“Don’t You Want Me” was the huge hit, a song that brought in the rock crowd, the gold-chained disco crowd, the Top 40 stations, everybody. It was massively influential on the club music that went on to dominate the decade. (Madonna’s first hit, “Burning Up,” nicked the drum track from the League’s “The Sound of the Crowd.”) Afrika Bambaataa once said, “I remember when we all heard ‘Don’t You Want Me Baby’ and people would say, ‘That’s all synthesizers, that’s a drum machine,’ and we’d say, ‘It can’t be, those sound like real drums.’ ”
They’d started out as all-male arty techno introverts from the northern steeltown Sheffield, which was full of great (and mostly incredibly solemn) synth groups, as chronicled in the fantastic documentary Made in Sheffield. They began their climb with “Being Boiled,” an art-twaddle track that began with the lines “Listen to the voice of Buddha / Saying stop your sericulture,” and then proceeded to get silly. (In case you’re wondering, “sericulture” means farming silk from worms and has nothing to do with Buddha.) But the silliness was lovable—they were all too human, this League.
The inspiring thing about Dare was the emotional journey behind it, the fact that they got there after starting out with “Being Boiled.” They began as an art band for boys, and then became a pop group for girls. If these guys could go from being dour, introspective twits who not only met girls but had girls in the group, well, there was hope for all of us, right?
Why did they let the girls sing in the first place? When I interviewed Phil Oakey a few years ago, he told me, “We’d made two LPs as a male-only group. But two of the guys left and we had to do a tour, so we went out and recruited a couple of women. And then we had to give them something to do, really.” After the other guys in the group left to form Heaven 17, Phil was out at a local club, the excellently named Crazy Daisy Disco, and picked up a couple of girls. They crossed the line from fans to starlets. As one of those girls, Suzanne, put it in 1981, “He wanted a tall black singer and he got two short white girls who couldn’t sing.”
But they had personality, the totally ordinary charm that put the human in the league. Together they bumbled into pop stardom, without paying any dues. In the U.K., the band was thoughtful enough to release their singles with color codes on the label; the red ones were for “poseurs” and the blue ones for “ABBA fans,” but anyone who liked the League could be both a poseur and an ABBA fan.
I guess the League fascinated me because they truly embodied the anyone-can-do-it spirit of this music—in fact, the hardly-anyone- can’t-do-it spirit. Phil cheerfully admitted to the fan mags that he only started singing in the first place because he failed at playing the synthesizer. At a time when guitar bands complained that keyboard geeks were too lazy to learn a real instrument, Phil Oakey had the gall to announce he found synths just too hard to play.
Oh, how I pondered the Phil Oakey perspective on life. The hours I spent poring over the lyrics, wondering how he did what he did. He seemed to have provocative ideas about love and religion. “The Things That Dreams Are Made Of ” articulated his worldview: “Everybody needs love and adventure / Everybody needs two or three friends.”
From the sounds of this album, Phil Oakey spent most of his evenings in glitzy clubs arguing with girls about philosophy. Life was a battle of Good Times versus Hard Times, every man for himself, God against all. He sang like a Sinatra-style cocktail crooner, sharing some of the hard truths he’d learned along the way, alluding to broken marriages and dashed dreams. “I’ve lain awake and cried at night over what love made me do,” he sang, and I couldn’t help but be jealous, less for the love part than the glamour of having tragic love affairs to look back upon with rue.
I yearned to cultivate decadence, without the hard work of actually doing anything decadent. The seductivosity of this music went without saying. Phil Oakey was a sensuous man, and took his stand as such. Indeed, he came on like an even more pretentious Barry White (his next project after Dare was a remix album under the name of the League Unlimited Orchestra) and, supposedly, putting on “Open Your Heart” in the right bedroom would lead to existential crises with sexual resolutions. In the “Love Action” video, Phil gets taken hostage by agents who strap him to a chair and interrogate him. They apparently represent the pro-hate faction. But Phil defiantly tells them, “No matter what you put me through, I’ll still believe in love,” a very Morrissey thing to say, although not even Morrissey would have the gall to put it this way. And like Morrissey, Phil specialized in feeding me ludicrously unusable advice about how to conduct an adult emotional life. For him, being a New Romantic was more than a fashion fad—it was a code of honor, an ethic.
My fantasy life, warped completely by the Human League, began to resemble a Human League song. I would judge everything by whether it was new wave or not. I related to Johnny Slash on the show Square Pegs; any time one of the other kids would call him punk, Johnny would pull his shades down and say, “Not punk, new wave. Totally different head, man! Totally different head!” Or as John Keats would say, “I see, and sing, by my own eyes inspir’d.”
ORCHESTRAL MANOEUVRES IN THE DARK
“Enola Gay”
1982
Spain was where I learned to dance with girls. Not dance with a girl, but in a gang of girls. This was a discovery that shook my foundations. I was used to school dances, where the boys stood on one side, the girls on the other, and you awkwardly asked a girl to dance. Maybe. But just going out on the floor with a bunch of girls and dancing? You could do this? It was like I’d discovered some secret crack in the fabric of the universe, something not just new but previously unthinkable. It was like I found the Shroud of Turin in my sock drawer.
I spent the summer of ’82 in a student exchange program at Colegio Estudio, a school in Madrid. The Spanish girls were all groovy. They all listened to Simon & Garfunkel, who they called “See-MOAN y Gar-FOON-kel.” They all listened to “techno-pop,” music that in my country only weirdos liked. They wore minifaldas on hot days. They had very strong feelings about the evils of the Catholic Church, unless they actually had Catholic mothers, in which case I wasn’t allowed near them in the first place. I fell in love with every single one of them.
I’m not sure how Angela and Nuria became my friends. My third or fourth day, I was sitting by myself at lunch. Angela and Nuria came up and said, You’re eating with us. Con nosotras. I said okay. Angela had a mod bob and a high-pitched voice that chattered constantly. She gave me a book of poems by Antonio Machado, her favorite. Nuria didn’t talk as much as Angela; in fact, she barely said a word all summer. I thought Angela looked a bit like a pigeon, which I meant as a compliment, but I knew better than to say it out loud, even though the Spanish word for “pigeon” is the same as “dove.”
We spent the summer going to discotecas and dancing—two Spanish girls, two American girls we knew, and me. Angela, Nuria, Kate and Ligia would primp and change outfits and put on their makeup, then we’d ride the subway, sometimes with other Spanish girls like Cristina or Casilda. We all kissed one another on the cheek twice a night, hello and good-bye. Lust was in the air, all of it mine, but somehow these girls knew I was never going to make a move on them. I wish I know how they could tell. Yes, I was in another country, speaking another language, but I still had the Esperanto word for “non-ass-grabber” written on my forehead. It was the most demanding social life I’d ever had; escorting these girls was constant work. My role was unclear to me, but it was obviously a good gig to have.
One of them once made out with a guy while dancing, then claimed he was no good at all. That’s the only time I ever saw any of them get romantic on the floor. They weren’t here to mingle; they were here to dance and show off. As I got older, I learned that my role is usually served by hot gay dudes who don’t know they’re gay yet, rather than straight boys who are merely shy, so I don’t know how I got so lucky. Weren’t there any bona fide gay dudes around? Guess not.
The perks of being in this gang w
ere massive. It was my introduction to nightlife, to clubbing, the thrill of discoteca culture. I remember the flashing lights of the Metro, as if we were already in the disco just by heading out there. The ecstatic tingle of anticipation, almost unbearable, as each station passed by. The girls all nervous in their minifaldas. The metallic glint of the elevator, riding up from the Metro stop, knowing what was up there waiting. The billboards on the block (“Martini: Te Invita a Vivir”) that served as signposts to remind us we were on our way. The boys outside on their Motovespa scooters. Walking up to the door, with that adrenaline rush of fear. Maybe something will go wrong? What if they won’t let us in? A private party? That happens. But we always got in, maybe because we just had one boy and a gaggle of chicas.
Pacha, that was the place. We were all sixteen—that was the age to get in. It was one thousand pesetas, about ten bucks, on weekends, but only seven hundred on weeknights. One final split-second wave of fear as you paid the money at the window. The pale green ticket stub. Getting in. The air-conditioning hitting you like a full-body slam. Crowding on the floor, the girls using their stiletto elbows, working our way across the room, somewhere near the corner. Finding our spot. There. We’re in.
The girls started dancing, their skirts spinning away, and I followed along. The music was a barrage of insanely sexy techno-pop songs I’d never heard before—Depeche Mode’s “Just Can’t Get Enough,” Haircut 100’s “Favourite Shirts,” Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’s “Enola Gay.” And the Human League—dancing to that, with actual girls. Can’t think, I’ll pass out. Just keep going. What is this sound? Who knows? Up! Down! Turn around! Please don’t let me hit the ground!
At school dances back home, I’d felt awkward and conspicuous, but here the lights were out and nobody could see me except my gang. The other dudes ogled my friends. They danced up to the girls’ faces and spoke to the American girls in English, saying, “I am your boyf riend” or “I am fast, I am good.” They danced up to the Spanish girls and sang the lyrics of whatever song was playing, usually in English. The girls would hold my hand and the boys would go away. Then they would let go of my hand. Most nights I was the only boy any of them would talk to. On the floor, I was one of the girls, twirling as one of the ladies of the night.
None of us ever drank, despite the fact that we were all of legal drinking age and there was a bar. This seems a bit remarkable in retrospect, but it was never even an issue. Why waste discoteca time? At some point during the night, Pacha always shut off the music for a half hour or so, so they could host an urban-cowboy contest on a mechanical leather bull. We stood around, stomping our shoes with impatience, watching the clientele hop on the bull and tumble off, while the sound system blasted country music. Then the techno-pop came on again.
Some nights, we stayed home to watch Dallas. They were two seasons behind the United States, so I ruined the show for them by revealing everything that was going to happen to Pam Ewing. I promised not to tell anyone else, so Angela could ruin it for the whole school.
Sometimes they trusted me to pick the evening’s entertainment. I took them to see The Graduate (El graduado), telling them it had lots of Simon & Garfunkel. But I squandered my credibility dragging them to Airplane! retitled Aterrizza como puedas, or “Land However You Can.” I assured them that in America, this was universally recognized as the funniest movie ever made. How I laughed, the lone hyena in the theater, at all the badly dubbed Spanish versions of jokes I knew by heart. The girls failed to see the humor of “ Yo hablo jive” or “No me llamas Shirley.”
I tried explaining why it was funny. See, in ingles, the word “seguramente” is “surely,” which sounds like el nombre de una persona. Shirley! ¿Divertido, no?
I was never allowed to pick the movie again. To punish me, they took me to Midnight Express, about an American boy who gets thrown into a foreign jail because he tries to smuggle drugs. The movie was torture to watch, although it did introduce me to the concept of bras that unhook in the front.
These were the coolest girls I’d ever met. They called the Smurfs “Pitufos.” They argued over politics and corrected my grammar. They took me to juice bars, and whenever the radio would play Depeche Mode or Soft Cell, they’d yell “¡Ponelo mas alto!” We gave one another profanity lessons in our native tongues. They took me shopping, where I learned the joys of spending warm summer days indoors, waiting for hours outside changing rooms and repeating “that one also looks very nice” in Spanish. They were teaching me a whole new language, in more ways than one.
Surely there were girls like this back home? Surely not. And no me llamas Shirley!
Sometimes we listened to records. Yet even though they went out clubbing two or three nights a week, they did not own any techno-pop records. They collected the acoustic folkies like Bob Dylan and Victor Jara, who I’d heard of because the Clash liked him; he’d been killed by the fascists in Chile for singing songs about girls who were killed by the fascists in Spain. I liked listening to records with these girls so much, I even drove myself, by sheer force of will, to enjoy Simon & Garfunkel, and began relating to their sensitive little folk songs. “Hello doucheness, my old friend. I’ve come to suck with you again.”
They talked about the Spanish Civil War like it was yesterday, and everybody at school had very complex political opinions. The little brother of my Spanish host family spray-painted an A in a circle on the wall of the garage, which (as he explained) meant he was an anarchist. If you wore a Spanish flag on the wristband of your watch, it meant you were a fascist. I had never met real-life fascists or anarchists or socialists. I was used to calling someone “fascist” when they borrowed my pencil without resharpening it, so I was shocked to hear people call themselves fascists. There had been an attempted military coup three months earlier, and everybody had fierce ideas about that. The school had a mural of Guernica up in the lobby, but it was covered with a glass panel to keep right-wing students from defacing it with graffiti.
There were fascist discos and socialist discos. One of our Spanish classmates invited us to a party at a place called Aguacates. Kate, Ligia and I never refused a chance to go clubbing, but the Spanish girls wouldn’t go, because they said it was the right-wing disco. I was like, who cares, it’s just disco, right? At midnight the DJ played “Arriba España,” the perky theme song of the Fuerza Nueva Party, and everybody rushed to the floor to sing along and gave fascist salutes, even the very drunk girl in the fuchsia tube top whose cleavage I had spent the evening admiring. I remember you, Amanda, and even though I appreciated how the salute made your right breast stretch a little farther out of your top, I didn’t care anymore. I even stopped wondering if your bra was the kind that unhooked in the front.
We left Aguacates a little rattled. I understood why my friends wouldn’t go there. It was like “The National Front Disco,” one of my favorite Morrissey songs, about how there’s a group of friends and one of them starts going to the fascist disco and everybody grieves because they’ve lost their boy. In general, political enemies did not party together.
All summer long, the songs were the only souvenir from the night I could hold on to the next day—remembering all those sensations was overwhelming in sunlight, so I would hum the tunes to myself. I had to learn them by heart, because I had no way of finding out who sang them or how to get a copy. I knew I’d never hear them again back home. Most of them didn’t exist in the United States yet, and many wouldn’t get any airplay until the 1990s, when they became staples of ’80s-at-eight radio shows. Mecano were easily the most popular group in the discotecas—they were local heroes, a Madrid trio with two smoldering synth boys and a pretty girl in a pouffy dress. The boys played keyboards, or as they were called on the album cover, “teclados,” which meant “touched things” and therefore seemed sexual by definition. The boys always frowned and looked mean in pictures; the girl singer, Ana Torroja, looked like she despised the boys. Hot!
Whenever I looked at the picture, I imagined how great
it would be to join this group. What was Ana Torroja really like? Was one of the boys in the group her boyfriend? Or were the boys a couple? All their songs were either about putting on makeup or going to parties. Their big hit, “Me Colé en una Fiesta,” was about both—Ana crashes a party where she isn’t invited, sees her boyfriend dance with another girl, and cries all the way home. I had already heard plenty of songs with this story, but this one I was actually dancing to, which made it all completely different.
The boy in my Spanish host family, Jorge Luis, was into metal and punk. The only male friends I made in Spain were his friends, so we sat in their rooms listening to Iron Maiden. They made me translate “The Number of the Beast” for them. (“¡Seis! ¡Seis! ¡Seis!”) They thought guys who went to discotecas were not so cool. The kids at school brought more records for me to translate—nobody in the United States even remembered Meat Loaf, but these kids loved all the Meat Loaf records and (incredibly) Jim Steinman’s solo album. In gratitude, Jorge Luis presented me with an essay collection by Che Guevara, apparently because I still had a few unticked boxes on my Eighties Teen Cliché Bingo card.
I could see why music was a serious business here. This was a place where every detail of your identity—politics, religion, fashion—seemed to hang on your taste in pop. If you liked a certain kind of music, you dressed the part every day. The gap between Iron Maiden and Depeche Mode was as deep as the gap between anarchists and fascists. Unfortunately, the only Catholic kids I met were fascists, so I went to church by myself, where I seemed to be the only person under a hundred. I was afraid I’d crush someone’s wrist in the sign of peace.
Talking to Girls About Duran Duran: One Young Man's Quest for True Love and a Cooler Haircut Page 6
