Sheffield continued: The Human League

The Human League was the first Sheffield band I ever heard: switching radio stations to WHFS in 1982 to check out the "new wave," "The Things That Dreams Are Made Of" is one of the songs that made me a convert.  That wacky synth playing under the lines "Everybody needs love and adventure, everybody needs cash to spend" (I'll try to transliterate it: reet-reet-reet-reet-reet-reet-reet-reet-reet-reet-reet-reet--- deeeowwwrrrr) lodged in the pleasure center of my brain and became my unconscious benchmark for new-waviness:

I was aware of Heaven 17 at the time (thanks to a younger and hipper girlfriend) and knew they were a Human League splinter group, but I didn't yet know that the best work of both factions was already behind them.  1980's Travelogue album is a monolith of analog-synth futurism, though it took me some years to find that out.  The schism occurred after that album; Phil Oakey retained the Human League name to pursue a more pop-oriented sound, the first result being 1981's Dare! album and the ultimate synthpop hit, "Don't You Want Me."  Was that a blessing or a curse?  The ubiquity of "Don't You Want Me" provoked a major backlash that took the League years to recover from; they never did catch that spark again (except for "I Love You Too Much," a minor gem that was completely overlooked), nor did they manage to leave the taint behind.  "Human"?  Blech.

One of the curiouser bits of Human League history is the early membership of Adi Newton, who soon left and went on to form ClockDVA: completely anti-electronic in its early incarnations, Newton reinvented ClockDVA as a "digital sorcery" band in the late 80s and picked up the thread of dark futurism begun by the Human League a decade earlier.  ClockDVA's Man-Amplified album sounds like it could be the evil twin of Travelogue...  but I'll stop my stream of consciousness there and save it for another day.

Update: less than an hour after I posted this, I discovered that the Human League are doing a short tour of England this fall, with a hometown gig at Sheffield City Hall on December 7.  Once again I am watching the Sheffield scene from thousands of miles away.  C'est la vie.