FEATURE:
Groovelines
The Human League - Don’t You Want Me
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I am going to go into more depth…
regarding one of the most iconic tracks of the 1980s. Before that, this Wikipedia article gives us some impressive statistics about The Human League’s Don’t You Want Me – a song that is coming up to its fortieth anniversary:
“Don't You Want Me" is a single by British synthpop group the Human League (credited on the cover as The Human League 100). It was released on 27 November 1981 as the fourth single from their third studio album Dare (1981). The band's best known and most commercially successful song, it was the biggest selling UK single of 1981, that year's Christmas number one, and has since sold over 1,560,000 copies in the UK, making it the 23rd-most successful single in UK Singles Chart history. It topped the Billboard Hot 100 in the US on 3 July 1982, where it stayed for three weeks.
In November 1983, Rolling Stone named it the "breakthrough song" of the Second British Invasion of the US. In 2015, the song was voted by the British public as the nation's seventh-favourite 1980s number one in a poll for ITV”.
Even though Don’t You Want Me is a celebrated and hugely popular moment in music history, its narrator is painting some quite grim and cruel scenes! A sense of control and intimidation is met with quite jaunty vocals and incredible synthesisers. It is hard to pinpoint what the very best aspect of Don’t You Want Me is. I especially love Philip Oakey’s lead vocal. There is so much to love a song that took The Human League by surprise. Don’t You Want Me song entered the U.K. singles chart at number nine, before hitting the top spot a week later. It remained there over the Christmas period for a total of five weeks. The track became the biggest-selling single to be released in 1981; the fifth-biggest-selling single of the entire decade.
There are a couple of articles about Don’t You Want Me that I want to bring in. The first is sort of a review. Freaky Trigger assessed the highs and lows of one of the defining songs of the 1980s:
“It’s almost a shame that after three years making records concerning sericulture, medieval time-slips, singles-as-singularities, assassinations, Judge Dredd, Dr Who and whatever the hell “Crow And A Baby” was about, the Human League get to #1 with a straightforward song of embittered romance. They maybe felt the same: “Don’t You Want Me” was the fourth single off Dare, released at the insistence of the label. Who of course were quite right.
Their cosmic imagination was only part of what made the League’s records good, though. They made their synthesisers slam together in an awkward but still addictive dance, and they had Phil Oakey’s marvellously rigid voice. Which you might not have thought was suitable for a song as directly emotional as “Don’t You Want Me”, but no – its limited range and perpetual tetchiness are ideal for a record about a man who simply won’t or can’t acknowledge the reality of the situation. Nobody else could have made the chorus sound quite so honestly uncomprehending.
For all that the guy in “Don’t You Want Me” is obviously a bit of a shit – “and I can put you back down too” – there’s something so hangdog about Oakey’s delivery that you feel sorry for him, like you might feel sorry for Alan Partridge or David Brent. Susanne Sulley’s polite and pitying dismantling of his perspective – blankness masking obvious irritation – leaves you in no doubt whatsoever that this is indeed a full stop.
As with “Tainted Love”, this is not a record I expect to stop meeting any time soon. I don’t think it’s as good as “Love Action” or “Sound Of The Crowd” – to be honest by now I’d even prefer to hear “The Lebanon” if I’m out of an evening. But it’s also easy to hear why it did so well: even beyond the all-too-yellable chorus, its clear-sighted outline of a whole romantic history makes it one of the most complete number ones”.
I want to source an article that goes into detail about the story and success of Don’t You Want Me. The song was also a massive success in America. One of those tracks that translated across the globe and seemed to capture the imagination of the record-buying public in 1981. Despite a rather detached and monotone vocal from Oakley, there was a magic and pull that was impossible to resist:
“In 1979, the Human League signed to Virgin Records, and their first two albums are cold, unforgiving sci-fi bloopiness. Those albums have a few bangers, like “Being Boiled,” but they did not sell. Soon enough, the Human League became art-school punchlines. Northern Irish punks the Undertones clowned the Human League by name on their 1980 single “My Perfect Cousin,” which became a top-10 UK hit. Since none of the Human League’s own singles had come anywhere near the top 10, that had to sting.
That same year, the Human League effectively broke up. Ware and Marsh had argued bitterly with Oakey, who wanted to make pop music, not icy synth provocations. Finally, Ware and Marsh left the band, splitting off to form a new group called Heaven 17. (Heaven 17’s highest-charting US single — at least until Bill Gates singlehandedly spearheads the Heaven 17 revival — is 1982’s “Let Me Go,” which peaked at #32.) Perhaps ironically, Heaven 17 ended up making pop music that also worked as icy synth provocation. So did the Human League.
Oakey kept the Human League name, but this, at least at first, was more of a burden than a boon. The Human League had been booked for a UK tour before Ware and Marsh left, and Oakey had to get a new band together quickly. He learned to play keyboards, and so did Philip Adrian Wright, who’d been a Human League member even though he’d only previously been responsible for the visuals of their live shows. (On Dare, the Human League’s breakout third album, Wright is still credited with “slides.”)
Oakey wanted a female backup singer who could sing the high parts that Ware had previously sung, and he wound up with two. Oakey headed out to a new wave night at a Sheffield club called Crazy Daisy, and he found two teenage best friends, Joanne Catherall and Susan Ann Sulley. Like Oakey himself, Catherall and Sulley had absolutely no previous musical experience, but they looked cool and moved well. (These are probably still the best qualifications for any prospective pop star.) Catherall and Sulley already had tickets to see the Human League on that upcoming tour. Instead, they became members of the band. When the Human League recorded the 1981 album Dare, Catherall and Sulley were still in high school, and they had to take the bus from Sheffield to the recording studio in Reading.
For Dare, the Human League were a whole new group. The final addition was keyboardist Jo Callis, a former guitarist for the punk band the Rezillos. (Callis, recruited for songwriting purposes, didn’t know how to play keyboard before he joined the Human League.) Virgin paired the group up with producer Martin Rushent, who’d mostly worked with punk bands like the Buzzcocks and the Stranglers but who knew how to layer up synth sounds. The group’s new sound kept the frozen synth textures of the early Human League records, but it added a melodic brightness that they’d never had before. It clicked right away. The album’s first single, “The Sound Of The Crowd,” peaked at #12 in the UK. The next two, “Love Action (I Believe In Love)” and “Open Your Heart,” both went top-10. Suddenly, the Human League were new wave stars. And then came “Don’t You Want Me.”
Phil Oakey’s “Don’t You Want Me” lyrics had been inspired by a photo story in a women’s magazine and by A Star Is Born. He wrote the song as a dialogue. Oakey’s character is some kind of aging power-broker type, despondent and heartbroken after being dumped by a woman who he’d found working as a waitress in a cock-taiiil bar. Susan Ann Sulley, who up to that point had only sung backup to Oakey, took the lead as the girl, who tries to let the guy down easy but who clearly wants to get the fuck away from him immediately. (The #1 song in America on the date of Sulley’s birth: The Four Seasons’ “Walk Like A Man.”) In real life, Oakey had started dating Joanne Catherall; they’d remain together until 1990.
On the first verse of “Don’t You Want Me,” Oakey sounds stern and commanding — as if he can’t believe that this girl would have the nerve to think that she could move on from him. “Success has been so easy for you,” he sings, implying that maybe it hasn’t been so easy for him. When he straight-up threatens her — “I can put you back down, too” — we start to get the idea that he’s wounded and shattered and powerless. On the chorus, he confirms it, his naked need increasing with every syllable: “You’d better change it back or we will both! Be! Sor! Ry!” He starts out sounding bored, and he winds up desperate.
As for Sulley, she remains bored throughout. She lets Oakey know, right away, that he wasn’t responsible for her success, that he was just a vector for it: “Even then, I knew I’d find a much better place, either with or without you.” She says that their five years together have been “such good times,” and it sounds like a dismissal. Her “I still love you” is totally perfunctory, a mechanical nothing that doesn’t come off the least bit sincere. Sulley’s lack of experience is part of what makes it great; it lends a conversational ease to the way she brushes Oakey off. All he can do in response is sing the chorus a bunch more times. When Sulley joins in, she sounds like she’s humoring him. The song presents a tangled mess of feeling, and it tells a story of what happens when a power dynamic is reversed.
It also slaps. “Don’t You Want Me” is the first hit song ever to be powered by Linn’s LM-1 drum machine. This doohickey, which would become one of Prince’s favorite instruments, samples real drum sounds rather than electronic ones, which gives some dimension to what’s unmistakably a programmed track. The keyboard lines push up against each other, mirroring the struggle of the song’s two characters. The song is spare and elegant. It foregrounds its singers and the drama that they weave, but it keeps pulsing out hooks underneath them. It’s pop magic.
Phil Oakey didn’t think it was pop magic. The initial version of “Don’t You Want Me” was chilly and confrontational art-pop, which was how he’d envisioned it. But Martin Rushent remixed the song, layering up the synths and making it sound like candy. Oakey hated this. “Don’t You Want Me” is the last song on Dare, and Oakey thought it was just filler, the worst song on the album. (When Oakey talks about “Don’t You Want Me” now, it sounds like he still hates it.) But Virgin A&R exec Simon Draper loved the song, and he overruled Oakey, demanding that the Human League release it as the fourth single from Dare.
Draper even approved an expensive music video from the Irish director Steve Barron, who will turn out to be hugely important figure to this column. (Barron also directed the 1990 movie Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which rules.) The clip is a neat bit of old-school Hollywood iconography that draws attention, again and again, to layers of its own artificiality. It was perfect for MTV. “Don’t You Want Me” blew up in the UK, topping the singles chart for five weeks and becoming the 1981 Christmas #1. In the summer of 1982, as MTV gained in influence, “Don’t You Want Me” was nearly as successful in the US.
The Human League had already been huge in the UK before the song hit, but “Don’t You Want Me” was the first Human League single to chart in America. It might be the first true MTV-era #1, the hit that established how the new medium was changing the rules for pop success.
The new British synthpop stars, covered in makeup and cloaked in layers of irony, were built for a visual medium like the music video. American soft-rock studio-musician types, who’d been making a lot of hits in the very early ’80s, could not hope to compete. In 1983, Rolling Stone proclaimed that the pouty synth kids made up a “Second British Invasion,” and the magazine claimed that “Don’t You Want Me” had been the “breakthrough song” for this new wave.
“Don’t You Want Me” wasn’t really the first synthpop song to hit #1 in the US; M’s similarly detached “Pop Muzik” had landed two and a half years earlier. And “Don’t You Want Me” didn’t singlehandedly alter the shape of the charts. UK synthpop was still at least a year away from commercial dominance in America. (This was changing, though. Soft Cell’s stark take on Gloria Jones’ “Tainted Love,” peaked at #8 behind “Don’t You Want Me.” “Tainted Love” is a 9.) But “Don’t You Want Me” still stands as a monument to preening, bleepy melodrama. It was a hard act to follow, but the Human League will be in this column again”.
Forty years after its release, The Human League’s Don’t You Want Me remains a song that inspires people. So many generations have adored and listened to a song that, whilst not overly-positive in the lyrics, has this ability to make people sing along and dance. Not only one of the best songs of the 1980s; Don’t You Want Me is one of the all-time great tracks. I wanted to explore its meaning and backstory a bit more. Having learned a lot about the Sheffield band’s most-famous song, I cannot help but to put it on and…
PLAY it loud