The Human League

... and, uh, some artwork.

You, you may have a Human League album with his-

Yeah

... uh, artwork on it.

A lot of these videos, if you watch a lot of them, you'll see his style in each one of them.

You got Ultravox, Icehouse, Paul McCartney, The Human League, XTC, Making Plans for Nigel, another really great hit, The Stranglers, Sex Pistols, Dragon, Hush, ACDC, Jailbreak, and The Saints.

I mean, really good list of a lot of them, really good.

They're all hits.

We did a lot of tours, but we were... really going against the tide because the stuff happening in the UK was New Wave.

It was the, you know, the Paul Youngs, the Simply Reds, the Human League.

Spandau Ballet.

Spandau Ballet.

The '80s, so many bangers, so many fun songs.

That one by the Human League, Don't You Want Me.

All right, number four.

Number four, 1999.

We end today on our 100th episode with one third of the Sheffield electronic pioneers.

We've recently had entries from ABC and last fortnight Heaven 17, but now we're back with The League, The Human League, who we last met in late 1981, episode 33.

They had just treated us all to the shimmering pop joy of Don't You Want Me, a massive global hit that secured the 1981 Christmas number one slot, propelled the album Dare into the stratosphere and sent Philip Oakey, Joanne Catherall, Susan Ann Sully, Ian Burden, Joe Callis and Philip Adrian Wright on a gruelling world tour.

When the tour buses finally stopped rolling in mid-1982, the pressure from Virgin Records to deliver an immediate follow-up masterpiece was immense.

And it was produced by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis.

The band I'm talking about is The Human League.

And I have a story about this particular track that I heard on a podcast featuring Jam and Lewis being interviewed.

And it was really interesting.

That was off the album Hysteria.

And this was to be the follow-up album.

It was the one that was causing the Human League a lot of problems trying to record it.

The label listened to the demo and asked them, what are you trying to sound like here, lads? And they said they wanted to make a Jammin' Lewis type record.

And I mean, tell me about the recording of that and the thinking behind that track.

Well I think that we did record it with Steve Severin and at that point happy birthday and I could be happy within the same song and I think when we delivered the album to the label they were like this is great but there's no big standout song to launch it from and they talked us into getting together with Martin Russian, which actually was no big deal because we're massive fans of the Buzzcocks, the Stranglers, the Human League.

So we were like really happy to meet Martin.

And he said, I think you've got two songs within one song here.