The Human League - The Dignity of Labour

The Human League's second release for Fast Product was a tribute to 'the worker'. The Dignity of Labour consisted of four electronic instrumentals inspired by the Soviet space programme. Each offered a different slant on a central concept: the extent to which 'modern technology depends almost entirely upon the worker'. In this case Russian miners toiled deep beneath the earth's crust, excavating the coal needed to make steel, the steel in turn being turned into gantries for Yuri Gagarin's spaceship. Gagarin appears on the EP's front cover as a splendidly isolated figure walking across a Moscow square to receive a medal for being the first human in outer space.

The EP came with a free flexi-disc, which documented - in true Brechtian fashion - the band and Last debating the sleeve's image. At the end Oakley makes a brief statement about the concept EP's theme: individualism versus collectivism.

The Human League - The Dignity of Labour (Bonus Flexi Disc) 1979

"You couldn't live in Sheffield and not be aware that the industrial era was crumbling", says Last. "So, on one level, the records was a totally serious hymn to the dignity of workers, but at the same time it was imbued with many levels of irony, doubt and alienation". Despite its timely resonances and atmospheric, ahead-of-its-time electronica, however, the EP's pensive instrumentals confused most 'Being Boiled' fans.

The Human League - The Dignity of Labour Part 1 1979

After the EP's release Last believed there was no point in putting out a third League single on Fast and decided to secure a major-label deal for the group. Approaching the big companies again, The Human League pitched themselves as the Next Big Thing in music: a wave of positivity after punk's nihilism and outrage.

"Blind Youth", the first song on their demo tape, ridiculed fashionable doom-and-gloom mongers, especially people who depict modern urban life as some kind of dystopian nightmare. 'High-rise living's not so bad', sings Oakey, a dig aimed equally at J.G. Ballard and The Clash. 'Dehumanization is such a big word/It's been around since Richard III'. Firmly rejecting punk's 'no future' posturing, The Human League exhorted the blind youth of Britain to 'Take hope...your time is due/Big fun come soon...Now is calling'.

The Human League - Blind Youth 1979

Militant entertainment: introducing Gang of Four and the Mekons' "Never Been in a Riot"

Gang of Our shunned the heat of rock spontaneity, the intuitive looseness of letting songs emerge "organically" out of jams. "No jamming - that was the J-word", says guitarist Andy Gill. "Everything was thought out in advance".

Drummer Hugo Burnham worked out unusual drum parts that inverted or frustrated the usual rock modes of rhythmic motion, like the mechanistic drum loop of "Love Like Anthrax", and what he calls the "continuous falling-down-the-stairs flow" of "Guns Before Butter".

Gang of Four - Guns Before Butter 1979

In their most thrilling songs - the taut, geometrical paroxysm of "Natural's Not In It", for instance - everything worked as rhythm, just like in James Brown's funk.

Gang of Four - Natural's Not In It 1979

A stumbling juggernaut of crude guitar and caveman drums, "Never Been in a Riot", the Mekons' debut, was a sonic argument in support of the proposition that rock, in the words of Melody Maker's Mary Harron, "is the only form of music which can actually be done better by people who can't play their instruments than by people who can".

Not everybody bought the argument initially. Rough Trade literally didn't buy it, refusing to take any copies of the single, saying it was just too incompetent. "Shortly thereafter, though, it was made Single of the Week in NME", recalls Fast Product's owner Bob Last (who signed the band for their first single). "And everybody wanted it, including Rough Trade".

NME's seal of approval was all the more significant because it came courtesy of the paper's resident punk rocker Tony Parsons, who took the lyrics of "Never Been in a Riot" as an inspired lampoon of the Clash's street-fighting-man posturing. According to Mekons' leader Tom Greenhalgh, the song is closer to an admission of vulnerability. "That you might be in a riot and be scared. Being open about that kind of weakness rather than trying to put on a front".

The Mekons - Never Been in a Riot 1978