CityLife

Human League show their steel

STEEL CITY TOUR: Human League

POP pundits are raving about veteran warbler Tony Christie’s new Made In Sheffield album and its reinvention of The Human League’s old hit Louise.

Yet the one man yet to hear it is Philip Oakey, the writer of the song.

“We have been incredibly busy,” he says by way of explanation. “We did the whole of August touring America, and I got a dog this year, and it’s amazingly taken up my time.”

It was only through said dog that he discovered in the first place that Louise would appear on the album Christie recorded – with the help of another Sheffield luminary Richard Hawley – to celebrate that city’s musical talents.

“People started talking to me about this Tony Christie album and I ran into Richard Hawley in the street, walking my dog,” says Oakey.

“I hardly know him, but he just said they were doing this song and I said ‘Thank you very much, that’s very nice’. I take it as a fantastic compliment.”

All of which conjures a cosy impression of Sheffield as a place where pop aristocracy bump into each other while out for a stroll. It is certainly a place where Oakey – born in Leicestershire but schooled in Sheffield – and fellow League veterans Susan Anne Sulley and Joanne Catherall feel comfortable.

“I’ve always been in Sheffield, been in the same house actually,” says Oakey, aged 53. “I got this house in 1986 and just didn’t work out how to get out of it.”

In the early 1980s, pop success generally meant a band would high-tail it to London as fast as the record company advance could take them.

“We never really thought like that,” says Oakey. “The cottage industry was always quite important to the Human League.

“We thought we should have our base wherever we wanted and would do what was necessary to present (our work) to those people in London. Also, Joanne and Susan’s parents live here, and why would we move them away from their parents?”

We tend now to think of Human League in terms of the hit-making “Mark 2” version of the band – Oakey posing with the floppiest quiff in pop, singing Don’t You Want Me, flanked by Sulley and Catherall, who he had recruited after spotting them on a dance floor as teenage schoolgirls on a night out together.

But before this, there had been a Human League incarnation featuring Oakey, Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh, the latter two going on to form Heaven 17.

Although, with their love of synthesisers, they were pioneering electro-pop, Oakey describes the early Human League as “punk”.

Musical vision

“We were people who couldn’t play instruments,” he says. In terms of both their musical vision and their refusal to budge from the north, The Human League had most in common with bands such as Joy Division/New Order, Oakey says.

“Joy Division were always interested in synths, and part of their very distinctive sound was a technology sort of thing,” he says.

“They really capitalised on it later with things like Blue Monday, which I really wish we’d written.”

Oakey admits that synth-driven pop went out of fashion from 1989 to 1995, when it was revived with the rise of dance music. And it was this period when The Human League saw their lowest ebb, making Romantic? their last album for Virgin in 1989.

“Record companies change their staff and the people there couldn’t understand why we were still on the label,” he says.

“So we were getting no hope and no communication from them.

"Legally, they had to give us lumps of money, but they weren’t interested in what we were doing. We thought we had come to the end of our career by being dropped by Virgin, but we were immediately snapped up by East West Records, who took the same songs that Virgin thought weren’t very good and we had three top 20 hits out of it.”

Since then, new albums from the Human League have been sporadic, and they have kept busy touring.

There is a new set of songs nearly finished, but Oakey does not take easily to the meticulous task of producing – “I don’t care what the hi-hat does on bar 16” – and is not sure, in a much-changed commercial environment, how to get this music out into the world.

But he adds: “I can’t get over my ambition. I wish I could. I still never had a number one album in America. That’s sort of the aim.”

In the meantime, The Human League are touring with Heaven 17 and ABC under the Steel City banner.

“I sort of think I came up with the idea,” says Oakey. “But I’m well known for claiming things. I also think I invented the steam engine and things like that.”

The Steel City tour, featuring The Human League, Heaven 17 and ABC, comes to the Apollo, Manchester, on Wednesday, December 10. £29.50. Call 0844 847 8000.