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Fashionable early
The Human League and Sheffield electronica
BY FRANKLIN BRUNO
Related Links

+ Human League fan site

+ League Online, a fan site

+ Blind Youth, a fan site

WATCH streamed videos

+ "Made in Sheffield"

In an interview appended to the concert DVD The Human League Live at the Dome (Secret Films/MVD), frontman Philip Oakey comments, "We were inevitably going to look unfashionable, because we’d been so fashionable." This is an understatement. In the States, the Human League are mainly remembered for the perennial "Don’t You Want Me Baby?" (though "Human" went #1 here as well). But back home in England, "Baby" was merely the biggest single from 1981’s epochal Dare. Martin Rushent’s production raised the bar for guitarless pop, and the inspired addition of Susanne Sulley and Joanne Catherall, two Sheffield scenestresses with no previous band experience, made the Human League more, well, human.

The ’90s saw the band flounder as grunge flowered. That hasn’t kept them off the road; the December 2003 Brighton show documented here capped six solid months on tour. Just four out of the 18 songs are drawn from post-1986 releases. Backed by an artful mix of programmed tracks and live musicians, the rest of the 80-minute set balances monophonic proto-house ("Hard Times") and Motown-on-ice songcraft ("Mirror Man"). Futurist nostalgia acts don’t come more sleekly packaged.

The most enjoyable aspect of the disc is the chance to see what ordinary performers the principals are. After two decades in the business, Sulley and Catherall are still non-singers, never so much as when attempting to harmonize. And neither one has what you’d call inspired stage moves. Sulley marches about in a series of backless dresses; Catherall usually hews close to the mike, even on songs she doesn’t sing. It hardly matters: everyone looks grateful to have an audience at all.

For a less ingratiating glimpse of the Human League, check out Made in Sheffield (Plexifilm), director Eve Wood’s documentary on that town’s electronic post-punk scene. In a BBC appearance, Oakey peers impassively from behind a green-tinted peek-a-boo ’do as the band make like lab technicians in the background. Most of this line-up was ousted before Dare, including co-founders Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh, who rebounded with Heaven 17’s equally glossy Penthouse and Pavement. Other key players included industrial gurus Cabaret Voltaire, and Vice Versa, who finally achieved success after adding "real" instruments and morphing into ABC.

Several interviewees note that though Sheffield had much in common with Manchester, Leeds, or Liverpool — other British cities that nurtured lively regional scenes in punk’s wake — few of the Sheffield bands aped punk. Instead of learning three guitar chords, they soldered together primitive synthesizers, working in the shadow of Kraftwerk and Eno-era Roxy Music, not to mention the steel mills that provided the city’s industrial base and its constant soundtrack. (Sheffield produced Def Leppard around the same time — so much for technological determinism.)

As an example of moviemaking, Made in Sheffield is rudimentary. Archival footage and talking-head segments are padded with Unsolved Mysteries–worthy "re-enactments"; a slo-mo sequence of a bloke heaving a guitar off a bridge is especially silly. Still, Wood’s film achieves a music documentary’s first goal: after watching it, you’ll want to know, and hear, more.

As with many such surveys, it’s the forgotten bands who fascinate. There are the Experts, traditional but well-loved pub-rock mainstays who made an ill-timed move to London just as journalists began covering the hype in their home town. There’s Artery, whom nearly every interview subject speaks of reverently but who left barely a mark on the wider world. On the evidence of performance clips, frontman Mark Goulthorpe possessed a palpable intensity akin to Ian Curtis’s; in a present-day interview, he wonders, "What are the mechanisms to create success — is it the work, or is it the exposure?" Guitarist Mick Fiddler, visibly strung out, answers simply, "Patience."

 


Issue Date: December 2 - 8, 2005
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