Trivia / The Human League

• Acclaimed Flop: Secrets was hugely popular among fans and critics and was widely considered an effective update of the band's Synth-Pop style, but it significantly underperformed on store shelves thanks to Papillon Records going under shortly after its release.
• Breakthrough Hit: Dare was their first mainstream success after several years as a cult band. As for specific songs, "The Sound of the Crowd" was their breakthrough in the U.K., and "Don't You Want Me" was the band's first hit in the U.S.
• Channel Hop: Initially signed to Fast Product, the band moved to Virgin Records after one single and an EP, both of which Virgin gained the rights to; Virgin distributed the Mk. I lineup's material in the US via their Virgin International branch before licensing the Mk. II incarnation to A&M Records in the region following the UK success of Dare. Virgin and A&M eventually dropped the band in 1990 after their attempts at following up the success of Dare brought increasingly diminishing returns, leading the Human League to jump over to Eastwest Records. This only lasted for one album and one non-album single before internal restructuring at Eastwest led to the band getting dropped from there too. For Secrets, they would sign with Papillon Records, then Wall of Sound for Credo.
• Creator Killer: Crash, despite generating the band's second US No. 1 hit and a fan-favorite single with "Human", quickly killed off the group's relevance in the American market after previous attempts at following up their blockbuster success Dare saw increasingly diminishing returns. Crash leaned into the band's longtime funk and R&B influences to catch up with changing trends in dance music, but Creative Differences with producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis resulted in mutual Creator's Apathy. The album was widely panned as generic and uninteresting, sales quickly dropped off, and the band's success afterwards was heavily limited and mostly relegated to their native UK.
• Executive Meddling: A fair few across the group's career, though it was also why "Don't You Want Me" was a single despite Phil Oakey's dislike of it.
• Follow the Leader: The success of Dare directly inspired a number of other Synth-Pop acts who adopted a similar style of brooding, dark-voiced anti-love song singers with equally brooding female backing vocalists. Animotion in particular sounds like a dead-on imitation of the Human League.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes:
  • Tapes of their earliest demos of Reproduction and Travelogue are impossible to find, as are recordings of their live shows from the 70s. The only compilation of early songs that exists is "Golden Hour of the Future", which was released in 2003 and includes just a few of their earlier songs.
  • While the band kept its singles in their setlists after the fact, Romantic? was scarcely reissued for the better part of three decades thanks to its critical and commercial failure. Until it was included on the vinyl Boxed Set The Virgin Years in 2022, the only reissues Romantic? ever saw were Japanese CD releases in 1993 and 2017.
• Late Export for You:
  • "Toyota City" was first released as an exclusive for the Japanese version of the Holiday '80 EP, and due to the fan interest, was added to Travelogue, released a month later. However, for its Travelogue release it was edited two minutes shorter for time reasons. The single "Only After Dark" does include the original long version as a B-side, but this received such poor distribution that importing the Japanese EP is more common.
  • Dare wasn't released in the United States until a year after its UK release, owed to the limited success of the band's prior albums leading Virgin Records to take a "wait and see" approach with the album.
  • Because it flopped on release, A&M Records refused to release Hysteria on CD; the album wouldn't come to the format in the US until 2005, via the band's remastering campaign in the early 2000s (by which point the band's '80s catalog was back under ownership of Virgin Records, who released Hysteria on CD in the US through their Caroline Records imprint).
• Promoted Fanboy:
  • Joanne and Susan were already fans of the group and owned their first two LPs, which was part of the reason they agreed to join the reformed group despite not having any prior musical experience.
  • The band themselves were prominently influenced by Yellow Magic Orchestra, to the point of using the Roland MC-8 microprocessor that YMO brought to fame. They would later get the chance to collaborate with the Japanese band on the EP YMO Versus The Human League.
• Revival by Commercialization:
  • "(Keep Feeling) Fascination" appeared in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and raised the track's popularity after languishing as an obscure non-LP single for years. For that matter, it also revived interest in the band as well, who had fizzled out quite hard after the massive success of Dare!
  • Their older single, "Empire State Human" also played a part in this, when it was featured in Lollipop Chainsaw
  • Their 1986 song "Human", previously best known for its ties to its heavily maligned parent album Crash, also saw a new uptick in popularity when it was used as the theme song for an advertising campaign by Liberty Mutual Insurance.
• Similarly Named Works:
  • No, "Fascination" is not the David Bowie song off of Young Americans.
  • And No, "Hard Times" is neither the Paramore song nor the Jetzons song that served as the basis for the IceCap Zone theme, despite being the same genre in both cases.
• No Export for You: America and Canada got an EP called Fascination! that rounded up a few tracks that were released in the UK, though it contains an early version of "I Love You Too Much" that is arranged differently to the one that would appear on Hysteria. This was this trope for around 30 years until it was eventually released on a special edition of Dare in the 2000s.
• Trailer Delay: The band wrote "Boys and Girls" and "I Am the Law" at the same time and performed them both in late 1980. Both songs are noted for their extreme minimalism, due to the band not having access to the synths and drum machines used by the departed Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh. The label wanted a single to pay off the band's debts, so the band picked "Boys and Girls" (which came out as a non-LP single in February 1981), and the band saved "I Am the Law" for their next album, which eventually became Dare, coming out 8 months later in October 1981. In the ensuing months, the band changed to a noticeably lusher, poppier style— and "I Am the Law" sticks out like a sore thumb as a result. It would have fit on either of the band's first two albums.
• Troubled Production: Their third album Dare had a much more troublesome production than the band's previous two albums, which were flops.
  • The band's two lead members, Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh, left the band in 1980 and formed a new group, Heaven 17. The press pretty much declared The Human League dead right there, as the only two members left were the ones that they perceived had the least to do with the band's musical direction: vocalist Philip Oakey and visual artist Adrian Wright. To add insult to injury, the band was already in crippling debt and Virgin Records was looking to drop them, but they still owed another album to the label.
  • Oakey recruited two local teenage singers, Susanne Sulley and Joanne Catherall, to sing for the group and recruited keyboardist Ian Burden to round out the band. Oakey went on tour with this lineup, with Sulley and Catherall not intended as full members of the group. The tour was poorly received by the band's old fans, who heckled them at pretty much every concert. However, Oakey and Wright were so impressed by Sulley and Catherall's professionalism, that they made them full band members.
  • When the new iteration of the Human League arrived at the studio to record their new album, they discovered that the artist in the adjacent studio was, of all bands, Heaven 17. The toxic atmosphere between the two bands led the Human League to book a new studio outside of their native Sheffield, which resulted in the still-underage Sulley and Catheral having to frequently take bus trips back to the city to attend school.
  • While still working on the album, the band issued the single "The Sound of the Crowd", which Virgin reluctantly promoted, only to see it become their first Top 40 hit. Virgin then asked for two more singles, again before the album was even finished, causing some stress with the recording process. Virgin's idea paid off: "Love Action (I Believe In Love)" and "Open Your Heart" were even bigger hits, both reaching the Top 10. Around this time, guitarist Jo Callis was added as the band's sixth and final member late in to the album's production.
  • When Dare was finally released in October 1981, it was a massive smash for both the band and label...but Virgin still wanted one more single, and picked "Don't You Want Me". Oakey begged them not to release it because he thought it was the worst song on the album. They rebuffed him, and he was sure the song would embarrass the band and ruin the career they worked so hard to rebuild. He didn't need to worry: In a rare case of Executive Meddling gone right, "Don't You Want Me" was the biggest of all of their hits, a #1 in both the UK and the US, and one of the most popular and iconic songs of the 80s New Wave Music movement.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Ian Craig Marsh and Martyn Ware originally sought to recruit Glenn Gregory as their vocalist, only to find out that he was unavailable. Following this, they sought out personal friend Philip Oakey, who had no musical experience but was well-known for his eclectic fashion sense, which Ware thought would be a good fit for the band. After Marsh and Ware left the Human League and formed Heaven 17, they finally got Gregory to join them as vocalist.
  • Philip Oakey recorded vocals for the B-side "Introducing", only for them to be left off the final release, rendering the song an instrumental.
  • Shortly after the release of Hysteria, the band started working on a follow-up produced by Colin Thurston, who previously worked with the Mk. I lineup on "I Don't Depend on You" and Reproduction. However, the project fell through in September 1985 due to Creative Differences. In the wake of this, Virgin Records flew the band out to Minnesota to start over from the ground up with The Time alums Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, leading to the release of Crash.

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