I’m so glad we did, because we ended up coming back and selling more tickets on that tour than we ever sold in the eighties. I think there’s a future for Spandau still, because if you fall in love with songs or an artist in your formative years, you pretty much love them for the rest of your life.
HADLEY: The reunion wasn’t an easy decision. It took about six months of soul-searching before I thought I could meet with Gary. We met at the Flask in Highgate in North London, with John Keeble as the Henry Kissinger. We got a pint, and I said, “Right, before we go any further….” I launched a few grenades. Keeble was sitting there going, “Oh, Christ! It’s all falling apart already!”
Then Gary said a few things, and we sort of looked at each other. “Is this going to work?” he said. I said, “I’ll tell you what: I’ve said my piece. If this is going to work, then we have to draw a line under it and not talk about this again. What happened has happened. Do you think we could work together again?” And he said, “I’d really like that to be the case, and I think we can.”
So, I agreed. I said, “Look, happy to get together again, but I’m a solo artist. I’m not going to go back in Spandau Ballet [full-time].” I mean, I’ve been a solo artist for longer than I was ever in Spandau Ballet, and I have a good career. My allegiance, really, is to my own band, the Tony Hadley Band, who have been with me for years.
I suppose the question on a lot of people’s lips is, “Will we get back together again?” I would like to. There’s still a little bit of politics.
The Christmas before last, John Keeble said, “Have you heard from the rest of the guys?” I’m, “No, no, and I’m not expecting to either.” We’re all older. What you were when you were focused on music when you were a young fella, and what you become when you get married and you have children—you pick up other friends, and they become more of your best friends.
But we’re still old friends, which is great. We can all go out and have a pint and a meal, and we’d all laugh and joke and tell stories. But it’s not the same, and it never will be.
“BEING BOILED”
ou know the famous Human League story? The one where the founder is pushed out, leading to the departure of its creative axis and leaving only the singer and the guy who operates the slide projector? And you know how the singer, Phil Oakey, recruited two teenage backing singers who’d never sung a note just because he liked the way they danced at the Sheffield disco the Crazy Daisy? And you know how, a year later, that version of the group beat ABBA out of the coveted U.K. Christmas number-one spot with “Don’t You Want Me,” a record that would go on to kick open the doors of America to all manner of British synthesizer bands with fascinating haircuts? This is not that story. We approached the Human League on numerous occasions—occasions numerous enough to be innumerable. And each time, Oakey politely but firmly turned down our request for an interview. So while we don’t have that Human League story, we don’t not have a Human League story. We talked to Martyn Ware for our Heaven 17 chapter (see this page), and he spoke in some depth about the early days of the Human League, the singular talent of Oakey, and the writing and recording of “Being Boiled,” which left us with a dilemma: Do we memorize this stuff to use as anecdotes during one of our enjoyable new wave dinner parties? Or do we cheekily run it under the Human League banner because “Being Boiled,” released in 1978, is one of the foundations upon which the era we’re celebrating was built? We’re probably going to do both. So, this story does not appear with the cooperation of the current incarnation of the Human League. But it is a story about the first Human League single, told by a member of the group who helped write and produce it. Caveat emptor!
JB: While I was interviewing Martyn Ware, I stated that the first two lines of “Being Boiled” are the electronic-music equivalent of Mick Jagger’s opening couplet in “Sympathy for the Devil.” Sometimes words just pop out of my mouth, but in this case, I made sense—at least to myself. When Oakey intones, “Listen to the voice of Buddha / Saying stop your sericulture,” you instantly know you’re in the hands of someone who sees the world in a very different way, and you’ve just made the decision to hang on for the ride. This early, indie version of the Human League was awash in nerd influences—Michael Moorcock, Dark Star, Gerry Anderson, the dot matrix printer—and together they coalesced into the woozy, nightmarish narratives of Reproduction and the heartbroken, dystopian ballads of Travelogue. I’ve loved a lot of the music the Human League and Heaven 17 went on to make, but separately they never created a world quite as compelling as the one they built together back in their formative days.
LM: Nowadays, you know exactly what every pop song is about. It’s right there in the title: You’re a firework. You can stand under my umbrella. But there was a time that bands made us work for it. I had no idea what “Being Boiled” was about. Sericulture? But the music was so ominous and Oakey’s voice so hypnotizing, so meditative, I really wasn’t bothered. In the coming years, Oakey would be writing songs based on human emotions, but it’s this low-fiwarning to the silk industry that really makes my blood flow.
MARTYN WARE: Phil [Oakey] was my best mate from the fourth form, King Edward School in Sheffield. When I say “best mate,” I don’t mean there were a few of us who were best mates; I mean it was, literally, me and him. It was a real bromance thing. We used to ride around the Derbyshire countryside on motorbikes, [had] formative sexual experiences and drug experiences, parties at his house—all the things you go through when you’re a teenager. We shared everything.
[I didn’t know if he could sing, but] I knew he looked great. He had the floppy haircut, and he always dressed interestingly. He was a very quiet guy. He didn’t seek approbation from his peers. He was kind of otherworldly, but then the other half of his character was very down-to-earth. He has always been like this, and he always will be a complete contradiction. He’s like the best chum you could ever have, and at the same time, he’s kind of distant and aloof. I’ve never met anyone like him.
We’d grown up in our musical tastes together, and I knew how weird his tastes were. He turned me on to Frank Zappa and Carla Bley’s Escalator over the Hill. We both loved anything we could find that was electronic and experimental. I knew he was conceptually right [for the Human League]. What I didn’t know was, could he write top lines to the backing tracks? That wasn’t really a block anyway, because we could easily have written some lyrics together with him. But as a test, we gave him the backing track to “Being Boiled” and told him to go away for a couple of days. He came back with a bonkers lyric and his voice, not out of tune but a bit deadpan, without expression. It was clear he could hold a tune of some kind, and his voice was unusual. I likened it to the deeper-range side of Bowie. But really, his influences at the time were more like mine. He really liked Neil Diamond and Leonard Cohen and, to a certain extent, Peter Hamill. He was just a genuinely odd person who was very musical. He heard the musicality in everything without prejudice. We would apportion equal weight to the most banal disco tunes like “Let’s All Chant” by the Michael Zager Band and also, from a lyrical point of view, we liked it. [Early Human League song] “Dance Like a Star” is based on that same idea of what is the blandest lyric we can think of? Can we get to that crystalline thing? Can we think down to that level of the great disco masters? And at the other end, we were experimenting with extreme philosophical sci-finarrative and a lot of philosophical musings.
I didn’t know what to think [about “Being Boiled”], to be honest. I just liked it. I didn’t think, Fucking hell, we’ve hit the jackpot! It was more like, Who the hell is ever going to hear this? I played it for Paul Bower, who was in a punk band called 2.3 in Sheffield, who were signed to [independent Edinburgh label] Fast Product. He sent a cassette to [label boss] Bob Last. Next thing we know, he’s on the phone saying, “We want to put it out.” We were actually going to have a record out—a real record. Even though I’d had no experience in graphic design, I immediately determined that we wanted to cont
rol artistically how we appeared. I went down to Andrews, the stationers in town, near the city hall, and bought a bunch of Letraset [sheets of transferrable lettering beloved by fanzine writers in the seventies], and knocked together the cover for “Being Boiled.”
Culturally speaking, it was quite a different environment. It was in the immediate post-punk phase, and record companies were looking for acts that were unusual, as opposed to similar to something that was successful. It was a unique point in pop history in Britain. We just happened to be around at that moment. We thought what we were doing and the way we were using the limited tools we had was unique. The Korg, which I’ve still got in my studio now, cost 350 quid [about $500]. The main workhorse synth we used was a Roland System 100, which I still have as well. That cost nearer the 1,200-pound mark. They were both bought on hire purchase [lay-away]. That’s why, when we were touring in the late seventies, Ian [Craig Marsh, League cofounder] built a structure out of steel frame and Perspex to protect them. The journalists at the time were going, “What a powerful indication of the alienation of contemporary youth,” but it was just to stop the skinheads from gobbing on them.
We were pleasantly surprised by the open-mindedness of the punk audiences. But our punk epiphany was in the early to mid-seventies with bands like the New York Dolls, Suicide, even Parliament and Funkadelic, as well as the punkier bits of the German new wave of the seventies: Amon Düül, Can, Neu!, and Faust.
I was confused by the reaction to [“Being Boiled”]. I was amazed that anyone would be interested. I’m not being self-effacing; I just thought it was such an out-there piece of work. I felt like it was a novelty record, to be honest, but then when you get a couple of compliments from people you respect, like noted reviewers in music magazines, you start thinking quite differently quite quickly and thinking, Maybe it is really good. One of those music papers, Melody Maker, had guest columnists who came in and did reviews. John Lydon reviewed “Being Boiled,” and his review was “Trendy hippies.” Two words. At first, I was really upset, but then I thought, John Lydon’s taken notice of us. It must be having some kind of impact.
MIXTAPE: 5 More End-of-the-Seventies Songs That Pointed the Way to the Eighties 1. “Boys Don’t Cry,” The Cure 2. “Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” Bauhaus 3. “Hong Kong Garden,” Siouxsie and the Banshees 4. “At Home He’s a Tourist,” Gang of Four 5. “Public Image,” Public Image Ltd.
It sold something like 5,000 copies in three months, and that was a lot for an independent single. And of course, that’s when the record companies start sniffing around, because they see something underground that might break big. EMI were interested, and though we could have got more money out of them, they were just too corporate, and we wanted to keep complete control. It wasn’t because we were control freaks. We had such a clear artistic vision that we couldn’t afford to sign to someone who was going to change it. So, besides the fact that Virgin wasn’t the biggest advance we could have got, that was the home we wanted.
The Human League had a manifesto, a set of guiding principles. It exists as a written document. I can give you the gist of it: Only electronic instruments—there was no such thing as samplers or even MIDI at that point. No found sounds, although that’s not quite true; we did use some sound effects on “Circus of Death.” We were never going to sing songs about love or use the word “love.” There was a list of words that were banned, and “love” was one. We created quite a challenge, because we had to find different subjects to sing about. If you take love, sex, and human relationships out of the game, you’re not left with a whole heap. That’s how you get science fiction and philosophical tales. We really wanted to create this holistic—although we didn’t know the word at the time—almost hermetically sealed world of meaning and narrative. Right from the start, we wanted people who listened to us to regard it as entering into our world, where we could, over a period of time, flesh it out with our artistic content. So it’s not just about music. It’s about lyrical content, it’s about the kind of films you watch, it’s about the kind of novels you read, it’s about the kind of visual art you like. It all fed back into a worldview.
THAT WAS THEN
BUT THIS IS NOW
The Human League achieved cult success in the U.K. over the next couple of years before corporate machinations resulted in their implosion and the end of the Ware-Oakey bromance. As for “Being Boiled,” British producer Richard X, renowned and dismissed as the godfather of the mashup, revived the seminal synth song twice: First in 2001, on his Girls on Top EP, where it was used with the vocals from TLC’s “No Scrubs” and titled “Being Scrubbed”; second, as a Top 10 single for U.K. reality show–reject supergroup Liberty X, where it was mashed up with Chaka Khan’s “Ain’t Nobody” and titled “Being Nobody.”
“TEMPTATION”
fter producers-musicians Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh were ousted from the Human League, they seemed poised to steamroll their former workmates. They formed the production company British Electric Foundation, which they used to launch their new incarnation, the trio Heaven 17 (the name was taken from the fictional pop group invented by Anthony Burgess in A Clockwork Orange). They presented themselves as hardworking executives armed with spreadsheets and shoebox-size cellphones. Despite being showered with plaudits on its release, Heaven 17’s 1981 debut, Penthouse and Pavement, was not a source of successful singles. The music produced under the B.E.F. banner—the yellow cassette Music for Stowaways, the B.E.F. covers album Music of Quality and Distinction, Vol. 1 (which nevertheless helped relaunch Tina Turner’s career)—were appreciated by similarly slim audiences. Meanwhile, the Human League’s Dare just kept getting bigger. However, the success of Heaven 17’s second album, 1983’s The Luxury Gap, evened the playing field.
JB: I’m not one of those people who weeps tears over the wonder of vinyl. I don’t have a side in the analog vs. digital debate. I like not having to get up to turn the record over just as much as I appreciate not having to lumber over to the TV for the pleasure of manually changing the channels. But after listening to both sides of a record, it is a particular pleasure to realize that one of them is your favorite. Side one of Heaven 17’s Penthouse and Pavement is a smug, accomplished powerhouse. If you wanted to introduce your new incarnation and extinguish any lingering comparisons with your former workplace, you couldn’t do better than the one-two punch of “(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang” and “Penthouse and Pavement,” followed by “I’m Your Money” and “Soul Warfare.” Side two has its highlights—“At the Height of the Fighting,” “Let’s All Make a Bomb,” for instance—though it’s hard to prevent the needle from returning to the breakneck beginning of “Fascist Groove Thang” a few more times. But as much as I love that side of that album, I have never been quite sure if Heaven 17 were a pop group or an ironic comment on being a pop group. When we spoke, Ware confirmed that I was correct to be confused, saying of “Fascist Groove Thang”: “We thought it was a comedy record.”
I was less confused about The Luxury Gap. Thematically, it dealt less with corporate culture and socioeconomic downfall than with broken hearts and doomed relationships. The Luxury Gap had the electronic age’s own wee-hours Frank Sinatra song in “Come Live with Me,” it had the tense “Let Me Go,” and it had Heaven 17’s first genuine hit, “Temptation.” Glenn Gregory’s deep, burnished voice has always sounded better alongside a female vocalist, and he’s never had a better partner than session singer Carol Kenyon. Even without Kenyon’s contribution, the track is punchy and melodramatic, but she inflames it, and she brought it even further to life via a series of star-making TV performances with the band. Heaven 17 may have adopted the image of captains of industry, but “Temptation” put them firmly in the executive suite.
LM: What he said!
MARTYN WARE: The Human League were two albums into our deal with Virgin and tens of thousands of pounds in the hole, unrecouped because of tour support. The albums weren’t particularly expensive to produce, but t
hey were just about covering their costs. Despite the best efforts of Virgin to break us, in inverted commas, we were only appearing to be popular with the cognoscenti, as opposed to the general public, and we didn’t know why. Our live following was still building, we were planning a European tour, we’d got all the slides sorted out, but there was pressure being exerted on us. [Manager] Bob Last was talking to the record company, and he was filtering it back to us through his perception: “You need to have a hit album, boys.” We never felt that we were going to get dropped, but it did cause tension, and I’d known Phil [Oakey] as my best friend for God knows how long—six years, I think. That made the split even more upsetting.
Bob, unbeknownst to me but not unbeknownst to Phil and Ian [Craig Marsh], had secretly been having talks with the record company to destabilize the situation and dropping words in Phil’s ear that maybe he could be a solo singer. Bob was confident he could manipulate the situation so that he could keep the band name and bring in new songwriters like his mate Jo Callis, who’s a good friend of mine—no blame apportioned there. This was all presented as a fait accompli one day when I turned up at the studio. With no inkling there was anything going on, I said, “Hi, boys, what’s going on?” and they said, “We’re throwing you out of the group, Martyn.” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Then my automatic Sheffieldness kicked in, and I said, “No, you’re not. It’s my group.” Like Jack Black in School of Rock. Because it was my group—it was mine and Ian’s. The presumption was that Ian was going to stay in the group, and the justification for him staying was that they needed the name, otherwise they’d be breaking the contract for the upcoming European tour. They were willing to compensate me somewhat; however, there was no money to do it. What threw a spanner in the works was, the day after that, Ian called me up and said, “I can’t do it. I want to go with you and do something. I feel more of an empathy with what you’re doing than all the machinations that have been going on behind the scenes, which I don’t agree with.” That was not what they reckoned on at all.
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