The Human League
BIC Windsor HallWhen you’re in love, you know you’re in love.
Following the platinum popularity of "Dare" was never going to be easy, and it took The League two years to complete its somewhat patchy successor, *Hysteria*, although in the interim, they released a pioneering album of remixes, "Love And Dancing", and two fantastic stopgap singles in the form of the meta - Motown “Mirror Man” and the juicy, jubilant “(Keep Feeling) Fascination”.
Throughout the decade, the League continued to be a successful singles actwith hits like “Louise”, “Life On Your Own”, “Together In Electric Dreams”, the latter not strictly a HL track but a collaboration between Phil Oakey and Giorgio Moroder, and the much-mocked “The Lebanon” whose couplet “And where there used to be some shops/Is where the snipers sometimes hide” recently won a Worst Lyric Of All Time poll on BBC Radio 1, to Phil’s perverse pride.
For their next move, the League surrendered a degree of creative control but, Sulley believes, saved their career by doing so. They hooked up with R&B producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, the former Prince acolytes whose Flyte Tyme team had recently scored big with Janet Jackson’s Nasty album. Jam and Lewis wrote “Human” for the League, another great both-sides-of-the-story duet, which became a massive transatlantic smash, but also, ironically, the band’s last significant hit for some time.
Oakey, Catherall, and Sulley have all said that it is the intention for the band to release a tenth studio album "in the near future" however no details or timescale have been given. On possible collaborations, Oakey stated on BBC TV News and to NME that "we have a lot of people that want to make records with us"
Thirty years on, The Human League still stand tall tall tall, big as a wall wall wall.