Darlington The Human League: And the Sheffield Electro Scene

Every Album, Every Song
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-78952-458-1
Verlag: Sonicbond Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 160 Seiten

Reihe: On Track

Sheffield in the late-1970s was isolated from what was happening in London in the same way that Liverpool had been in 1963. A unique generation of electro-experimental groupings evolved in the former Steel City around Cabaret Voltaire and The Future. The Future split into two factions, Clock DVA and The Human League, the latter splitting into two further factions - Heaven 17 and The Human League as we now know them, fronted by Philip Oakey with Joanne Catherall and Susan Sulley.
Dare became one of the most iconic albums of the eighties; the album by which The Human League are most instantly recognised. It is an ambitious record, both driven and voracious, with giddy grenades of inventiveness. A triumph of content over style, at once phenomenally commercial and gleefully avant-garde.
The American success of 'Don't You Want Me', accelerated by the high-gloss video, which exploited the band's visual appeal, heralded what was soon termed the 'second British invasion'. It was the first of two singles by the band to top the US charts.
This book tells the full story, from the scene's origins in Sheffield, through the full arc of the very early Heaven 17 albums and the complete Human League discography into the twenty-first century.

Andrew Darlington watched the very first episode of Dr Who and he also watched the most recent episode. Whatever academic potential he may once have possessed was wrecked by an addiction to loud rock 'n' roll and cheap science fiction, which remain the twin poles of what he laughingly refers to as his writing career. He is most proud of his parallel universe collection A Saucerful Of Secrets. His latest book is The Hollies on track (Sonicbond, 2021) and his writing can be found at Eight Miles Higher via andrewdarlington.blogspot.co.uk.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Darlington, Andrew

Leseproben

Introduction

None of The Human League have any orthodox musical training but prefer to regard composition as an extension of logic, inspiration and luck. Therefore, unlike conventional musicians, their influences are not so obvious.

Fast Product Press Pack, June 1978

Rock ‘n’ roll was never intended to be about virtuosity. It was more a DIY folk music. Skiffle was a 1950s fad championed by Lonnie Donegan, which ignited a thousand ad hoc austerity groups repurposing household items – a washboard, an old tea chest impaled with a broom handle, tension-strung to create a stand- up bass, and maybe a couple of battered acoustic guitars played with more energy than technique. Two decades later, Sheffield created a new kind of electronic skiffle.

Why Sheffield? The M1 slip road 34 takes you into the small South Yorkshire industrial city that has a greater music tradition than that description would imply. We could start with Wurlitzer organist Reginald Dixon: famous for his radio broadcasts from the Blackpool Tower Ballroom. But we probably won’t. Instead, we’ll begin in the beat-boom era with Dave Berry, his distinctive creepy stage persona, and hits that included ‘The Crying Game’, his cover of Bobby Goldsboro’s ‘Little Things’ and the Ray Davies-penned ‘This Strange Effect’. Dave was born in Woodhouse – to the southeast of Sheffield – in February 1941.

Then there’s Joe Cocker, who took the Woodstock festival by storm with his anguished take on The Beatles’ modest sing-along: the Ringo Starr-sung ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’. Joe was born at 38 Tasker Road in the Sheffield suburb of Crookes in May 1944.

Tony Christie might’ve been born in nearby Conisbrough, but his long association with the steel city includes his 2008 Made In Sheffield album – produced by Richard Hawley, with contributions from Alex Turner and Jarvis Cocker.

Of course, there’s Def Leppard, jazz guitarist Derek Bailey, singer Paul Carrack, jazz drummer Tony Oxley, Pulp, Arctic Monkeys and beyond. But this book is largely centred around the cluster of electro musicians who were feeling their way through the 1970s to upsurge into the 1980s as the ‘soundtrack for the second industrial revolution: 45 and 33-and-a-third rpm’.

The first time I visited Sheffield – where now there is the labyrinthine Meadowhall temple to opulent consumerism – there were still foundries you could smell in the air and that shook the street beneath your feet, ‘like a metronome, like a heartbeat for the whole city’, according to Human League founding member Ian Craig Marsh. ‘We all come from pretty strong working- class backgrounds’, Ian told me. ‘My Dad’s a bricklayer, and my Mum used to work at Bassett’s Liquorice Allsorts factory. My Grandfather got burned clear down his right side when he was splashed with molten steel at a steel works!’. De-industrialisation left abandoned factory units to colonise as rehearsal rooms and studio space for insurrectionary anti-musicians, who ‘discarded natural sound source in favour of synthetic instrumentation because of its convenience, mobility and vast source of as-yet-untapped potential’ (the manifesto of 1970s Sheffield electronic band Vice Versa). And there was cheap front-room technology easily adaptable, Skiffle-style, sufficient to bend to purpose: original, in the sense of not using drums – which were just too tedious to learn – or guitars, which were considered obsolete. ‘We wanted to sound like a proper pop group, but we were not prepared to put in the five or six years that it would’ve taken to learn a traditional instrument’, explained Human League singer Philip Oakey. The non-Sheffield Nick Rhodes of Duran Duran described his discovery of synths as ‘This is a new planet that I could live on’. And yes, that’s how it was.

It was a time of dense-black xeroxed fanzines. Sheffield had its own GunRubber – produced since February 1977 by Paul Bower and Adi Newton – Modern Drugs from Martin Fry, NMX from Martin Russian, and the photocopied Steve’s Paper from Stephen Singleton: all documenting the burgeoning local music scene centred around Cabaret Voltaire and The Future. And there was the cassette underground, where, for the first time, bands, musicians and poets could use their bedrooms to home-record their own experimental sounds, then cheaply reproduce and circulate limited-edition C30s or C60s among a proto-internet of linked like-minded enthusiasts. It was ignited by the punk energy and ethos that anyone could get up and do it. It was new. It was exciting, combining the dissident samizdat self-publishing spirit of insurgency with mischievously incendiary early-Dada art-confrontational energies, supercharged by the relentlessly dark cut-up strategies of beat-generation writer William S. Burroughs and his sci-fi new wave disciple J. G. Ballard. Each bubble-pack package that arrived in the morning mail was ripped open to reveal new bulletins from the innovative edge of luring and sometimes scary tomorrows. New Musical Express (NME) carried its own weekly review column, with the addresses of more DIY weirdnesses a mere postal order away.

The first experimental synthesizer system had been devised in 1955 by RCA, but it was a certain Dr. Robert Moog who gave his name to the cheaper and more-marketable modular version that began to infiltrate awareness during the late-1960s – as demonstrated on the first entirely synthesized album Switched On Bach (1968) by Walter (later Wendy) Carlos, followed by The Well-Tempered Synthesizer a year later. Human League producer Martyn Ware recalled hearing Carlos on the A Clockwork Orange (1971) soundtrack. Heaven 17 would take their name from the same movie.

Bands such as The Byrds, Pink Floyd, The Moody Blues and others began to dabble in the effects that electronics could produce – with Terry Riley, Tonto’s Expanding Head Band and The United States Of America taking it incrementally further, nodding to John Cage as a kind of spiritual godfather. The cosmic synth genre was an extension of the psychedelic music-to-take- trips-by drug culture: an avant-garde trance deployment of otherworldly textures. Then, incorporated into banks of keyboards, the synthesizer became an exotic embellishment to the assault arsenal employed by virtuoso prog rock musicians. Synths were bulky, heavy, fragile and temperamental, utilising voltage-controlled oscillators and related devices that responded to room humidity and temperature. Heat changes from the lighting rig could affect tunings. A Moog required a two-hour warming-up period.

In Germany, Tangerine Dream, Neu and Kraftwerk were not only adapting and developing their own rhythmic variations but were inventing new ones through the use of sequencers. Kraftwerk – ‘The most important group of the century’, according to Philip Oakey – compressed eccentrically catchy musical ideas into the appropriately stimulating shape of wires, programmes, images, trackers, scanners, impulses and screens.

Championed by DJ John Peel, Tangerine Dream grew out of the Berlin Zodiak Free Arts Lab, where they evolved the hypnotic pulsations of their LP Phaedra (1974): the first charting album for them and for Virgin Records. Abstract solo albums by Klaus Schulze and Tangerine Dream’s Edgar Froese dissolved into sound pixels, which absorbed the listener into a Rorschach eyelid movie of aural fantasia. The 1977 success of Oxygène took Jean-Michel Jarre as close as space music could get to conventional pop, with brisk programmed percussion and melodic synth lines that made it both accessible and relentlessly catchy. Yet, it was closer to soporific mood music, conjuring an aid-to-getting-high mind screen for recumbent sofa surfers. To gonzo music journalist Lester Bangs, ‘The men at the keyboards send out sonar blips through the congealing air… three technological monoliths emitting urps, hissings, pings and swooshings in the dark’ (in his Psychotic Reactions And Carburetor Dung, published by Serpents Tail in 1987).

In Sheffield, it was different. ‘We didn’t need to spend a lot of money to be creative’, said Martyn. The Sheffield answer was to leap obliquely into exploratory voyages to uncharted areas of electronic experiment, sidestepping both conventional musical standards and accepted modes of rock celebrity. It was innovation inspired by the can-do attitude of punk, and the art-school Bowie cool. On one side of town was Cabaret Voltaire; on the other there was The Future – a ‘more adventurous but less commercial’ version of The Human League, which cannibalised Ian Craig Marsh and Martyn Ware alongside Adi Newton, who operated tape loops and treatments and was destined to form the excellent but much-undervalued Clock DVA.

If there was a pre-existing language, Kraftwerk had utilised tape loops, while Holger Czukay used random bursts of shortwave radio interference for his work with Can. Cabaret Voltaire began in trainee-telephone-engineer Chris Watson’s attic, inspired by a brief 80-page book called Composing With Tape Recorders: Musique Concrète For Beginners by Terence Dwyer (Oxford University Press, 1971). First Chris – then Chris in cahoots with Richard H. Kirk – played collage sound games with reel-to-reel tape recorders – sped- up, slowed-down, spliced and looped, adding a Farfisa drum machine with rudimentary mail-order ring modulator signal processing...