“ We thought we were really punky. Even The Adverts had learned one chord. We didn’t even do that. We just got a machine and tuned it on till it sounded nice.”
Such is the candour and refreshing honesty of Phil Oakey interviewed for this DVD compilation of hits from 1980 to 1995, that he has no qualms in announcing that the Human League were little more than a ‘consumer version of Kraftwerk’. They didn’t make their synths, they bought them. So casual and so causal is the effect of the narrative that it’s difficult to maintain any mythology about the group. Oakey had no expectations of being a singer prior to actually being asked to join the band and freely admits to confusing Hinduism and Buddhism in ‘Being Bolied’. The ‘subversive parody’ of the ‘Dare’ album put forward by the earnest journalist is similarly rejected in one fell swoop: it was fairly simple minded, admits Oakey, ‘we had watched people being so arty that you couldn’t sell anything’. The invention of the ‘Futurist’ sound and their use of synthesizers? “Synths were just a novelty”. And again, were they making a statement with the early use of cover versions? No. They did it because they’d heard Bowie do it. The spoken ‘This is Phil talking’ bit in ‘Love Action’? The breaking down of the fourth wall? No. It was because ‘On Turn Blue’ Iggy Pop said ‘This is Iggy talking’. Simple.
Not only do you go away from this interview thinking that Phil Oakey is one of the nicest, self-deprecating individuals you are ever likely to bump into in Sainsburys (as well as the most commercially astute) it also goes someway toward deconstructing the alarming ease with which critics and observers can mythologize an artist and their period. Sometimes the truth is far more simple; the stuff of chance rather than the consequence of design. And this is something that is supported by the videos and the songs themselves: ‘Circus Of Death’, ‘Empire State Human’, ‘Love Action’, ‘Open Your Heart’, ‘Don’t You Want Me’, ‘[Keep Feeling] Fascination, ‘Louise’, ‘Human’. It’s a story of simplicity, shock and surprise. Which is as much as you’d expect from a group of young individuals caught up in the astonishing and totally unforeseeable glare of public attention. The DVD finally manages to pin the band down not as pioneers but as interested and innovative passengers.
*Extras include:
4 Bonus ‘Top Of The Pops’ transmissions from 1981
24 Bonus ‘Later With Jools Holland’ transmissions from 1995
Band Interview