Rip It Up and Start Again (16 page)

Oakey had no real ambitions to be a pop singer. He was a hospital porter when Ware suggested he try out as the Future’s front man. “We gave him the backing track to ‘Being Boiled’ and two days later he came back and said, ‘I don’t know if you’ll like this.’” He’d come up with a bizarre lyric blending stuff about the senseless slaughter of silkworms with confused, ill-digested notions about Eastern religion. Nonsense, but delivered in Oakey’s commanding baritone, it sounded wonderfully baleful. “We heard the first lines—‘Listen to the voice of Buddha/Saying stop your sericulture’—and it was a turning point.” Oakey joined the group, but he wasn’t keen on the Future as the name, so they came up with the Human League, taken from a science-fiction game about two warring intergalactic empires.

With Oakey on board, the group shifted decisively in a pop direction with songs like “Dance Like a Star,” a lo-fi, cobbled-together counterpart to Summer and Moroder’s “I Feel Love.” At the start of the song, Oakey taunts, “This is a song for all you bigheads out there who think disco music is lower than the irrelevant musical gibberish and tired platitudes that you try to impress your parents with. We’re the Human League, we’re much cleverer than you, and this is called ‘Dance Like a Star.’” Shedding their prog side, the Human League began to develop a new aesthetic, not art rock so much as art pop. Highbrows aligning themselves with commercial dance pop (Abba, Eurodisco, Chic), they now sneered at the sort of middlebrow notions of deep and meaningful (the Pink Floyd/Cure/Radiohead continuum) typically cherished by college students. As part of their newfound appreciation for conveyor belt pop and epic schmaltz, the Human League started to work up all-electronic cover versions of sixties classics like the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling.”

The next threshold for the Human League came courtesy of scenester Paul Bower. His band 2.3 were set to release their debut single, “Where To Now?” on Fast Product. Bowers loved the Human League’s material, especially “Being Boiled.” He gave a demo tape of the song to Bob Last, who liked it so much he wanted to release it without any rerecording. Last, a huge Parliament-Funkadelic fan, recalls hearing “this phenomenal fat bass riff in the middle of ‘Being Boiled,’ like a mutant Bootsy Collins riff. I was like, ‘God, we’ve got to put this out.’” Last also dug the way Human League “played with this whole cultural landscape of kitsch,” simultaneously embracing and making fun of it. This aspect came to the fore on “Circus of Death,” the companion track to “Being Boiled,” which Ware once described as “a subliminal trip through all the very trashiest films.” The story involves an evil clown who runs a nightmare circus and uses the sinister mind control drug Dominion to pacify the population, with Steve McGarrett from
Hawaii Five-0
flying in to the rescue.

“Being Boiled” was released in June 1978 with the slogan “Electronically yours” on its cover. That same month, the Human League made their live debut at the Psalter Lane art college in Sheffield. To reproduce the tracks they came up with a solution that was both pragmatic and artistically appealing. “We went onstage with a tape recorder, with the rhythm and bass on tape,” says Marsh. “We liked the idea of putting the machine where the drummer ought to be, with a spotlight on it. Then we’d come onstage, take our positions by the keyboards, and then very pointedly I’d walk over and press ‘play.’ We knew this would be a big windup to the rock ’n’ roll fraternity, the keep-music-live crew. At that time the only people using backing tapes were disco artists doing personal appearances in nightclubs.”

The first show went well because some art students had erected a wall of badly tuned TV sets behind the band, but subsequent gigs suffered because the Human League weren’t much to look at. “Me and Martyn were static behind the synths,” says Marsh, while Oakey was rigid with stage fright. Then an art student named Adrian Wright came up and offered to rectify their image deficit with slide projections. “Adrian had access to professional Kodak slide machines. He could scam them off the college,” says Marsh. And so the Human League acquired its fourth member, giving him the title director of visuals.

Wright was an obsessive collector of pulp ephemera:
Man from U.N.C.L.E.
cards, Rin Tin Tin books, memorabilia from
Doctor Who
and Gerry Anderson’s marionette series
Thunderbirds
and
Stingray
. “If you went ’round to Adrian’s bedsit, every single square inch of wall space, from floor to ceiling, was full of comics and toys,” says Ware. Wright also had a fascination with celebrity culture, says Oakey, “people who manipulated the media to their own advantage. He was absolutely fascinated by the Kennedys and Hitler, to the point where some people thought he was fascist. But in fact, he was just interested in their use of image and propaganda.” For the Human League, Wright developed an increasingly complex set of slide projections, juxtaposing imagery from science and technology (rockets, graphs, diagrams, oil rigs), nature (flowers, animals), and popular culture (erotica, celebrities, advertisements). “The first time we had the slides, this free gig at the Limit in Sheffield, was our first really successful show,” says Marsh.

Following the release of “Being Boiled” and their first gigs outside Sheffield, the Human League started to get celebrity endorsements. David Bowie hailed them as a glimpse of pop’s future. They played in Europe on the same bill as Devo and Iggy Pop. They were invited to support Siouxsie and the Banshees on tour, for which they made their own fiberglass “riot shields” to protect the synths from lobbed beer. The partnership with Fast Product blossomed, with Bob Last functioning creatively almost as a fifth member of the band. Eventually he became their manager. “Bob had this fantastic sensibility where everything was an art event,” says Ware.

Along with a passion for concept and presentation, the League and Fast also shared the same antihippie, antislacker, no-time-for-flabby-thinking attitude. According to Ware, “We were into action, this super-Protestant, must-work-all-day outlook that is very much part of Sheffield.” The Human League’s second release for Fast Product was a tribute to the worker. The
Dignity of Labour
EP consisted of four electronic instrumentals inspired by the Soviet space program, all offering a different slant on a central concept: the extent to which modern technology ultimately depended upon the workers. In this case, Russian miners, toiling deep beneath the Earth’s crust, excavated the coal needed to make steel, which was then made into gantries for Yury Gagarin’s spaceship. Gagarin appears on the EP’s front cover as a splendidly isolated figure walking across a Moscow square to receive a medal for being the first human in outer space. The EP came with a free flexidisc, which documented—in true Brechtian fashion—the band and Last debating what the record sleeve should be. At the end, Oakey makes a brief statement about the concept EP’s theme of individualism versus collectivism.

Dignity of Labour
was released in April 1979 on the eve of Britain’s general election. The ensuing massive defeat for the Labour government inaugurated an era in which individualism would be championed at the expense of collective values. “You couldn’t live in Sheffield and not be aware that the industrial era was crumbling,” says Last. “So on one level the EP was a totally serious hymn to the dignity of workers. But at the same time, it was imbued with many levels of irony, doubt, and alienation.” Despite its timely resonance and atmospheric, ahead-of-its-time electronica, the EP’s pensive instrumentals confused most “Being Boiled” fans.

Last believed there was no point in putting out a third League single on Fast Product and decided to secure a major-label deal for the group. Approaching the big companies again, the Human League pitched themselves as the trailblazers of music’s next big thing, a wave of positivity after punk’s nihilism and outrage. “Blind Youth,” the first song on their demo tape, ridiculed fashionable doom-and-gloom mongers, especially people who regarded modern urban life as some kind of dystopian nightmare. “High-rise living’s not so bad,” sings Oakey, a dig aimed equally at Ballard and the Clash, “Dehumanization is such a big word/It’s been around since Richard the Third.” Rejecting punk’s “no future” stance, the Human League exhorted the blind youth of Britain to “Take hope/Your time is due/Big fun come soon/
Now
is calling.”

CABARET VOLTAIRE’S RESPONSE
to punk was different. To some extent, they went along with the ride. Kirk began to push guitar to the fore. Where once all three voices had been used, Mallinder settled into the role of lead singer, his vocals sinister and low in the mix. The Cabs started playing live regularly, renting rooms above pubs and promoting their own gigs. They wangled their way into the punk world, sending off tapes to New Hormones’ Richard Boon, who didn’t have the cash to release a record but gave them a supporting slot with Buzzcocks in March 1978. “It was at the Lyceum, the Slits were on the same bill, a complete fucking nightmare,” recalls Kirk. “Full of crazed punk rockers. We got covered in spit.”

Shortly after the Lyceum gig, Cabaret Voltaire moved their operational base from Chris Watson’s attic to a building called Western Works. The Cabs’ new headquarters had formerly been the offices of the Sheffield Federation of Young Socialists. “If you look at old photos of us rehearsing at Western Works, you’ll see this wall behind us covered with all these old socialist posters from the sixties and seventies. We left them there because we thought it made a nice backdrop.”

Having a space to hang out and work at any hour of the day was a breakthrough, says Kirk. The acquisition of their own multitrack tape machine and mixing board enabled Cabaret Voltaire to make recordings with good enough sound quality to release. This was the logical extension of the do-it-yourself impulse, no longer having to rent a studio and deal with the resident recalcitrant engineer or the ticking clock, but being able to spend as much time as one wanted on the recording process. Through the eighties and into the techno nineties, this kind of self-sufficient entrepreneurial collective would become widespread. In 1978, Cabaret Voltaire were developing the model for a kind of postsocialist microcapitalism, an autonomy that represented if not exactly resistance, then a form of grassroots resilience in the face of top-down corporate culture. “When you have your own studio, you don’t have to be beholden to some record company that’s paying the bills,” says Kirk. “Western Works gave us the freedom to do what we wanted.”

Initially, however, Cabaret Voltaire couldn’t afford to be totally autonomous, so Rough Trade “advanced us enough money to buy the four-track and mixing desk,” says Kirk. Actually recorded before they acquired the new studio setup, the group’s debut record,
Extended Play,
was released by Rough Trade in October 1978. The four-song EP kicked off a remarkable run of releases via the label that lasted until 1982 and included six classic singles, four landmark long-players, numerous live albums, and the odd mini-LP.

Somewhere between 1977 and 1979, the definitive Cabaret Voltaire sound took shape: the hissing hi-hats and squelchy snares of their rhythm generator, Watson’s smears of synth slime, Mallinder’s dankly pulsing bass, and Kirk’s spikes of shattered-glass guitar. Everything coalesces on singles such as “Silent Command” and “Seconds Too Late” to create a stalking hypno-groove somewhere between death disco and Eastern Bloc skank. Another Cabaret Voltaire hallmark was the dehumanizing of Mallinder’s voice via creepy treatments that made him sound reptilian, alien, or, at the extreme, like some kind of metallic or mineralized being. On “Silent Command,” for instance, Mal’s vocal bubbles like molten glass being blown into distended shapes. On other singles, such as “Nag Nag Nag” and “Jazz the Glass,” there’s an almost charming sixties garage punk feel, the fuzztone guitar and Farfisa organ vamps recalling? and the Mysterians or the Seeds.

Having started out playing clarinet, an instrument more redolent of Jethro Tull than PiL, Kirk swiftly joined postpunk’s pantheon of guitar innovators. You can hear the chill wind of his guitar sound emerging on “The Set Up” from the debut EP. Elsewhere he employs a choppy rhythm style, equal parts reggae’s scratchy afterbeat and the itchy funk of Can’s Michael Karoli. What really grabs your attention is Kirk’s trademark timbre, a sensuous, brittle distortion like blistered metal or burning chrome, needling its way deep into your ear canal. Typically fed through delay units and heavy with sustain, Kirk’s guitar arcs and recedes through soundscapes reverberant yet claustrophobic, like bunkers or underground missile silos. “Being a telephone engineer and good with electronics, Chris Watson was able to custom-build me a fuzzbox using this circuit he’d got from a magazine,” says Kirk. “So no one else had this sound.”

When it came to live shows, Cabaret Voltaire were as committed to multimedia as the Human League, but oriented more toward sensory overload. They used slide and film projectors to create a backdrop of unsynchronized, cut-up imagery: French porn, TV news, and movies. Bombarding the audience with data also related to Cabaret Voltaire’s conception of themselves as reporters. “We were more like, let’s just present the facts and let people make up their own minds,” says Kirk.

Cabaret Voltaire’s reportorial approach meant that current events leaked into their music. Visiting the United States for the first time in November 1979, they caught wind of the impending shift to the Right with Reagan and the born-again Christian movement, which inspired their second album,
The Voice of America
. “We were fascinated by America but aware of its darker side. A big novelty for a bunch of kids from England, where TV finished at eleven
P
.
M
. and there were only three channels, was the fact that America had all-night TV and
loads
of stations. We just locked into this televangelist Eugene Scott, who had a low-rent show that was all about raising money. And the only reason he wanted the money was to stay on the air.”