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

Gang of Four - Damaged Goods EP

"Damaged Goods", the title track of their debut EP, showed the group had done its Marxist homework and knew about things like "commodity, fetishism" and "reification". The song uses the language of commerce and industry as a prism offering disconcerting insight into affairs of the heart. With grim wit, the song represents a breakup in terms of refunds and emotional costs: "Open the till/Give me the change you said would do me good...you said you're cheap but you're too much".

Gang of Four - Damaged Goods 1978

The EP's other standout track, "Love Like Anthrax", was an even more heartlessly cold dissection of romance. The music was estrangement enough by itself. "There's this bizarre, totally robotic drumbeat matched with a weird two-bar-loop bassline, so that the emphasis in both drums and bass falls entirely in the unexpected place", explains Gill. "And then my guitar comes in with random free-form noise". 

In 1978, feedback hadn't been heard in rock for a long while. Gill's howling cacophony was nothing like Hendrix's controlled yet orgiastic use of feedback to smear melody lines, or Velvet Underground's tidal waves of white noise. In rock's Romantic tradition, feedback typically signified the engulfingly oceanic, a swoony rush of Dionysian oblivion. In Gill's hand, it just sounded like migraine, which totally suited "Anthrax"'s theme of love as a debilitating brain fever, something any rational person would avoid like the plague. In the lyrics singer Jonathan King bemoans feeling like "a beetle on its back". He's paralyzed and literally drained, his lovesick thoughts trickling "like piss" down the gutter.

"Love Like Anthrax" is constructed as a sort of Brechtian stereophonic duet. King wails the stricken lover's lament from one speaker; Gill recites dry-as-dust details about the recording process from the other.

Gang of Four - Love Like Anthrax 1978

A Brecht fan to the point of having Bertolt's picture on the wall of his Edinburgh flat, Bob Last incorporated alienation effects into the artwork of Damaged Goods. "The group sent me a letter that was very precise about what they wanted on the cover", he says. Enclosed was a newspaper clip with a photograph of a female matador and a bull, along with a caption of dialogue. The matador explains, "You know, we're both in the entertainment business, we have to give the audience what they want. I don't like to do this but I earn double the amount I'd get if I were in a 9 to 5 job". The bull grumbles in response, "I think that at some point we have to take responsibility for our actions".

In the end Last ignored the Gang's wishes and designed a different cover, but reproduced the letter and the untidily snipped-out newspaper clipping on the back sleeve.