The Human League

**The Human League** is a British musical group formed in Sheffield and active from around 1977 to the present. The group is notable for its general policy of producing music using electronic instruments only and as such has become to be regarded as one of the pioneers of electronic pop music, also known as synth-pop or more recently as 'electronica',

The group has undergone many personnel changes during its history, most notably when founding members Martyn Ware, Ian Craig Marsh, Philip Oakey and Adrian Wright split into two factions in September 1980 leaving Oakey and Wright with the group name, while Ware and Marsh went on to form the B.E.F. and new group Heaven 17. The Human League subsequently included two new musicians and songwriters Ian Burden and Jo Callis, as well as the two teenagers Susanne Sulley and Joanne Catherall as vocalists, famously recruited by Oakey after seeing them dancing in a Sheffield disco.

After initial success in the early part of the eighties, most notably with the seminal elecro-pop album *Dare,* the group has since undergone mixed fortunes and further changes in the line-up. Their recording contract with Virgin was terminated after 1990 although the group enjoyed a successful comeback in 1993 with the album *Octopus*. Their latest album *Credo* was issued in 2011. In 2016 the group issued a career-spanning anthology entitled *A Very British Synthesizer Group*.

## Links to OMD

* ""*The summer of 78 changed us. Human League released Being Boiled and we thought 'holy shit other people are listening to what we have been listening to*.'..", AM, 2021.
* Both OMD and The Human League made their Top of the Pops debut on 08 May 1980, with Messages and Rock 'n' Roll respectively, with both singles being outside the Top 40 that week. They allegedly used the same reel-to-reel tape recorder on stage for their mimed performances. While Messages moved up the charts after the show, The Human League failed to have the same success with their single.
* The Human League's no.1 album *Dare* was released three weeks before *Architecture & Morality*, in October 1981. The two albums paths often crossed in the UK album charts from November onwards and they both became 'classics' of the 1981 electronic music canon.
* The Human League's follow-up album *Hysteria* was released one week after *Junk Culture* in May 1984 and again the two albums shared the UK album charts for some weeks during that spring.
* Similarly, both *The Pacific Age* and the League's fifth album *Crash* were released in September 1986.
* During a Radio 1 show hosted by Phil Oakey in 2003, the group frontman says he remembers watching OMD perform at the Limit Club in Sheffield 'sat at the back with Tony Wilson'. This may have been on 05 July 1979.
* Phil Oakey and Andy McCluskey discuss each others bands and music in the *I Love 1980* documentary, first broadcast in 2001.
* Surprisingly Oakey didn't meet McCluskey and Humphreys until 2018 when they all performed at Let's Rock Norwich festival on 26 May of that year.[1] Heaven 17 were also on the bill.
* In his podcast Electronically Yours, ep.38 broadcast in 2021, Human League founder member Martyn Ware interviews Paul Humphreys and claims to be a "great friend" of both AM & PH.