The early sounds of The Human League

With singer Philip Oakey on board, the Human League shifted decisively in a pop direction with songs like "Dance Like a Star", a lo-fi, cobbled-together counterpart to Summer and Moroder's "I Feel Love". At the start of the song, Oakey taunts, "This is a song for all you bigheads out there who think disco music is lower than the irrelevant musical gibberish and tired platitudes that you try to impress your parents with. We're the Human League, we're much cleverer than you, and this is called 'Dance Like a Star'".

The Human League - Dance Like A Star 1977

The Human League's debut single "Being Boiled" was released in June 1978 with the slogan "Electronically yours" on its cover.

Philip K. Dick's influence is all over early Human League. "Circus of Death", the B-side of their debut single, was partly inspired by Ubik, while "Almost Medieval" from the first album, Reproduction, is based on Counter-Clock World, a novel in which time goes backward.

"Circus of Death" was once described by Human League co-founder Martyn Ware as "a subliminal trip through all the very trashiest films". The story involves an evil clown who runs a nightmare circus and uses the sinister mind control drug Dominion to pacify the population, with Steve McGarrett from american tv series Hawaii Five-O flying in to the rescue.

The Human League - Circus of Death 1978


The Human League - Almost Medieval 1979


As part of their newfound appreciation for conveyor belt pop and epic schmaltz, the Human League started to work up all-electronic cover versions of sixties classics like the Righteous Brothers' "You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling". That song was both a crowd-pleaser and a striking gesture, almost transgressive. "No one did covers really. During punk, you were supposed to do original material", says Human League co-founder Ian Craig Marsh.

The Human League - You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling 1979

The early recordings of Cabaret Voltaire

You can hear a Burroughsian influence - the flat, matter-of-fact depiction of extreme and grotesque acts of sex and violence - in the spoken-word voice-overs that accompany some early Cabaret Voltaire pieces, such as the fetid imagery of "Bed Time Stories": "With dogs that are trained to sniff out corpses/Eat my remains but leave my feet/I'll hold a séance with Moroccan rapists/Masturbating end over end".

Cabaret Voltaire - Bed Time Stories 1974

Creaky and homespun, the Cabs' early stabs at musique concrète, such as "Dream Sequence Number Two Ethel's Voice", have an alien-yet-quaint quality, while more ferocious tracks like "Henderson Reversed Piece Two", all rattling, synthetic percussion and soiled sheets of sound, recall avant-classical electronic composers such as Morton Subotnick.

Cabaret Voltaire - Henderson Reversed Piece Two 1974

Devo & the video for "Whip It"

The band moved to Los Angeles, capital of the entertainment business, and with 1980's Freedom of Choice made a record even more calculatedly commercial than the clinical-sounding Duty. This gave Devo their own platinum album, spurred on by the Top 20 success of "Whip It".

Written during the ailing twilight of the Carter presidency, "Whip It" offered Dale Carnegie-style advice to the embattled leader. "Come on Jimmy, get your shit together", laughs Mothersbaugh. By the time Warner Brothers allowed Devo to make a promo clip for the song, it was clear that Reagan was heading for a landslide victory. Devo made the video into a surreal commentary on America's shift to the Right. The result was a video that twenty-five years later is not the least bit dated looking and is still a huge hoot. It was Devo's one true moment of mass-cultural triumph.

Pitched somewhere between a John Ford Western and David Lynch's Eraserhead, the genuinely creepy video for "Whip It" perfectly cristallizes Devo's "freak show aesthetic". As a bunch of Texas stud muffins and blonde bimbos gawk and giggle, Mothersbaugh wields a whip and one by one lashes away the garments of a strange Grace Jones-like amazon of a woman, whose legs start trembling in an indescribably abject way as she waits for the final whip crack to strip off her last shred of modesty. Meanwhile, the rest of Devo performs the song cooped inside a cattle pen - pasty-faced spud-boys wearing shorts that show off their scrawny knees and the famous "flowerpot hats". "We were horrified by Reagan's ascent", says Casale, "So we were just making fun of myths of cowboys in the West".

Devo - Whip It 1980

As the new decade progressed, the original "eighties industrial band" got chewed up by the industry. Even as they railed against Reaganism with songs like "Freedom of Choice" and "Through Being Cool", Devo found themselves increasingly bossed around by their record company.

Devo - Freedom of Choice 1980


Devo - Through Being Cool 1981

Devo - Duty Now for the Future

An icky squeamishness contaminated Devo's sex songs, from their earliest efforts like "Buttered Beauties" (in which Mothersbaugh imagines female secretions smeared all over him like "glossy tallow"), to the chorus "I think I missed the hole" in the debut album's "Sloppy (I Saw My Baby Gettin')". They loved pornography, whether it was Bataille's avant-garde version or Hustler's mass-market hardcore. "I wrote a song called 'Penetration in the Centerfold' about the first Hustler I ever saw", says Mothersbaugh.

Devo - Sloppy (Single version) 1977


Devo - Penetration in the Centerfold 1979

What emerged from these impulses and inputs were songs that, beneath the quirky Dada surface, were often plain misogynistic in the most conventional sense. On the debut, "Gut Feeling" segues straight into "Slap Your Mammy", while "Triumph of the Will" on the second album, Duty Now for the Future, reads like a Nietzschean justification for rape: "It was a thing I had to do/It was a message from below...It is a thing females ask for/When they convey the opposite".

Devo - Triumph of the Will 1979

Devo's first singles and debut album "Q: Are We Not Men? A: We are Devo!"

As expressed in the anthem "Be Stiff", Devo's proudly neurotic, uptight attitude was a revolt against the take-it-easy baby boomers. "We were anything but hippies - loose, natural", Devo founder Gerard Casale recalled years later.

Devo - Be Stiff 1977

Devo's first two singles, "Satisfaction" and "Jocko Homo" - self-released on the group's own Booji Boy label -were relatively torpid compared with their later frantic sound. This was partly because "Jocko Homo" and its B-side, "Mongoloid", were recorded in a garage with no heating during a freezing winter, with the band wearing gloves.

Devo - (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction (single version) 1977


Devo - Mongoloid (album version) 1978

Whenever feasible, Devo gigs began with The Beginning Was the End: The Truth About De-Evolution, a ten-minute film directed  by their friend Chuck Statler, whom they'd originally met in an experimental-art class at Kent State University. Statler's minimovie generated the enduringly famous images of Devo: singer Mark Mothersbaugh as mad professor in bow tie and white coat giving a student lecture on devolution, the rest of the band wearing plastic sunglasses and colored tights pulled tightly over their heads to squish their features, bank-robber style.

Devo - Jocko Homo (from The Truth About De-Evolution) 1976

Devo recorded their debut, Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!, in Germany while still embroiled in negotiations with labels (in the end, owing to a dispute over verbal agreements, Virgin and Warner Brothers both got the group, releasing Devo's records in the U.K. and America, respectively).

Released in August 1978, Q: Are We Not Men? is a stone classic, but it does suffer slightly from falling between two extremes, neither capturing the full frenzy of Devo's live shows nor making a total foray into producer Brian Eno's post-Low soundworld. "In retrospect, we were overly resistant to Eno's ideas", says Mothersbaugh. "He made up synth parts and really cool sounds for almost every song on the album, but we only used them on three or four songs...like the loop of monkey chanters that's on 'Jocko Homo'".

Devo - Jocko Homo (album version) 1978

You can still hear the Eno imprint. "Shrivel Up" is dank with synth slime, giving the song an abject feel that fits the lyrics about decay and mortality.

Devo - Shrivel Up 1978

"Gut Feeling" takes garage punk's woman-done-me-wrong rage and gives it a perverse twist: "You took your tongs of love and stripped away my garment".

Devo - Gut Feeling 1978

"Uncontrollable Urge" makes rock's "wild sexuality" seem as absurd and humiliating as an involuntary nervous tic.

Devo - Uncontrollable Urge 1978

"Come Back Jonee" likewise turns Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode" inside out. In Devo's tune, the heartbreaker bad boy "jumps into his Datsun", the OPEC 1970s low-gas-consumption version of a real rock 'n' roll automobile like a T-Bird.

Devo - Come Back Jonee 1978

Their cover of the Rollling Stones' "Satisfaction" - which defiled the iconic sixties classic by reducing it to a desiccated theorem - was a hit in several European countries. Devo's disco-punk version resembled, in Mothersbaugh's words, "a stupid perpetual-motion machine clanking around the room".

Devo - Satisfaction (album version) 1978