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The Human League's work was now recognised on both sides of the Atlantic. In February 1983, the band was nominated for the Best New Artist award at the 25th Annual Grammy Awards (though the award eventually went to Men at Work). [25] On completion of the tour, Burden went on to his next commitment playing bass guitar in West Berlin. Because of the professionalism they had shown and because he planned to use them further vocally, Oakey and manager Bob Last made Sulley and Catherall full members of the band, to be paid on a salary basis. Dare wasn't released in the United States until a year after its UK release, owed to the limited success of the band's prior albums leading Virgin Records to take a "wait and see" approach with the album. Because the imposed style had not worked, Virgin permitted the band to return to their original style and the band recorded and released their first full studio album Reproduction in August 1979. The album and the single " Empire State Human" failed to make an impact on the charts. After these flops, Virgin cancelled the band's December 1979 tour. By this time, the Human League's role as UK electronic pioneers was usurped by Gary Numan, when his single " Are 'Friends' Electric?" became a huge hit in the UK in mid-1979. [7] [ unreliable source?]

We like to be in control in the studio. We don't like giving that up to a producer. That's why we had a big, final argument, and we just decided to go home and leave them to finish it off. It just got to the point of who had the power, and in that instance...They were the men behind the mixing console, so they had ultimate control. Capitalising on the success of the album and their recent No.1 hit single, " Being Boiled" was re-released and became a Top 10 hit in early 1982. The band toured for the first time together internationally. Concurrently, Dare (later renamed Dare!) was released in the US by A&M Records and "Don't You Want Me" also reached No.1 there in the summer of 1982. A remix album of Dare entitled Love and Dancing was released under the group name " The League Unlimited Orchestra" (a tribute to Barry White's Love Unlimited Orchestra), reaching No.3 on the UK album chart. Trope Codifier: One of the first electronic bands to hit the UK Sheffield scene, in fact. Also a Ur-Example of UK Synthpop. The band's two lead members, Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh, left the band in 1980 and formed a new group, Heaven 17. The press pretty much declared The Human League dead right there, as the only two members left were the ones that they perceived had the least to do with the band's musical direction: vocalist Philip Oakey and visual artist Adrian Wright. To add insult to injury, the band was already in crippling debt and Virgin Records was looking to drop them, but they still owed another album to the label. Finally in May 1984, the band released the politically charged single " The Lebanon" about the Lebanese Civil War. The single peaked at No.11 in the UK. This was followed shortly thereafter by the album Hysteria, so called because of the difficult and tense recording process. It entered the UK album chart at No.3; however, it climbed no further and critics and fans were divided by the new direction the band had taken. The second single was " Life on Your Own" in mid-1984. The single peaked at No.16.

Notes

Bubbling Down Under Week commencing 17 December 1990". bubblingdownunder.com. 17 December 2021 . Retrieved 17 December 2021. The Human League: Love Action (I Believe in Love)". British Phonographic Industry . Retrieved 12 June 2020.

Matrix / Runout (Side B runout, stamped, etched, variant 1): V 2391 B-2U-1- x̶x̶x̶ D TOWN HOUSE DMM On 11 December 2009, the Human League signed a new recording contract with UK based Wall of Sound. [37] They also have their own studio in Sheffield [38] and are managed by Sidewinder Management Ltd. The band continue to record and play live, with regular appearances at music festivals worldwide, at many of which they are among the headliners.

Credits

In March 2014, "Don't You Want Me" re-entered the Top 20 of the UK Singles Chart, thanks to a social media campaign from the fans of Aberdeen F.C., who won the Scottish League Cup the previous weekend. They have adopted the song as a terrace chant, citing their midfielder Peter Pawlett with the lyrics changed to "Peter Pawlett Baby". [42] Their renewed success prompted the band to tour again for the first time since 1987, and they conducted a tour of the US and UK in 1995. Subsequent singles " Filling Up with Heaven" and the non-album single " Stay with Me Tonight" also reached the UK Top 40, and a new remix of "Don't You Want Me" was released to capitalise on the band's revitalised profile. This was in the run up to a new "greatest hits" compilation in 1996, but which proved less successful than their first "Greatest Hits" album from 1988.

The Human League: The Very Best of the Human League". British Phonographic Industry . Retrieved 12 June 2020. Human' is probably the best vocal that I ever did, but it took a month to record," Oakey recalled. "A really big influence on doing those monologues was Gary Numan, particularly ' Are "Friends" Electric?', which has two different spoken bits, and he pulls it off." [6] Although the subject of retirement is often brought up in interviews, Oakey, Sulley and Catherall have all stated that they still enjoy performing and intend to carry on for "as long as they are filling concerts and people want to see them". Sulley has joked that she "has to carry on because she doesn't know how to do anything else". [39] 2010s: Credo and further tours [ edit ] At Paradiso, Netherlands, in April 2011. From left to right: Joanne Catherall, Phil Oakey and Neil Sutton.

The Human League provides examples of:

This original lineup lasted until 1980, after which Ware and Marsh left to form Heaven 17. Oakey kept the band name and added female vocalists, and it is this incarnation that gained widespread popularity. a b c Roberts, David (2006). British Hit Singles & Albums (19thed.). London: Guinness World Records Limited. p.262. ISBN 1-904994-10-5.

Dare incorporated female vocals and moved away from the doomy, avant-garde pseudo- industrial sound of the Mk. I era in favor of a more pop-oriented sound. Executive Meddling: A fair few across the group's career, though it was also why "Don't You Want Me" was a single despite Phil Oakey's dislike of it. Offiziellecharts.de – The Human League – Human" (in German). GfK Entertainment charts. Retrieved 27 February 2020. Pareles, Jon (8 February 1987). "The Human League plays the Ritz". The New York Times . Retrieved 24 July 2015. Acclaimed Flop: Secrets was hugely popular among fans and critics and was widely considered an effective update of the band's Synth-Pop style, but it significantly underperformed on store shelves thanks to Papillon Records going under shortly after its release.

Statistics

Platinum and Gold Singles 1982". Kent Music Report. 28 February 1983 . Retrieved 10 November 2021– via Imgur. Follow-up “Love Action (I Believe In Love)” intensified the dance dynamic still further and made it all the way to the UK Top 3 in the summer of 1981, with The Human League finding themselves Top Of The Pops regulars. It was perfect timing – the UK music scene was in a freshly confident mood. Magazines like Smash Hits and The Face were helping telegraph a soap-opera narrative of high-street glamour and kitchen-sink creativity, also shaped by the growing reliance on pop promos to help sell a song. The Human League had a strong look that played perfectly into that. Being Boiled"... sorta. Read literally, the song is a condemnation of the silk industry, which involves boiling silkworms to death to harvest their cocoons (hence the song title), though it can just as easily be read as metaphorical in a number of other ways, from the perils of capitalist exploitation as a whole to general abuse. The next single from the album was the ballad " One Man in My Heart", which features Sulley on lead vocals. It reached No.13 in the UK and was unique in that it was the only single by the Human League to feature a female only lead vocal until "Never Let Me Go" in 2011. Using Future material, the Human League released a demo tape to record companies under their new name. The tape contained versions of "Being Boiled", "Toyota City" and "Circus of Death". Ware's friend Paul Bower of Sheffield new-wave band "2.3", who had just recorded a single for Bob Last's Edinburgh-based independent label Fast Product, took their demo to Last and he signed the band.