Once thought of as chilly, future-forward Brit-Muzik done frostily with analogue-into-freshly digital Casios, Moog Prodigys and still-primitive drum machines, the new wave of increasingly slick synth-pop was born out of the culture of post-punk everything. Less than five years before 1981’s synth-pop revolution yielded its biggest harvest of hit fruit in “Don’t You Want Me” and “Tainted Love,” the Human League, Soft Cell and respective frontmen Philip Oakey and Marc Almond weren’t embracing slick bittersweet love songs. They were raving in Low Bowie-like bellows on radical, working-class politics and quivering croons about queer kitchen-sink dramas atop spare electronic instrumentation with sketchy, even-sinister melodies. They had Veronica Lake-esque, long-in-the-front hairdos (Oakey) and Cleopatra-like, liquid eye liner (Almond).
Around the same time, Alison Moyet’s Yazoo was also having great electro-induced success with Vince Clarke-fashioned hits, but the latter’s origin story, Depeche Mode, actually started off twee while saving its transgressive lyrics and harsh, mechanized music for a later date. The point is that the then-bourgeoning new wave (a la Oakey and Almond) had its toes in something more aggro than what wound up being once synth-pop got in the hands of clowns with even funnier haircuts and makeup.
A tour with the Human League, Soft Cell (minus the duo’s other half, David Ball, who died last year) and Alison Moyet needn’t be something treacly or nostalgic. It should be, as our punk-rock associate, the late radio DJ Lee Paris, once said, a celebration of yesterday’s now music today.
Starting this show at the Met with the legendarily husky-voiced Moyet was fine/good/OK, but not rousing. It wasn’t Moyet’s fault—her deep voice was in fine fettle; her band was crisp. One guy even wore a skinny red tie. But the robo-bionic-blues/synth-soul mashup of anthemic dance cuts (“Don’t Go,” “Situation”) and quaint baleful ballads (“Only You”) that made Yazoo purr only caught cool fire.
Luckily, Almond was all steam and smolder set to a spare, all-synth sound with more than enough love and desire coming from (and to; the audience adored him) the pixie-ish Soft Cell vocalist. Forever Noel Coward in a leather bar, Almond, with his ruined romantic lyrics and dramatic, trilling vocals, attacked the sound of lo-fi, pre-industrial kink on early songs such as “A Man Could Get Lost” and “Memorabilia” (which was tied together with Soft Cell’s neon-moody new track, “Danceteria,” and snippets of early Madonna songs). Together with the best found-footage of Downtown NYC and Soft Cell home movies circa dirtball 1980, Almond painted a dark portrait in oil and blood of glorious fetishism and electro-induced poetry. While softer-to-the-touch synth-sulks such as the Bacharach-ian “Torch” and “Loving You, Hating Me” were tender treats for longtime Soft Cell fanatics, “Say Hello, Wave Goodbye” was the clincher. The track found Almond crumbling the bouquet of roses he’d just caught from a fan above his head like raindrops, while fondly recalling Ball, his mad synth-pop partner-in-crime.
Any set starting with two keytars is a great set. Especially when it’s two musicians separately playing the synth melody and digital bass to the Human League’s abstractly doomy “The Sound Of The Crowd” as the stoic, neo-robotic Oakey detachedly sing-speaks its lyrics while wearing what looks like a spandex space suit with ridiculously high shoulder pads. Yes, this is a great thing.
Then, out came the two dancing, singing women of the Human League (the very-British Joanne Catherall and Susan Ann Sulley), and in came the Motown-ice-frug of “Mirror Man,” the frozen-war politicism of “The Lebanon” and the slap and slam of “The Things That Dreams Are Made Of,” the latter with Oakey’s famed rap-not-rap bridge: “Norman Wisdom, Johnny, Joey, Dee Dee, good times.”
Though Oakey, whose signature stentorian monotone is still a thing of beauty (new wave, synth-pop and beyond), does that rap thing, only faster, during the clipped, chipper “Love Action (I Believe In Love),” he just as quickly turned on the Minneapolis Sound R&B charm on the slow, chiming balladry of “Human.”
Unlike Soft Cell, which rifled through its scabby, pre-Non-Erotic Cabaret days with more than a few menacing tracks during its set, the Human League chose only one pre-Dare cut during its encore, but it was a good one: the hard-banging, rubber-bounced ball of “Being Boiled,” with Oakey morally dooming the cruelty of sericulture while dressed in white caftans. Ending the set, post-“Boiled,” with “Electric Dreams” (Oakey’s sweet-and-light solo hit with Giorgio Moroder) was an odd choice to close the first Human League tour in forever. Yet hearing Philip and the girls singing “We’ll always be together, no matter how far away that seems” was as poignant as Almond’s “Say Hello, Wave Goodbye.”
And poignancy isn’t something you would’ve expected out of all-synth music from 45 years ago.
—A.D. Amorosi; photos by Chris Sikich
