Visage’s timing was perfect. The Blitz scene was the vanguard of a general shift in pop culture back toward fantasy and escapism. Strange described the new breed—now confusingly known as New Romantics, Futurists,
and
Blitz Kids—as “people who work nine to five and then go out and live their fantasies. They’re glad to be dressed up and escaping work and all the greyness and depression.” Yet for all its brisk electrodisco rhythms, Visage’s music was sepia toned and at times almost funereal, with Strange’s vocals exuding a fey sadness. The hit singles “Fade to Grey” and “The Damned Don’t Cry” both conjured what Mark Fisher called “the Euro-aesthete’s ‘exhaustion from life.’” The effect was compounded by the band’s videos, which evoked a between-the-wars desolation derived from
Cabaret
. With impeccable timing, Bowie staged a comeback in the late summer of 1980 with his number one hit “Ashes to Ashes,” which tapped into the same mood of washed-out and washed-up melancholy and used a similar European electronic sound, as if to remind everybody he’d done it first with side two of
Low
. Steve Strange, looking like a Pierrot, made an appearance in the “Ashes” video.
As Bowie had done with
Low,
instead of looking westward toward America, the heartland of rock ’n’ roll, for inspiration, the New Romantics pointedly turned their gaze to the East. This meant Germany, obviously, but also Russia. Visage wrote a song titled “Moon over Moscow,” while Spandau Ballet, the other major group on the Blitz scene, plunged into Cossack/constructivist kitsch with their single “Musclebound.” Although he later sang with a glutinously overstated “soulfulness,” at this point vocalist Tony Hadley’s operatic and Teutonic emoting bore scant relation to black music. Picking up on the reference to Spandau—site of a prison in western Berlin where Nazi leaders such as Rudolf Hess and Albert Speer had been condemned—and the neoclassical marble torso on the cover of their debut album,
Journeys to Glory,
the neofascist magazine
Bulldog
hailed Spandau as fine exponents of “musclebound, Nordic” art.
Journeys
also featured a brief sleeve note that struck a Nietzschean tone of beauty as cruelty:
Picture angular glimpses of sharp youth cutting strident shapes through the curling gray of 3-AM. Hear the soaring joy of immaculate rhythms, the sublime glow of music for heroes driving straight to the heart of dance. Follow the stirring vision and the rousing sound on the path towards journeys to glory.
The Spandau ethos was openly elitist. Their early gigs were word-of-mouth-only events in unusual places. New Romanticism, for Spandau, represented a natural aristocracy, the collective narcissism of a self-appointed few. As Hadley crooned on their first hit, “To Cut a Long Story Short,” “I am beautiful and clean and so very very young.”
Spandau Ballet’s dalliance with the Eurosynth sound was short-lived, though, and the group quickly reverted to their soul-boy roots, venerating black American music above all else and producing, by way of tribute, a series of stilted funk records. Meanwhile, Ultravox—re-formed by Currie and with Midge Ure as its new singer—plunged into full-blown Teutonica with the quasi-classical “Vienna.” Wreathed in the sonic equivalent of dry ice, this ludicrously portentous ballad—inspired by a vague notion of a past-its-prime Hapsburg Empire sliding into decadence—reached number two on the U.K. charts in the first weeks of 1981 and hovered there for what seemed like an eternity.
At one point a single man looked set to have all the key bands on the New Romantic scene—Visage, Spandau, and Ultravox—in his grasp. Martin Rushent, who’d produced New Wave groups such as the Stranglers and Buzzcocks for United Artists, was in the process of forming his own label, Genetic, and its London office happened to be directly above Blitz. Despite Rushent’s having zero fashion sense and a totally untrendy beard, he regularly hung out at the club. “It became just the hippest place on Earth,” Rushent recalls. “I remember seeing Spandau down there for the first time, and they just blew me away. They were all wearing tartan kilts, odd clothes and hair, but the music was brilliant.” Soon Spandau, Visage, and the reformed Ultravox were all lined up to sign to Rushent’s fledgling label. But turmoil at Radar, Genetic’s parent company, put the label in limbo, so Rushent urged the groups to seek separate deals of their own. In the meantime, he threw himself and a quarter million pounds into building a studio on the grounds of his home in the Berkshire countryside, complete with state-of-the-art equipment for making electronic music.
Between 1978 and 1980, synthesizers had become much more affordable and sophisticated. A prime example was the Wasp synth, which was dirt cheap at around two hundred pounds, lightweight enough to be easily transported (unlike the prog-era synths), and easy to use. The Wasp was the great democratizer when it came to electronic music. Equally significant was the arrival at the end of the 1970s of instruments that hugely expanded the potential of machine-made rhythm. The Linn Drum Computer, for instance, was the first programmable drum machine to feature sampled percussive timbres, and could therefore realistically simulate the sound of toms, kicks, snares, and cymbals. If you preferred a more hands-on, drummerly feel, you could use syn-drum pads such as those made by Simmons. Played manually in real time rather than programmed, they were touch responsive—the harder you hit, the louder they sounded. Each pad connected to its own module, allowing the user to switch between different drum timbres or feed the beat through effects to make it sound jarringly futuristic. The gimmicky, pinging sound of Simmonses and similar syn-drums was smeared all over the early New Romantic records. Even at the time, it had a curious, ultramodern yet already dated quality, a pre-echo of its status today as a sonic signifier for “early eighties.”
Rushent’s first stab at electropop using these new tools was with former Buzzcock front man Pete Shelley. The sound they developed was a transitional hybrid of guitar-based New Wave and electropop, heard at its best on the superb single “Homo Sapien.” Released in August 1981, “Homo Sapien” was a coded coming-out for Shelley. The single’s innuendos—the fruity way Shelley enunciates “homo sapien,” plus couplets like “homo superior/my interior”—provoked an unofficial ban from Radio One. By the time the singer’s solo album was released, another group had taken the Rushent electropop sound to the charts and stolen Shelley’s thunder.
In early 1981 Rushent had been called in to salvage the Human League’s career, then at its lowest point. After
Travelogue,
the group had become deadlocked by their inability to agree on a direction for the next album. Phil Oakey instigated the band’s splitting up, telling Martyn Ware, “We’re kicking you out of the group,” only to be thrown for a loop when Ian Craig Marsh decided to go with Ware to form a new venture called British Electric Foundation. Worse, the music press reacted to the split by deciding that Ware and Marsh were the real musical brains, writing off singer Oakey and visual projectionist Adrian Wright as the talentless rump.
The decision for Oakey and Wright to retain the name Human League made sense. There was an imminent European tour that had to be honored (lest they risk huge debts) and the strikingly coiffured singer was the memorable face of the band, its obvious star (if stardom ever came). In a sense, Oakey’s lopsided haircut had become the League’s logo. It took some finagling from manager Bob Last, though, to convince Oakey (who never liked the name) to keep operating as the Human League, and to convince Ware and Marsh (who did like it) to accept a payoff for loss of the brand. The deal was 1 percent of the take on the next album, which seemed merely symbolic, given the state of the band.
When they hooked up with Rushent, the Human League were demoralized and directionless. “They had no real material, just bits of ideas,” says Rushent, who’d been invited by Virgin to produce a potential single called “The Sound of the Crowd.” “I listened to the demo and said, ‘Well, that’s going in the bin, we’re starting again.’ Their spirits picked up hugely when we’d completed ‘Sound of the Crowd,’ because it did sound a hundred times better.”
“The Sound of the Crowd” was the first fruit of Oakey’s songwriting partnership with new Human League member Ian Burden. Formerly the bassist in an experimental Sheffield band named Graph, Burden was an unlikely writer of pop hits. But “Sound of the Crowd” was an unlikely hit. “I still reckon that song is one of the maddest records that’s ever got in the Top Twenty,” says Oakey. “The whole thing runs on tom toms, but they’re synth toms, and it’s got very odd screaming sounds.” It also has a foreboding dub feel of bass pressure and cold cavernous space, which came from Burden’s being a reggae fiend.
“The Sound of the Crowd” featured backing vocals from two other new recruits, Joanne Catherall and Susanne Sulley. Oakey had spotted the teenage pair dancing during a “Futurist night” at Crazy Daisy, the club that had been the Sheffield glam youth’s focus since Roxy days. “I was really into Michael Jackson’s
Off the Wall
at that point and thought high voices were the way pop was going to go,” he recalls. “Martyn could do quite a nice high backing vocal in the old League, so with him out of the picture, I was thinking: ‘Do I know anyone who sings falsetto? No. Get a girl then.’ We auditioned four people, but Joanne and Susanne, being friends, were ideal because they could look after each other when the band was on tour.” That Joanne was darkly handsome and Sulley blondely pretty didn’t hurt in terms of the band’s visual chemistry either.
Oakey’s decision to recruit “the girls,” as they universally became known, was a genius move. As Jon Savage put it, when they plucked Catherall and Sulley off the dance floor at Crazy Daisy, the Human League literally let the crowd into their sound. Overnight, the League’s music opened up, became populist, and then popular. Shining through their provincial attempts at glamour, Catherall and Sulley’s ordinary-girl charm banished the old League’s cold-fish image and visually matched a shift in Oakey’s songwriting toward songs of everyday romance. Their amateurishness—“I can’t dance,” admitted Sulley in 2001, twenty years into her career with the League, “I’ve got no rhythm, we’re not particularly great singers”—made the League lovable for the first time. “That was a totally conscious thing on Philip’s part, he understood what he was doing when he got the girls to join,” says Last, who was extremely doubtful about the idea at first.
The rejuvenated League’s next two chart-busting singles, “Love Action” and “Open Your Heart,” were practically manifestos for this new humanized, not Numanized, direction in electropop. In a weird way, “Love Action” sounds like its title, pulsing and glistening, an iridescent affirmation. Yet for all its warmth and wetness, “Love Action” still retains something of the aberrant quality of “Sound of the Crowd,” making it an improbable smash hit. “It’s not got a proper chorus,” admits Oakey, explaining that “Love Action” is basically two different songs bolted together. The verses, from a song called “I Believe in Love,” are “confessional nonsense, what I was feeling at the time,” while the angular, not-quite-a-chorus bit is from another song about watching Sylvia Kristel in the soft-core erotic movie
Emmanuelle
.
Rushent and Human League had become a hit-making dream team. “To a large extent I was their band,” says Rushent. “I was certainly their drummer, because I programmed all the rhythms and made all the decisions about the grooves.” He worked closely with Burden on the bass sound and with another new League member, multi-instrumentalist Jo Callis, on the song’s chord patterns. “One of the key things was that for the first time we had a proper band,” says Oakey. “In the old League we had four people who fiddled with a lot of things, but suddenly we had Martin who’d been a drummer, Ian Burden who played bass, and Jo Callis who’d been guitarist in the Rezillos and knew about chords.” Rushent’s varied background in recording was vital. He’d worked his way up from being a lowly tape operator, working with everybody from Shirley Bassey to Yes in the process. “Martin really knew what pop was,” says Oakey. “He could take your mad sounds and they’d still be mad sounds but he could put them in places that made them pop. Really horrible things come out of synthesizers and that’s what I like about them. But somehow Martin could make them work within a pop context, and I don’t know how he did it.”
Released in October 1981,
Dare
represented a perfect melding of tradition and innovation. “I’d learned a lot through working with the arranger Johnny Harris,” says Rushent. “He was bandleader for all the big-show singers like Petula Clark and Tom Jones. Through watching him work, I learned about voicing instruments and how the most important element of music is silence. Don’t clutter your arrangements, keep every instrumental part simple and ‘vocal,’ as if someone was singing it. If you listen to
Dare,
there’s lots of space in the songs and there’s loads of little parts, and you can sing them all. There’s so many bloody little sing-along bits and every one sticks in your head.”
Instead of an orchestra, though, Rushent, in tandem with Burden, Callis, and Oakey, was working with machines. One particular “magic machine” was especially crucial, the Roland Microcomposer, a combined synthesizer and sequencer that allowed the user to program in complicated and extended note patterns, and which came with a labor-saving “copy/insert” function that enabled the pasting of whole passages of music from one location in the piece to another. “Today the Microcomposer would be regarded as very primitive, and when you first grappled with it, the results sounded shitty,” recalls Rushent. “But if you really read the manual and studied what it was capable of doing and spent days mastering it, you could end up with a style of playing that no one else had. Stuff that was impossible to duplicate in the live environment, all these little inflections, bends, and tonal changes. That’s what was novel about Human League at the time, the ultimate precision. No one had heard that before. When it hit the dance floor, it was like this massive machine. The thing was right up people’s backsides. But there’s enough feeling in it so it doesn’t sound like Kraftwerk, but like humans playing it.”