by LORRAINE CARPENTER

From the subterranean exuberance of their first two albums to world-dominating hits like “Don’t You Want Me” and “(Keep Feeling) Fascination,” the Human League’s back catalogue is a springboard for countless current synthpop and electropunk acts. Briefly down but never out, the highly touted trio re-emerged this year with a new album, Secrets, distilling their classic electropop sound with a truly modern touch. When he’s not touring or clearing Human League samples for use by younger artists, singer Philip Oakey practices DJing at HL HQ in the band’s native Sheffield, and scours record shops for the latest techno and neo-electro sounds. The Mirror spoke to the man about being human.

Mirror: How did you feel about playing nostalgia tours with bands like the Culture Club?

Philip Oakey: Well, I’ve been working in music since 1977, and it’s never paid to do it at leisure. We spend a lot of money on our studio and we buy up second-hand, analog synths—we’ve got banks and banks of them—so we agree to these quite lucrative tours. I never really wanna do them until we get there, and then I actually enjoy myself. I tend to be a quite contemporary person, I go around the nightclubs, I know what’s going on now, so it’s really weird that for the five- or six-week period of the tour, you’re in a different frame of mind, looking backwards. You know, I get out my old Vivienne Westwood suits. We like playing live, we’re quite good at it these days, and we’ve also got a great band at the moment. Also, I actually like living on buses and in hotels, I like seeing different parts of the world, even if it’s Cardiff!

M: What’s different about your approach to this album versus your ’90s material?

PO: If anything, it’s just that we’ve gone back. I think of this album as the album we should have made for the last 20 years. We got disillusioned towards the end of the ’80s and early ’90s, when it looked like electronics had been just a flash in the pan. What we did was poison, everyone hated us because we weren’t very like Nirvana. So we struggled and we corrupted what we did, really. Both myself and Susan did Prozac for a few years. It got annoying, especially seeing as I didn’t have much money—only have a nervous breakdown if you’ve got loads of money, then you can really enjoy it. But, since about 1993, because of dance music, synths have been really big again, in very obscure places as well. Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg do a lot of really good synth stuff, and in Europe trance is huge, and I see that as a very natural progression from what we did. Now, it’s unusual if a month goes by without either a compilation or someone with a couple of loops of ours getting in the charts. It’s like all we had to do was wait.

The next generation

M: What’s your feeling on electro?

PO: I really like Dot Allison, Felix Da Housecat, Adult., all that stuff really suits me. The big dance and trance clubs have died in Britain and people are turning towards more intimate stuff that’s a little bit stronger on the lyrics and more song-structured. I’ve always been a huge Giorgio Moroder fan, and a lot of electroclash directly relates back to Moroder, to Kraftwerk, touches of Tangerine Dream, bands that people maybe don’t think of as very synthy, like, say, Japan and early Ultravox. In fact, we’re doing a retro tour at the end of the year with Visage, who you might remember from the ’80s, and I asked Steve Strange, “Have you heard the new Miss Kittin record?!” The Felix remix sounds so like Visage, but he hadn’t heard it.

M: Uh, last I heard, Steve Strange was arrested for shoplifting stuffed Teletubbies.

PO: Mmmm, I don’t know, he may have got into some real drug problems along the way. He’s got an autobiography out, but I’ve not read it yet. But we’re supposed to be like that, aren’t we? We’re pop musicians, we’re all rogues, one way or another. Adam Ant has just been committed, but he’s always been like that! That was what I liked about him, that he was never exactly a normal guy. Really, this is a job for vagabonds. I can only say I’m really pleased to have done it all these years. I don’t know how I got away with it. :

With Tracy Young, Mark Anthony, Neo-Tokyo
and much more at the Black & Blue
main party at the Olympic Stadium
on Sunday, Oct. 13, 10pm, $80

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