The Human League - The Dare! Demos

It remains one of the great mysteries of the age. Like who built the pyramids, or what was the purpose of Stonehenge. How did Phil Oakey come up with Dare!, one of the defining statements of eighties synthpop?

The odds were certainly against him. When the League Mark I split, Ian Craig Marsh and Martyn Ware took all the song writing and production skills with them. Oakey was left only with Adrian Wright, the guy who did the slide projections for their live shows, and his trademark hair cut. Neither Oakey nor Wright had any real experience playing an instrument, let alone knew much about writing a hit single. And Oakey's first move was hardly one to inspire any confidence: rather than hire some musicians to play the backing parts for a European tour that had been booked before the split, he recruited a couple of school girls he had spotted at the local disco to be dancers for the band.

So where did Dare! come from? Well, the simple answer, and the one most commonly advanced, is: Martin Rushent. Having cut his teeth producing first-wave punk and post-punk acts like The Buzzcocks, Generation X, and XTC, he had spent the better of a quarter million pounds setting up Genetic Sound Studio, the centre piece of which was a Linn Drum machine. Where earlier drum machines could only play a fixed number of preset rhythm patterns, typically associated with rather dated dance styles like the Cha Cha or Bossa Nova, the Linn could be programmed to play anything the programmer liked. What was more, the Linn could be synchronized with arpeggiators and sequencers, allowing each part to sound perfectly in time with every other part. Rushent's mastery of the Linn drum machine, together with an innovative production style that isolated each instrument, affording each its own precise place in the acoustic field, gave the album its air of sleek, cool modernism.

The other answer looks past Rushent's studio skills to credit Ian Burden and, especially, Jo Callis, the hired guns that Oakey belatedly brought on board to help work out the musical backing to his and Wright's early song sketches. What this two cd set shows, however, is that neither answer fully suffices. The demos present here show that even at a very early stage in the album's development, and certainly well before Rushent was to add his distinctive touches, Oakey and Wright had begun to forge a very different conception of the band's sound. Where the songs for Reproduction and Travelogue were audio collages, built up from tracks painstakingly pieced together from individual modular synth patches, the songs for Dare! began with simple chords, mostly picked out on on the new generation of cheap polyphonic synthesizers (such as the Casio M10), and plaintive one-finger melodies that express an aching romanticism that was new to their sound. The League Mark II wrote songs, in short, with memorable lead lines and a distinctive tone--the very limitations of their abilities seem to have kept them from becoming overly predictable or formulaic.

The story of how Oakey and Wright, together with Callis, Burden, and the school girl dancers, Joanne Catherall and Susanne Sulley, developed these songs from the most rudimentary sketches to dance floor classics that still inspire shrieks of recognition whenever they're played, is presented in wonderful archaeological detail in this two cd set. There's plenty to intrigue the dedicated League fan who doesn't already have this set: alternate lyrics to "The Things That Dreams Are Made Of," early versions of "Do or Die" and "Open Your Heart" (here titled "Letting It Show" and "Banjo Song," respectively), and songs that didn't make the album, such as "In The Park" (a variation on Lou Reed's "Perfect Day" I suspect), and "Boxing on TV." But to my mind, the real answer to the question with which we began can be found at the very end of the second set, a methodically worked out bass line for the Ike and Tina Turner classic, "River Deep, Mountain High." The League Mark I was keen on on sixties r'n b standards, and even included "You've Lost That Loving Feeling" on their first album. Clearly at some point there must must have been some thought of doing something similar for Dare!

In the end, however, there would be no Phil Spector covers on Dare! Instead of RDMH, they included the haunting, austere, vaguely sinister theme from the film "Get Carter." That choice, and I suspect it was Oakey's choice, speaks volumes about how clearly the vocalist understood what he wanted from this album: romantic but danceable, glamorous but minimal, modern but nostalgic. If the success of Dare! belongs to any one, my money's on the guy with the lopsided hair cut.

-- Crash the Driver

The two cd set posted here is identical to that which was posted over at Going Underground, the links for which have now been dead for some time. We're posting it here following repeated requests from the members of the Blind Youth list, the place to go for all things related to the League Mark I. Our thanks to Going Underground for making it available.

The Dare! Demos CD One

The Dare! Demos CD Two

Music For Stowaways by B.E.F.

It held no more than ninety minutes of music. Individual tracks could be located only with a great deal of button pushing and waiting. And invariably its tape store came unwound, wrapping yards of sticky brown ribbon around the capstans of your player. But in the early eighties the cassette struck fear in the heart of the music industry. Prominent artists and label execs alike lined up to announce, "Home taping is killing music." Profits plunged. The vinyl record seemed doomed.

But there were others who saw the cassette tape as a harbinger of a brighter future. Malcolm McLaren, architect of the punk revolution, declared that it was a radically democratic medium, allowing every day users to become pop artists and music label owners in their own right. His band Bow Wow Wow had a hit with "C30 C60 C90 Go!," a veritable clarion call to the disciples of ferrous oxide, and a prodigious underground trading network sprung up. Bands that had no hope of ever securing a deal with an independent let alone a major found themselves being played on the Peel show and being reviewed in the weekly music press.

British Electric Foundation were firmly on the side of the cassette rebels. Following their split with The Human League, Ian Craig Marsh and Martyn Ware set up B.E.F. less as a band than as a corporation, an umbrella organization which would oversee any number of different kinds of musical and artistic endeavours. And to make it clear that this new enterprise was opposed to the interests of the industry, a means of using the system against the system, they launched it with Music For Stowaways, a cassette-only release of meditative mood pieces, very much in the manner of the League's Dignity of Labour, and politically-tinged dance grooves that presaged their work with Heaven 17. "Stowaway" referred to the name originally intended for what became the Sony Walkman, and the release as a whole celebrated the freedom of the personal cassette recorder.

In the years that followed, B.E.F. would be responsible for a couple of glossy collections of pop standards covered by an eclectic group of vocalists, including Billy MacKenzie, Sandy Shaw, and Tina Turner, but somehow the early promise of this tape and of the idea of the anti-corporation corporation got lost. What was to be the beginning of the revolution seems now to have been its last gasp, but it remains a fascinating glimpse of a future that might have been.

--Crash The Driver

Music For Stowaways

01 Optimum Chant (4:12)
02 Uptown Apocalypse (3:13)
03 Wipe The Board Clean (3:48)
04 Groove Thang (We Don't Need This Fascist) (4:07)
05 Music To Kill Your Parents By (1:28)
06 The Old At Rest (5:37)
07 Rise Of The East (2:51)
08 Decline Of The West (7:20)
09 B.E.F. Ident (0:36)
UK Cassette Virgin [TCV2228] 1981

Truly one of the more astounding post-punk electronic releases, this built perfectly on the rather crude Dignity Of Labour EP and established this particular Human League axis as purveyors of fine instrumental electrobeat. Not to mention that it helped ring in the bumper crop year of 1981 on an inventive and playful note.

Most of the contemporary attention was paid to "Groove Thang" and its companion vocal piece "(We Don't Need This) Fascist Groove Thang", released as Heaven 17. Perhaps this was because it was funky and perhaps because it had a vocal line to follow. It was a bit disingenuous though, considering the quick slide Heaven 17 took into nothing but "groove thangs". And though it's fine, there's better stuff here.

From the very start of the tape the interlocking rhythmic interplay of "Optimum Chant" and "Uptown Apocalypse" defines a tension between change and stasis that was later to become a primary goal of most electronic ambient works. "Wipe The Board Clean" seems to be waiting for a vocal line, but it's one of those backing tracks better left without a front. Rarely has there been a record with three stronger opening tracks.

"The Old At Rest" is noticeably mellower, with something of the dark timbre of the Bowie-Eno Berlin instrumentals, and something of Cluster or Harmonia as well. The expansive "Decline Of The West" harks back to some Reproduction sounds, with a lovely little sonar ping thrown in.

Marsh and Ware rushed on to redefine pop music (or so they thought) but never again managed to be half as innovative as on this lost piece of tape. It was issued in an edition of 10,000. And every one is loved.

-- Second Chameleon

The Taverner Tape by The Human League

"No Future," they say.
But must it be that way?
Now is calling
The city is human

The Human League needed help. Not in their struggle against The Pansentient Hegemony. That was long past. No, The Human League needed help with something much more difficult, something on which their future very much depended. The Human League needed help getting a record contract. And they turned to the only man they knew who could help, Jason Taverner.

It was the Spring of 1979. Martyn Ware, Ian Craig Marsh, and lop-haired vocalist, Phil Oakey, had already scored a surprise success with their first single, the inscrutable but irresistible, "Being Boiled." Recorded for the princely sum of two and a half pounds ("And that was for the Letraset for the sleeve," Martyn would later claim), the first pressing of "Being Boiled" had sold out in a matter of days. John Peel played it on his show, they appeared on the cover of the NME, and David Bowie called them the "future of music." But they were broke. "Being Boiled" was, after all, released on their manager's tiny independent label, Fast Records. To move to the next stage, to become the all-conquering pop stars they imagined themselves being, they needed a deal with a major.

The trio gathered home-made demos of several of the tracks they had been playing live, in support of bands such as Siouxsie and the Banshees and The Stranglers, and asked local network television personality Jason Taverner to introduce them on a tape to be sent round to the labels. Taverner was an avuncular figure; when they appeared on his show, he liked to call Ian, Martyn, and Phil, "the lads," and praised their youthful optimism when other bands "were just trying to shock people." In return, the band had recorded a hit album, There'll Be A Good Time With Taverner Tonight. This was sure to get the attention of the A&R men.

Of course there was no Jason Taverner. The League had never been on tv, let alone recorded a hit album. It was all an elaborate ruse, somewhere between Situationist prank and Monty Python skit, with Phil playing the part of the regional television personality to a tee. To further confound matters, they inserted the same fifteen second theme, the so-called "Dominion Jingle," after each song. An obscure reference to a fictional drug, and sounding like a lost sound cue from a low budget horror movie set in an abandoned amusement park, the jingle cast an ominous shadow over the demo's collection of pop songs and futuristic instrumentals, reminding listeners that the League were as much descendents of Delia Derbyshire as Donna Summer.

And it worked. The Banshee's label, Polydor, expressed interest. Soon Virgin and Fiction, home to both The Cure and The Associates, were in a bidding war for the synthesizer band from Sheffield. Finally, in April, The Human League signed with Virgin. "I was really taken with their version of 'You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin,'" recalls A&R man Simon Draper. "They were very original and Phil had his amazing asymmetrical hair; I immediately wanted to sign them. But they were very avant garde and I wondered whether they were going to be successful or not."

Commercial success would, in fact, largely elude the original line up of The Human League, but their albums have become among the most revered in the minimal synth canon. Here, then, is the long lost demo tape that started it all. Though every effort has been made to restore the tracks (among other things, Second Chameleon is a trained sound engineer), the quality is less than ideal. We trust that the historical significance of the tape out weighs such concerns in this instance.

--Crash The Driver

The Taverner Tape

1. First Jason Taverner Intro
2. Blind Youth
3. Dominion Jingle
4. Interface
5. Dominion Jingle
6. Again The Eye Again
7. Dominion Jingle
8. Second Jason Taverner Intro
9. Toyota City
10. Dominion Jingle
11. Path Of Least Resistance
12. Dominion Jingle
13. Zero As A Limit
14. Dominion Jingle
15. Third Jason Taverner Intro
16. You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'