Living In The Future Of Pop Music

In 1981 The Human League presented the definitive electro-pop album, Dare. Today the Sheffield band - with its nucleus of vocalists Philip Oakey, Joanne Catherall and Susan Ann Sulley - are still touring.

The League are in Australia for the first time since 2009's V Festival, where their retro-futurist live shows eclipsed The Killers'. Yet Oakey, the New Wavers' infamously self-deprecating leader, remembers that run as less triumph than trial. "We were having a bad time on that tour!" he announces. "We were having one of those tours where things go wrong, sort of. I lost my credit cards on the way to Australia - I really like Australia and I like the shops and everything, I'm a little bit of a guy who goes in shops and spends money - so that put me out. Then I think I broke my finger on Pitt Street in the middle of Sydney. I was walking up the road and it started raining, so I looked up and walked into a bollard with my hand... But never mind!" Oakey might project a haughty image, but he's personable and chatty - like Bowie.

The Human League was formed by synth buffs Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh in 1977. Initially, an experimental outfit named The Future, they solicited Oakey, a stylish hospital porter, to be their vocalist. He penned the murky Being Boiled - The League's seminal debut. The band signed to Virgin Records, airing the album Reproduction. Meanwhile, Bowie proclaimed them "the future of pop music". "He turned up at a couple of shows very early on, before Joanne and Susan joined, and was very instrumental in getting us in the papers and being nice about us, predicting that we would do well, and then went off and did his own thing via Iggy Pop and things like that - which was fine, really." Oakey admits to emulating Bowie's vocals.

But, Bowie props aside, The League failed to crossover - intensifying latent discord. Oakey was more inclined to pop. ("Probably my favourite-ever pop group is T Rex," he says, later lauding the glam rock-influenced Goldfrapp.) Ware and Marsh split, conceiving Heaven 17. "It's classic that you get upset with people when your hopes are dashed," Oakey posits. "I thought we would be having number ones as the old band - and we all get upset if that doesn't work."

With The Human League's tour commitments to fulfil, Oakey decided to add a female backing vocalist - taking his quest to Sheffield's discos. The frontman had a brainwave when he spotted Catherall and Sulley, glamorous friends dancing in-sync. Virgin matched The Human League V 2.0 with producer Martin Rushent to cut the impeccably modish Dare. Their fortunes changed dramatically as the album generated hit after hit - Don't You Want Me a transatlantic #1. So massive was Dare that the synth-popsters struggled to follow it - the sleekly minimal Hysteria eternally underrated, despite its politically controversial, industrial-edged single The Lebanon. "I often think records are a little bit better than I gave them credit for at the time," Oakey reflects. "But we've always had quite an inferiority complex because we're not trained musicians. We came out of punk in Britain and we were almost proud not to be virtuoso musicians. So we could never believe that we were making such musical records."

The Brits laid down 1986's Crash in Minneapolis, USA, with Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis - the ex-members of The Time who'd facilitate Janet Jackson's reinvention. "That was a big revelation for some guys from Sheffield who never thought that we would leave the north of England," Oakey notes. "To suddenly be in the middle of the black music scene was very exciting." Liaising with Jam & Lewis did prove challenging. "The Yanks are very, very musicianly."

Curiously, the League had already strayed into R&B on their post-Dare EP Fascination! - Mirror Man the result of Oakey "researching" Motown hit machine Holland-Dozier-Holland. ("We were trying to be The Four Tops.") However, Jam & Lewis dug the funk of (Keep Feeling) Fascination. "I don't know whether they thought we were really funky," Oakey laughs. "They thought we were ok." Nonetheless, Crash spawned a second US chart-topper in Human. And, in fact, The League created the blueprint for the electro'n'B of everyone from The Weeknd to Kelela.

Inevitably, in Minneapolis The League 'bumped into' Prince - and they considered touring with him. Oakey fondly recalls being hugged by the star. "I am a huge Prince fan," he extols. "Of all the people who have died recently, that was the one that really shocked me - a guy who I thought would go on for another 30 or 40 years making vital albums." The American contingent inspired The League to establish their own studio in Sheffield - officially putting Steel City on the electronica map.

The Human League experienced a resurgence during the noughties' electroclash era - the band subverting '80s revivalism with Secrets. Renegade producer Richard X repurposed League tracks for various mash-ups (cue: the Liberty X-featuring Being Nobody, blending Being Boiled with Chaka Khan's Ain't Nobody). "We very nearly made an LP with him, two LPs ago," Oakey shares. "We went and recorded four tracks. [But] he was going in a direction that we weren't quite going in. So we didn't end up working with Richard. I'd love to work with him again now."

The Human League last issued an original album in 2011's Credo through the dance label Wall Of Sound - although they lately promoted the anthology A Very British Synthesizer Group. Oakey is uncertain about future LPs. "I just pile stuff up. Every idea I ever have, I write down. I go and I record tracks in my little set-up at home all the time. The question is finishing them off, and the question is selling them." Contemporary acts are expected to be business-oriented - deterring the League. "We're a little bit lazy." This also explains why Oakey - who recorded the indelible Together In Electric Dreams with disco pioneer Giorgio Moroder for the kitsch movie Electric Dreams - hasn't transitioned into production, like Heaven 17. (He "tried" to DJ.) "I think - and I may be flattering myself here - I'm an ideas man," Oakey reasons. "I just try and come up with something a little bit different - a little bit of a different lyric, a little bit of a different tune, or a little bit of a different sound."

There's scant information about the League's internal machinations. In the '80s Oakey, who alluded to an ill-fated youthful marriage in Dare's Love Action (I Believe In Love), partnered Catherall - and, myth has it, dated Sulley. "There was all sorts of romance and things going on in the first place," he affirms. "[But] we've done that, we've moved on. Joanne's got a son who's now leaving university and Susan's got a lovely bloke." If the trio has endured, it's because one will always boost the others' morale in those hard times. Catherall is "the most sensible," Oakey suggests. "It's funny because Joanne, if anything, is the quiet one. But, if you fall out with her, you will never get on with The Human League. She doesn't say anything, she stands back, but she spots anyone that shouldn't be in the group very quickly."

The Human League even have a limited online presence - Oakey ambivalent about social media. Ultimately, he "believes in" mystique. While "a total republican", Oakey admires the Queen for distancing herself from media. And though at least one publisher has proposed an autobiography, Oakey deems it "very unlikely". "I think maybe there are so many little secrets that would have to be given away that 40 or 50 people would have to be dead before I could write down what happened."