings or at least intones in a deadpan South Yorkshire housewife drone, acts as the song’s punctum; this is the crucial bit not polished or refined, this is what catches unwary outsiders. And the 12-inch mix – with Rushent deploying his other favourite pre-coital party piece of teasing the listener over and over before reaching the song itself (cf. the virtually perfect 12-inch of Altered Images’ “I Could Be Happy,” its top ten bedfellow over the season) – is very fine indeed. So, for the now of 1981 floating into 1982, they ruled – and therefore, so, by extension, did we.*
(*N.B.: The “we” used by me throughout this post and passim elsewhere on Popular has nothing to do with Wyndham Lewis or the Royal Family but refers to myself and my first – late – partner.
It could have been side one playing in Lester’s apartment, in which case “Do or Die”…
The Top 40 for 19 December 1981 is my favourite of all time
RIP Martin Rushent. I always twinned him with Martin Hannett in my teens, one being dark and spacey, the other light and clean. Both made records that sounded like the future, and in 1981/82 were my favourite producers.
@wichita. Thanks for the heads-up on that. I twinned Rushent with Hannett in my teens too.
An awful weekend; first the news about Andrew Gold, and now Martin Rushent – I only got round to picking up Pete Shelley’s Homosapien album on CD on Saturday.
Black armbands and an honorary playing of the 12” of Altered Images’ “I Could Be Happy.” RIP big New Pop architect.
Andrew Gold? Oh no, what a shame. We should never have let him slip away.
Okay, I’m going…
Benny Spellman of floor filling Fortune Teller fame, also gone this weekend :-(
I’ve never ventured into Andrew Gold album territory, which is daft because his biggest hits are all super-melodic and up my street save for the odd sax/rock gtr squall. Any recommendations? None are on Spotify.
His first single was recorded during a year-long stay in the UK and came out in Polydor in 1966 – This East by Villiers & Gold. Never heard it, but I’m most intrigued.
His Best Of compilation Thank You For Being A Friend is a good place to start. “Looking For My Love” – what a song (off All This And Heaven Too, which is likewise a fine starting point if you want to investigate his albums further).
Thanks. Will do.
I’ll vouch for his 1970 single as a member of Bryndle. I didn’t even know he was involved til I read the obits, but it’s a lovely slice of west coast pop, sonically caught exactly between the Mamas & Papas and Linda Ronstadt eras. Not on youtube, unfort.
I remember at the time a talking point re Don’t You Want Me besides the fact that it had gone to number one was that Phil had had a haircut – the video seemed charged with the extra information of this “different” Phil.
The first issue of Smash Hits I bought was the late 81 League on the cover, I was annoyed that I hadn’t noted the existence of the mag up to this point, i was surviving on Songwords and some other thing – Tops?
I share the view that it’s not as overplayed as Tainted Love which might be down to the fact that it’s easy to stop listening to side two of Dare after Seconds whereas TL is difficult to avoid on Soft Cell’s debut LP.