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Human League – Dare SDE

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Ahoy, pop kids of the AW.

The folks at Super Deluxe Edition are doing a blu-ray featuring hi-res stereo, 5.1 and Atmos mixes of Dare, the Canadian Sound of the Crowd mini-album and all of the 12″ singles and b-sides. The only thing missing is the 7″ mix of the early version of tSotC, because the master tape has disintegrated.

I’m sure it will sound fantastic. When the SACD was done years ago, it was a flat transfer because the master tape sounded so good.

Still one week left to get your order in.

The first album I bought with my own money (strictly speaking, a Christmas record token) and I still love it.

https://superdeluxeedition.com/news/the-human-league-dare-sde-exclusive-blu-ray-audio/

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Comments

  1. One of my favourites too (although I only had a ropey tape copy for a few years until I bought a proper version).
    Only let down by one track in my opinion, but – similar to Come On Eileen at the end of Too-Rye-Ay – it just fits the flow despite hearing it over 1900 million times

  2. The Human League – Dare (1981)

    I often wonder what went through Mr and Mrs Sulley’s minds when Phil Oakey, with his lop-sided hair and high heels, sat on their sofa with Philip Adrian Wright and asked if their daughter would give up college and join a virtually unknown pop band. In the event, they said yes and I don’t think they regret it.

    Phil Oakey is probably the pop star I admire the most. There was a time, when he faced nothing but adversity. He was staring at bankruptcy, two weeks away from a European tour, lacking any real musical ability with only a slide projectionist for company. He remained steadfast. He kept the faith. He continued to believe in his dream. And, his dream came true.

    The Human League started as a duo. In 1977, two computer operators took advantage of the falling price of electronic components and bought a synthesiser. They were Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh. The synthesiser was a Korg 700S. They played Tamla Motown in the style of electronic art rock. They soon made a name for themselves at student parties and could afford a second synthesiser. Before long, they decided they needed a singer. Oakey had the look but even he wasn’t sure he could sing.

    They signed for a major label (Virgin), released a few singles and a couple of albums that crept into the bottom of the charts, just as Gary Numan stole their thunder and took the synth art rock sound to the very top. Ware and Marsh left to form Heaven 17. Oakey and the visuals projector retained The Human League name. It was at this crossroads that Oakey bumped into Sally Ann Sulley and Joanne Catherill. He was entranced watching them dance at a club, the Crazy Daisy. They were natural, unschooled, ungainly even, but with a cool girl-next-door demeanour. They were already fans of the band and so, too, their dreams came true, ending up as band members for a tour they’d bought tickets for as fans. The girls’ cooing vocals wrapped affectionately around Oakey’s deep baritone, as dark and as handsome as his looks. They complemented his striking on stage appearance perfectly, giving a hint of romance, schoolgirl crushes and joi de vivre.

    Put Martin Rushent in the producer’s chair and add a couple of proper musicians to the mix, Ian Burden and Jo Callis, albeit playing unfamiliar instruments, and everything fell into place almost immediately. They were effectively a bunch of unabashed amateurs flying by the seat of their pants. The Sound Of The Crowd was where they found their sound, bass-heavy smooth with shards of Sheffield steel, its infectious toms drawing people to the dance floor, cleverly mixing Bryan Ferry and Abba with synthesisers. If it made them dance around the studio, then they knew they had a hit. The Sound Of The Crowd is incredibly simple. The beat is 4/4, you can play the lead line with one finger and the chorus consists of yells that increase in intensity until they reach a scream. For the lyrics, we are introduced to Oakey’s eye for the bizarre in the mundane. “Stroke a pocket with a print of a laughing sound” is an unusual call to the dance floor. In the Pop scene of 1980/81, it sounded fabulously modern and futuristic.

    Mainly, Phil Oakey says whatever is on his mind. The opener, The Things That Dreams Are Made Of, is a modest statement of intent. All they want is love, affection, cash to spend and two or three friends. The shout out to The Ramones is telling. They, too, play incredibly simple songs but with guitars. Norman Wisdom’s place in the scheme of things is unknown. The Thing That Dreams Are Made Of is a choice introduction, expressing longstanding human emotions using the latest hi-tech musical instruments. Open Your Heart is a perfect example of how Oakey’s straight talking can touch the soul. This is the sweetest melody on the album, provided by Callis, stretching Oakey away from his usual speaking voice into a higher register. It’s a song of a man on the cusp of disaster, persuading himself to take the plunge. It is as powerful and as affecting as Peter Gabriel’s Salisbury Hill. He pulls off a similar trick with Love Action, another dance number made irresistible by a buoyant bassline and percussive synthesisers. “This is Phil talking”, a perfectly mascara’d eye looking directly at the audience. He wants to say so much about love that he breaks into a disarmingly honest rap, the words tripping over themselves, “I believe in truth though I lie a lot”, as the synthesisers scatter around like disturbed mice.

    It’s not all joy and sunshine. Things get bleak towards the end of side one and stay like that until the middle of side two. Darkness is a night’s sleep disturbed by hypnagogic hallucinations. Do Or Die is a desperate attempt to escape an oppressive relationship. Side two is introduced by a disembowelled minute of the Get Carter theme, just a single skeletal line. I Am The Law is a straight-faced take on Judge Dread, slow, methodical and backed by eerie wisps of sound. The album is re-energised by a thunderous Seconds, seemingly powered by industrial machinery. The subject matter, however, is the assassination of JFK.

    The finale, Don’t You Want Me, is an update of A Star Is Born. A lovesick Oakey projects his relationship with Sulley forwards five years and finds himself no longer needed. Her voice wavers with emotion, defiant but hardly brimming with confidence. Both are too stubborn to admit their desperate need for each other. Oakey was distraught when Virgin insisted on releasing it as single but they were proved right when it became their best seller.

    A Very British Synthesiser Group, a deluxe overview of their career, includes a disc of early takes. The music isn’t that different. After all, they glorified in their simple synthesised sound. However, the vocals are just guides and the absence of the backing from Sally Ann and Jo illustrates the sense of joy they bring to the final, polished records.

    The cover sleeve, too, is simple, beautiful and thoroughly modern. Each band member is perfectly made up gazing through a narrow rectangular window onto a glossy sheen of white space. The words The Human League are in a pastel blue and a smaller, fully capitalised Dare is blush pink. It’s as glamorous as a Vogue magazine cover.

    Phil Oakey backed himself and realised his dream. 1981 was The Human League’s peak with four smash hit singles, one of which was a global Christmas number one, and an album of absolute pop perfection. They sounded good anywhere; in a club, on the radio, in the car, at a banquet for a queen. The Human League never hit those dizzy heights again, especially album-wise, but they continued to release intoxicating singles right through their long career. It was as though they had captured the legendary lightening in a bottle but couldn’t repeat the trick, unable to work out how they had pulled it off.

    There is a purity to this Pop music, an innocence, an unselfconsciousness. It is frivolous, chirpy and timeless. It’s totally relatable. Despite his unbalanced haircut, Phil and the girls seemed very ordinary and straightforward people, girls next door, bloke in the street, and that’s what makes Dare great. Unencumbered by guitars, the listener can simply let their hair down and have fun. Its title is an instruction to the audience as much as the band. It may not have been built to last but it still sounds as fresh as a crazy daisy today.

  5. Just as on the Deep Purple Made In Japan thread I felt the inexplicable need to express my preference for Rainbow over DP and On Stage over Made in Japan, I now feel compelled to express my overwhelming preference for Penthouse & Pavement above Dare.

    • On the whole, I would tend to agree with you. Both are fabulous (and essential) albums, but Penthouse edges it for me.

      I recall a BBC4 doc (??) a number of years ago that was (I think) about the rise of synth bands in Sheffield – it had a segment where Glenn Gregory and Phil Oakey were being interviewed together and Glenn Gregory asked “so Phil, who of us was better” (or words to that effect or could have been the other way round – I’m getting old you know)

      • I understand your reticence about P&P. The follow-ups, The Luxury Gap, How Men Are and Pleasure One, are much more accessible, as they slyly copied some the affectations of their more successful offshoot*, if chucking in some awareness of soul and jazz, each beyond Oakey’s limited vision. (Not, per se, a put down. As, within his limited range, he is superb. I just think Glenn Gregory a better singer.
        *I know, seemingly the other way round, but not really, at least in my mind.

  6. I would not be at all suprised if this is the first stab of a full-on multi-CD box set, which seems somehow overdue.

    Dare, the Dare: Singles & Remixes download compilation from two years ago (which is, more or less, the bonus content of the blu-ray), the Sound of the Crowd Canadian mini-album, Love & Dacing, the Fascination! Canadian mini-album. Pop e’m in a box, that’ll be fifty quid to you, guv.

  7. Lovely writing, @Tiggerlion.

    I’ve got a lot of time for the League. I’m missing a couple of their later albums, so I’m not their biggest fan, but they have created some wonderful songs and Dare is obviously an immortal piece of synth pop magic. I also love the story of the girls’ early days, when they juggled schoolwork and Top of the Pops, and missed some studio sessions because they were doing their exams.

    I like the fact that they’ve survived ups and downs and their appeal becoming more selective, and can still fill many an arena and put on a really good show. They’ve also managed the rare feat of never putting out a really duff album.

    In passing, I read a recent interview with Martyn Ware in which he said that as part of the deal done when he left the HL for Heaven 17, he was granted 1-2% (IIRC) of the profits from Dare. He didn’t state the eventual amount that came in, but said just that percentage was enough to buy him a flat in London. Which was nice.

    • I believe the deal was specifically for Phil to keep the name The Human League, and until “Temptation”, H17 made more money from that deal than they did from actually being H17…

  8. Dare is a wonderful, wonderful album, and, ubiquity or not, Don’t You Want Me is still one of the most stirring single songs ever made, the intro still enough to bump my geese deliciously. The extended and almost instrumental version, from Love and Dancing, makes that an essential purchase, too.
    I have no small love for the 2nd album of this iteration of the League, Hysteria, too, and several of the cuts on the Jam/Lewis helmed Crash are good, if the rest are decidedly not. Not much familiar with mush since. Maybe someone can volunteer opinion?

    • Octopus was a return to the classic sound of ver League, after the Jam & Lewis etc pop experiements, and all the better for it. Jeez, even that is 30 years old!

      I saw them at the RAH on that tour. Awful sound, great t-shirt.

    • Apparently would have been very difficult to do

      “By the end of the remixing process, the master tape of Love and Dancing had 2,200 main edits and some 400 further, smaller edits for the stuttering repetition effects. This amount of splicing was so excessive – with an edit every half a second[13] – that the master tape came very close to disintegrating. Rushent recalled: “You couldn’t fast-forward it or fast-rewind it, so the first thing I did was copy the album on to another tape, before the original master fell apart.”[5]”

      (SDE site via Wikipedia)

  11. Pete Shelley’s Homosapien album is the unseen third party in the League vs. Heaven 17 battle (or something). If it hadn’t have been for the experimentation that Martin Rushent had done with Shelley, who had a history of pushing boundaries, then maybe these guys would not have pushed themselves as hard as they did. Certainly that album allowed Rushent to learn how to work all the stuff he’d bought for his studio.

    I never liked Heaven 17 until I saw them supporting Squeeze a few years ago, and became a fan overnight. With the League, I mean, Dare is hard to beat, but there’s so much quirky stuff in their catalog. I love ‘The Black Hit of Space’ from before.

    Not sure what I am saying, but it seems like a lot of interesting stuff happened in this general area.

        • I’d never heard of that mini-album, until checking out Discogs, to see quite what else they have released, post Crash, Octopus being the only other I am familiar with.. Much as I am interested, the only affordable CDs versions, of the Fascination long EP, are then scuppered by prohibitive p & p.

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