Archive for the ‘The Human League’ Category
Release Round-Up: Week of April 3
Johnny Cash, Bootleg IV: The Soul of Truth (Columbia/Legacy)
Three complete gospel albums – one of which was never released – and a heap of unreleased material make this one to look out for if you like The Man in Black at his sacred best.
Morrissey, Viva Hate: Deluxe Edition (Liberty/EMI)
If you can call it that, an expanded edition of Moz’s debut album, remastered with one bonus track, one edited track and one excised track.
Elvis Costello & The Imposters, The Return of the Spectacular Spinning Songbook!!! (Hip-O/UMe)
The standalone CD and DVD contents of that box set that everyone rightfully hated, including Costello himself.
Doris Day, With a Smile and a Song (Turner Classic Movies/Sony Masterworks)
Just in time for the legend’s birthday! A two-disc set of highlights personally selected by Day, devoted equally to her songs in film and on standalone albums.
fIREHOSE, “lowFLOWs”: The Columbia Anthology 1991-1993 (Columbia/Legacy)
Mike Watt’s late ’80s/early ’90s punk trio’s last two albums, with a heap of B-sides and rarities, in honor of fIREHOSE’s reunion tour.
The Human League, Dare: Deluxe Edition (Virgin/EMI)
Don’t you want this expanded edition of the British synthpop band’s breakthrough album?
The Smiths, The Smiths / Hatful of Hollow / Meat is Murder / The Queen is Dead / The World Won’t Listen / Louder Than Bombs / Strangeways, Here We Come / “Rank” (Sire/Rhino)
The remasters released in that mega box set last year are now available on their own.
Keep Feeling Fascination: Human League’s “Dare” Gets Expanded
“You were working as a waitress in a cocktail bar when I met you…” As patently false as the subject matter behind The Human League’s hypnotic “Don’t You Want Me” is, it was a massive, out-of-nowhere smash for a band that came out of a troubling state of flux with a renewed energy unlike few others. The fruits of that period, the 1981 album Dare, is coming back into U.K. stores this spring as a deluxe title with a host of non-LP goodies over two discs.
The Human League started out as an avant-garde all-male group anchored around Martyn Ware, Craig Marsh, Philip Adrian Wright and Phil Oakey. Their first single, 1978′s “Being Boiled” was a surprise Top 10 U.K. hit, but subsequent works did not find the same audience. Amid weakening support from the band’s label Virgin Records and clashes over the band’s sonic direction, the band broke apart, with Ware and Marsh forming Heaven 17 and Oakey and Wright left to do something – anything – for the League’s winter 1980 tour of Europe.
Against all odds, the duo recruited synth player Ian Burden to flesh out the group’s live sound and found Susan Ann Sulley and Joanne Catherall, a pair of untrained best friends spending a night out at the Crazy Daisy Nightclub in Sheffield, to provide vocals for the group. (Sulley and Catherall, both teenagers, needed parental permission to embark on the tour.) Despite the skepticism of initial reviews, things worked out well enough for the quintet to continue as a band in the studio; first single “Boys and Girls” was a moderate success; upon moving to a new studio (away from recording sessions by Heaven 17) and adding guitarist Jo Callis of The Rezillos to the lineup, the first single from those sessions, “Love Action (I Believe in Love)” was a Top 10 hit.
But The Human League really went into the stratosphere with a track that Oakey initially hated. The fictional tale of a musical Svengali whose protegée decides to move on from him professionally and romantically was so disliked by Oakey, he dumped it onto the end of the Dare LP. But “Don’t You Want Me” was the band’s first and only chart-topper for Christmas of 1981 and became a major hit across the globe.
The deluxe edition of Dare features the 2002 remaster of the original album and various, newly-remastered 12″ remixes and instrumentals on the first disc. The bonus disc, meanwhile, collects nearly all of the material on stopgap album Fascination!, which featured a handful of just as successful non-LP singles in “Mirror Man” and “(Keep Feeling) Fascination.”
Don’t you want this, baby? If so, March 26 is the day to get it. Hit the jump to check a pre-order link and track annotations.
