Last night we were down at the Royal Festival Hall to see The Human League as part of their current UK tour, which ends in Leicester on 18 December.
Before I get to some thoughts on the main event I’ll tell you about the support band, Performance, a rather intriguing trio (one of whom, Joe Stretch, is also a successful published novelist). They’re not dissimilar to the other groups that have taken a leaf out of the 80s musical playbook recently – La Roux being a good example. Unlike La Roux, however, there’s no mixing of styles here – it’s as if some sort of rift in time and space opened up in 1983 and they dropped straight through it onto the stage. The friend I went to the gig with agreed that they were one of the best bands of the 80s that we’d never heard before. That’s not to say they were bad, but it was an odd listening experience – I half-expected to wake up to find myself back at the school disco!
After the Performance it was time for The Human League and, backed by an accomplished keyboard player, drummer and lead guitarist Phil, Susanne and Joanne soon strutted onto the stage to rapturous applause. Their lead line-up hasn’t changed since 1980 when Phil famously discovered the girls in a Sheffield nightclub, and now they have 9 top-selling albums under their belt, with a tenth, ‘Credo’, set for release early in 2011. Tonight we were expecting the usual set list of chart-topping hits from the Dare and Crash albums, and we certainly got many of those, but were also treated to some very early material, including Being Boiled (backed by some very disturbing imagery) and Empire State Human (my favourite Human League track, dating from 1979, which stands out as one of the earliest ‘danceable’ synth songs in British musical history). On top of that we also got two tracks from the upcoming album which sounded quite catchy and contemporary but, as with all Human League material, will probably benefit from repeated listening.
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| From Human League December 2010 |
I have to say that, overall, I found last night mesmerising – very few bands, old or new, have the stage presence of The Human League. And even fewer lead singers have a voice as powerfully controlled as Phil Oakey’s. If you happen to be one of the younger people who reads my blog, and you’re thinking about exploring 80s musical history, The Human League would not be a bad place to start your journey, and neither would the following song…
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxrSTQnYI6Y?fs=1]
About Pete Stean
