The Human League make it big: Dare and Don't You Want Me

"Sound of the Crowd" was the first fruit of Phil Oakey's songwriting partnership with Ian Burden, formerly the bassist in Graph, an experimental Sheffield band. 'I still reckon that song is one of the maddest records that's ever got in the Top 20', says Oakey. 'The whole thing runs on tom-toms, but they're synth toms, and it's got very odd screaming sounds'. There's also a foreboding dub feel of bass pressure and cold, cavernous space (Burden was a reggae fiend). "Sound of the Crowd" also featured backing vocals from tow other new recruits, Joanne Catherall and Susanne Sulley.

"Love Action" and "Open Your Heart", the rejuvenated League's next two chartbusting singles, were practically manifestos for a new humanized-not-Numanized direction in electropop. In a weird way, "Love Action" sounds like its title: pulsing and glistening, an iridescent affirmation. Yet, for all its warmth and wetness, "Love Action" still retains something of the aberrant quality of "Sound of the Crowd", making it an unlikely candidate for a number 3 hit. 'It's not got a proper chorus', admits Oakey. It's basically two different songs bolted together: the verses, from a song called "I Believe in Love" are 'confessional nonsense, what I was feeling at the time', says Oakey, while the angular not-quite-a-chorus section is from another songs about watching Sylvia Kristel in the softcore erotic movie Emmanuelle.

Released in October 1981, Dare presented a perfect meld of tradition and innovation. "The Things that Dreams Are Made of" saw Oakey reeling off a list of life-enhancing stuff over electronicized Glitterbeat: 'Everybody needs love and adventure/Everybody needs cash to spend...Everybody needs two or three friends'.

"I Am the Law" turned The Clash's "I Fought the Law" inside out - it was a sympathetic song about authority and the police inspired by Oakey's encounter with an injured bouncer back when he was working as a hospital porter.



"Don't You Want Me", the fourth single off Dare and the Christmas number 1 for 1981, was their most sonically conventional single yet, from its perky groove to its trim verse/chorus structure. "Don't You Want Me" further underlined the importance of Joanne Catherall and Susanne Sulley to The Human League: their biggest hit was the one that gave the greatest prominence to their modest vocals. A duet between Oakey and Sulley, it deliciously rewrites the story of how 'the girls' were discovered and projects five years into the future. Oakey sings as the Svengali who plucks a girl from obscurity ('You were working as a waitress in a cocktail bar') and turns her into 'someone new', only to be abandoned by his protégé-lover now she has the world at her feet. Defiant (if ever so slightly off key), Sulley sings the part of the provincial dreamer who always knew deep down she was destined for better things, and is now determined to make her own path in life. (In reality, it was Catherall who became Oakey's girlfriend).
The "Don't You Want Me" video added further layers of artifice. A Brechtian conundrum, it depicted the band making a promo, cutting between scenes from the video-within-a-video and action off-set or in the editing suite (the band watching their own rushes). 'I don't know where that idea came from originally, whether it was Phil's or the director Steve Barron's', says Bob Last. 'But from the band's point of view, a great deal of the appeal was that it was a film, shot on 35mm - something that was extremely unusual in those very early days of the video industry. And that was a straightforwardly aspirational thing: the idea of doing a video with high production values. If you look at the promo, there's a big film camera prominent in it. And from a marketing standpoint, it was very smart, because here were these girls in the band who really were "regular girls" now appearing in a movie. It just made perfect sense'.

Electronic Dreams: The Human League, Gary Numan, Ultravox, Visage, Spandau Ballet

A hit single continued to elude The Human League. As if to rub salt in their wounds, on the eve of the release of their second album Travelogue, pop-punkers The Undertones took the piss out of the band in their Top 10 hit "My Perfect Cousin". Kevin, the song's goody-two-shoes subject (he's got a degree 'in economics, maths, physics and bionics') starts an electronic band with some art-school boys. 'His mother bought him a synthesizer', spits singer Feargal Sharkey with disgust, 'Got The Human League in to advise her'. Now that he's in a band, Kevin has girls chasing him, 'But what a shame/It's in vain...Kevin, he's in love with himself'. This pretty much crystallized the early Human League's public image - music for narcissistic art-school poseurs and science geeks.

The Undertones - My Perfect Cousin 1980

Their first album Reproduction's big single, "Empire State Human", concerned a man who keeps on growing.  

The Human League - Empire State Human 1979

Travelogue's "The Black Hit of Space" imagines a record so monstrously bland it turns into a kind of predatory cultural void sucking up everything in its path. As it climbs the charts, the rest of the Top 40 disappears 'until there was nothing but it left to buy'. But all the clever astrophysical details (gravity being so multiplied in proximity to the disc that your record player's tone arm weighs 'more than Saturn', etc.) only confirmed the band's nerdy image.

The Human League - The Black Hit of Space 1980

Gary Numan's music rocked, and even when it didn't, it possessed an almost symphonic grandeur - just listen to his most chillingly beautiful song, "Down in the Park", a sort of dystopian power ballad.

Gary Numan and Tubeway Army - Down in the Park 1979

Gary's sullen pout and wounded eyes made for a perfect pin-up in the classic teenybop tradition, with transgender appeal: girls dreamed of thawing the iceman, bringing him back to life; boys identified with his loneliness, allegorized in songs like "M.E.". Here Numan sang from the point of view of 'the last living machine' on an earth where all the people have died. 'Its own power source is running down. I used to have a picture in my mind of this sad and desperately alone machine standing in a desert-like wasteland, just waiting to die', he said.

Gary Numan - M.E. 1979

As for the atmosphere of numb anomie and alienated sexuality, Ultravox laid it all on the table with the debut's manifesto-like "I Want to be a Machine" and Ballard-damaged "My Sex". 'My Sex is a spark of electro flesh', sings John Foxx. 'A neon outline on a high-rise overspill...skyscraper shadows on a car-crash overpass...It wears no future faces, owns just random gender'.

Ultravox - I Want to be a Machine 1977


Ultravox - My Sex 1977

Visage songs like "Fade to Grey" and "The Damned Don't Cry" conjured what Mark Fisher called 'the Euro-aesthete's "exhaustion from life"', especially in tandem with the videos, which evoked pre-war desolation derived from Cabaret and Fritz Lang.

Visage - Fade to Grey 1980


Visage - The Damned Don't Cry 1982

With impeccable timing, the late summer of 1980 saw David Bowie staging his comeback with a number 1 hit, "Ashes to Ashes", which tapped into the same effete, melancholy mood and European electronic sound, as if to remind everybody that he'd done it first with side two of Low. Visage's frontman Steve Strange, dressed as a pierrot, made an appearance in the "Ashes" video.

David Bowie - Ashes to Ashes 1980

Instead of looking westwards for inspiration, the New Romantics pointedly turned their gaze to the east - Germany, obviously, but also Russia. Visage recorded a song called "Moon over Moscow", while Spandau Ballet, the other major group of the scene, plunged into Cossack/Constructivist kitsch with their single "Musclebound".

Visage - Moon Over Moscow 1980


Spandau Ballet - Musclebound 1981

Singer Tony Hadley's operatic vocals bore scant relation to black music. Picking up on the reference to Spandau - site of a purpose-built prison in western Berlin, where Nazi leaders such as Rudolf Hess and Albert Speer were incarcerated - and the neo-classical marble torso on the cover of their debut album Journeys to Glory, neo-fascist magazine Bulldog hailed Spandau as fine exponents of 'musclebound, Nordic' art. New Romanticism, for them, represented a natural aristocracy: the collective narcissism of a self-chosen few. 'I am beautiful and clean and so very, very young' as Hadley crooned on their first hit, "To Cut a Long Story Short".

Spandau Ballet - To Cut a Long Story Short 1980

Meanwhite Ultravox - reformed by keyboardist Billy Currie when he sensed that the pop weather had finally changed in their favour, and with Midge Ure as its new singer - plunged into full-blown Teutonica with the quasi-classical "Vienna". Wreathed in the sonic equivalent of dry ice, this ludicrously portentous ballad, inspired by a vague notion of a past-its-prime Habsburg Empire sliding into decadence, reached number 2 in the charts in the first weeks of 1981 and hovered there for what seemed like an eternity.

Ultravox - Vienna 1980

The sound Martin Rushent and Buzzock frontman Pete Shelley developed was a transitional hybrid of guitar-based New Wave and electropop, heard at its best on the superb single "Homo Sapien". Released in August 1981, "Homo Sapien" was a coded coming-out for Shelley, but the single's innuendoes (the fruity way Shelley enunciates 'homo sapien', plus couplets like 'homo superior/my interior') provoked an unofficial ban from Radio One, and this fatally thwarted its chart prospects.

Pete Shelley - Homo Sapien 1981

Sex Gang Children: the rise and fall of Bow Wow Wow

Bow Wow Wow's second release, Your Cassette Pet, continued to exploit the underage-sex angle. In "Sexy Eiffel Tower, singer Annabella Lwin plays a suicidal girl about to leap from the top of Paris's most famous landmark. She gets implausibly horny in the proximity of death: 'Feel my treasure chest/Let's have sex before I die/Be my special guest'. Plunging through the air ('Falling legs around your spire') she enjoys a petit mort or two before the grand mort of hitting the ground. Annabella claimed, with apparent sincerity, that the panting sounds she expertly imitated weren't meant to be orgasm but the sound of panic.

Bow Wow Wow - Sexy Eiffel Tower 1980

"Louis Quatorze" concerns a pervy bandit-of-love who surprises Annabella with unannounced visits and ravishment at gunpoint. The music, though, almost vanquished any moral reservations: Bow Wow Wow had developed an exhilarating and unique sound, all frolicking polyrhythms, twangabilly guitar and frantic-but-funky bass. Add Annabella's girlish, euphoric vocals - especially charming on a cover of the Johnny Mercer standard "Fools Rush In" - and the results were irresistible.

Bow Wow Wow - Louis Quatorze 1980


Bow Wow Wow - Fools Rush In 1980

More striking than its contents, though, was Your Cassette Pet's radical format: a cassette-only release midway in length between an EP and an album, it retailed at only £1.99 (half the price of a traditional vinyl album) and came in a 'flip-pack' carton similar to a cigarette packet.

McLaren's contrived controversies kept backfiring. Desperate to stir up some buzz for Bow Wow Wow's debut album proper, he designed its cover as a simulation of Dejeuner sur l'Herbe, Manet's 1863 painting denounced as 'indecent' by Napoleon III for its image of a naked woman surrounded by fully clothed men. Annabella posed nude (under duress, she later revealed) but because she was still just under sixteen, her mother managed to stop the cover from being used. 

Another blow for McLaren came with the commercial failure of "Chihuahua" - simultaneously Bow Wow Wow's most seductive single to date and their manager's most blatantly cynical gambit. Mouthing McLaren's words to a wistful, Blondie-like melody, Annabella sang about being 'a rock 'n' roll puppet', confessing, 'I can't dance and I can't sing/I can't do anything' and warning, 'I'm a horrible idiot/So don't fall in love with me'. You could mount a defence of "Chihuahua" as a sly deconstruction of the pop industry's machinery of star-lust and fantasy. But if you consider McLaren's genuine anti-feminism, his real-world treatment of Annabella as meat, and the way he ventriloquized those humiliating words through Annabella's own lips, "Chihuahua" leaves a bad taste.

Bow Wow Wow - Chihuahua 1981

Finally, Bow Wow Wow scored their UK pop breakthrough in early 1982 with "Go Wild in the Country", an anti-urban fantasy featuring risqué lines about swinging naked from the trees and romping in fields 'where snakes in the grass are absolutely free'. "Go Wild" exhorted youth to spurn KFC and McDonalds and go 'hunting and fishing'.

Bow Wow Wow - Go Wild in the Country 1982

On the sultry, bossa nova-inflected "Hello Hello Daddy, I'll Sacrifice You", Annabella played the role of devouring earth-mother goddess as a coquette with a knife behind her back. The sweetly crooned lines about woman being 'more body than soul and more soul than mind' were vintage McLaren misoginy cobbled together from Lévi-Strauss, Jung and The Golden Bough.

Bow Wow Wow - Hello Hello Daddy, I'll Sacrifice You 1982

By the time Bow Wow Wow scored their second UK Top 10 hit and American breakthrough with "I Want Candy" - an exciting but vacuous remake of a sixties bubblegum tune - McLaren had pretty much ceased managing the band.

Bow Wow Wow - I Want Candy 1982

Malcolm McLaren, Bow Wow Wow and Adam & The Ants

In the summer of 1979 Virgin released Some Product: Carri On, a hastily assembled album of Pistols radio interviews, complete with a cover depicting imaginary Sex Pistols spin-off merchandise - 'Fatty Jones' chocolate bars, a 'Vicious Burger', a Sid action doll complete with coffin.

The Pistols' manager Malcolm McLaren ended up half-heartedly managing a London band called Adam & The Antz. Adam was an ex-art-school punk who'd built up a devoted cult following with mildly kinky songs like "Whip in my Valise" and "Beat My Guest".

Adam & The Antz - Whip in my Valise 1979


Adam & The Antz - Beat My Guest 1979

But the singer also had a mind of his own, and McLaren flinched from the prospect of dealing with another Johnny Rotten. Sensing that the band would be far more malleable, he connived with the Antz to sack their leader, and at the end of 1979 he gave Adam the bad news at a rehearsal.

McLaren proposed the new band, now called Bow Wow Wow, as a victory over Thatcherism. Rather than take the obvious post-punk path and bemoan mass unemployment, though, he mischievously framed the absence of work as liberation rather than affliction. Bow Wow Wow's "W.O.R.K. (N.O. Nah NO! NO! My Daddy Don't)" declared, 'Demolition of the work ethic takes us to the age of the primitive'. Going to school was pointless because its function (socializing youth for a life of labour) had been outmoded. 'T.E.K. technology is DEMOLITION of DADDY/Is A.U.T. Autonomy', goes the chorus chant, taking the Situationist fantasy of automation enabling a utopian future of perpetual play and updating it for the microchip era.

Bow Wow Wow - W.O.R.K. (N.O. Nah NO! NO! My Daddy Don't) 1981

Again, this attitude put McLaren ahead of the curve: Wham! rode exactly this carefree/careless attitude to fame a few years later, with the pro-dole "Wham Rap!" (a rewrite of "W.O.R.K.", essentially) and the sunshine anthem "Club Tropicana".

Wham! - Wham Rap! (Enjoy What You Do) 1983


Wham! - Club Tropicana 1983

McLaren penned lyrics praising cassette piracy and got the ex-Antz to write Burundi-rumbling backing music. But in July 1980, despite getting acres of press and hours of radio play, the debut single "C-30, C-60, C-90 Go!" stalled just outside the Top 30.

Bow Wow Wow - C-30, C-60, C-90 Go! 1980

In the meantime, in the winter of 1980, Adam Ant's singles "Dog Eat Dog", "Ant Music" and "Kings of the Wild Frontier" smashed their way one by one into the UK Top 10. Adam's sheer self-belief lent a weird sort of conviction to ludicrous lines like 'Don't tread on an ant/He's done nothing to you/Might come a time/When he's treading on you'.

Adam & the Ants - Dog Eat Dog 1980


Adam & the Ants - Ant Music 1980


Adam & the Ants - Kings of the Wild Frontier 1980


Adam's zenith came with "Prince Charming", his September 1981 UK chart topper, and one of the strangest hit singles ever. Its keening coyote-yowl melody resembled a Native American battle cry; the beat lurched disconcertingly, a waltz turning into an aboriginal courthship dance. For the video, Adam glides between a series of arrested poses, frozen tableaux of defiance and hauteur that weirdly anticipate 'vogueing', the New York gay underground's form of competitive dancing inspired by photo spreads in fashion mags. At the end of the video, Adam impersonates a gallery of icons - Rudolph Valentino, Alice Cooper, Clint Eastwood, Marlon Brando. Song and video both expose a certain empty circularity to Adam's neo-glam idea of reinventing yourself: imitate me as I've imitated my heroes. The chorus is oddly brittle and defensive ('Ridicule is nothing to be scared of') while the ultimate message - dressing up in fancy finery as a way of flaunting self-respect - feels distinctly trite.

Adam & the Ants - Prince Charming 1981

"Prince Charming" ultimately suggested that Adam's destiny was to run through history's wardrobe until he ran out of heroic archetypes. He'd already done highwaymen with the previous number 1 single, "Stand and Deliver".

Adam & the Ants - Stand and Deliver 1981

In the video for "Ant Rap", the next big hit from the Prince Charming album, he dressed up as a knight in shining armour.

Adam & the Ants - Ant Rap 1981

End of a revival: Madness and Dexys Midnight Runners during the '80s

A sense of place, always present in Madness's music (the cover of Absolutely, their second album, showed them outside Chalk Farm tube station) gradually intensified, climaxing with 1982's The Rise and Fall.

Here Madness shouldered past the 'new Kinks' tag and lunged for 'new Beatles' status. The front cover of the gatefold sleeve was a Magical Mystery Tour-like tableau of the band atop Parliament Hill and garbed in semi-surreal attire. 

Inside, "Our House" (another massive hit) was Madness's "Penny Lane", bittersweet nostalgia for the familiar surroundings of childhood.

Madness - Our House 1982

On "Primrose Hill" - Madness's "Strawberry Fields" - they even hired prog arranged David Bedford to write brass-band orchestration.

Madness - Primrose Hill 1982

Kevin Rowland's new 'new soul vision' was heralded in March 1982 with "The Celtic Soul Brothers", which replaced the old Dexys horn fanfares with the jaunty jangle of mandolins and boisterous folksy violins (supplied by the Emerald Express Fiddlers).

Dexys Midnight Runners - The Celtic Soul Brothers 1982

The follow-up "Come on Eileen" was a massive number 1 in the summer of 1982 - in Britain, America and around the world. Accompanied by an unexpectedly playful video, "Eileen" was an honest-to-goodness love song. Rowland archly admitted to having impure thoughts: 'You in that dress/My thoughts I confess/Verge on dirty'.

Dexys Midnight Runners - Come On Eileen 1982

Another massive hit, a cover of Van Morrison's "Jackie Wilson Said", acknowledged the heavy debts the new Dexys owed to the latter's 'Caledonian Soul' sound of Irish folk-infused R&B.

Dexys Midnight Runners - Jackie Wilson Said (I'm in Heaven When You Smile) 1982

Rowland's response to fame was the calculated career-suicide move of 1985's Don't Stand Me Down, which featured no singles, just eleven-minute songs including bizarre comic dialogues like "This Is What She's Like", rants against the English upper classes and meta-soul exercises like "The Occasional Flicker".

Dexys Midnight Runners - This Is What She's Like 1985


Dexys Midnight Runners - The Occasional Flicker 1985

On the front cover, Dexys made a final confounding image shift: they appeared wearing ties, pin-stripe suits and neatly combed hair, looking for all the world like investment bankers in a photo for a corporate prospectus. 'So clean and simple; it's a much more adult approach now', said Rowland, rationalizing what in some senses was mod logic taken to the extreme: dressing like the ruling class.

2-Tone signposted its sources and reference points with countless remakes, tribute songs and interpolations (like the 'no gimme no more pickneys' vocal lick from Lloyd Charmers' "Birth Control", borrowed on The Special's "Too Much Too Young").

Lloyd Charmers - Birth Control 1969


The Specials - Too Much Too Young 1980

Even the 2-Tone logo - a black-and-white figure representing the imaginary rude boy Walt Jabsco - was modelled on a photo of the young Peter Tosh from The Wailers.