The Human League "Dare!" to define 80s synth pop on October 16, 1981


A blast of a synthesizer. A cold, mechanical thump of a drum machine. It is October 16, 1981, and the future has arrived! This event, dear reader, was the release of Dare!, the third album by a curious Sheffield-based collective known as The Human League. Now, to describe Dare! as merely an "album" would be akin to describing a Four Loko Gold as "a bit of a drink." It was not just music; it was a glittering, synthetic, sequined juggernaut of sound that careened through the FM airwaves of the early 1980s like a rogue spaceship piloted by a crew of impeccably-coiffed androids.

But few would have predicted this smashing sonic success prior to that day. For it is a well-established fact that The Human League were, for a time, utterly doomed.  The original members, whose music had, until that point, been of the sort one generally plays at parties where the primary goal is to ensure the guests leave as quickly as possible, had departed in a huff. This left the frontman, a fellow named Philip Oakey who was known for a haircut that defied most known laws of physics, in a state of utter quandary.

He had some music, a vague notion of a sound, and a considerable lack of—and here we must use a technical term—a band.

Now, the universe, having a deeply ironic sense of humor, saw this state of affairs and decided to intervene. Its intervention took the form of two young women, Susan Ann Sulley and Joanne Catherall, whom Oakey had, with the sort of detached whimsy one reserves for choosing a brand of breakfast cereal, invited into the band. The reasoning was sound in a purely circular way: they looked good, and looking good was, as everyone knows, the first and last requirement for a band, with a surprising amount of tedious and entirely unnecessary bits involving instruments and chords and things in the middle.

This wasn't just music; it was a paradigm shift wrapped in a shiny, minimalist sleeve. It was the sound of the microchip finding its soul, of technology not just assisting, but taking the reins and becoming the very heart of pop. And on that fateful October day, Dare! didn't just drop, it landed with the quiet confidence of a sleek silver spaceship touching down in a field of bewildered cows.

Suddenly, everyone was talking about it. From the grimy pubs of London to the glittering clubs of New York, a new language was being spoken, a language of synthesizers that didn't mimic, but celebrated their artificiality. The album opener, "The Things That Dreams Are Made Of," was a mission statement, a shimmering curtain rising on a futuristic stage. Then came "Open Your Heart," a cascade of perfect, crystalline notes. And of course, the behemoth, the colossus, the worldwide smash hit that was "Don't You Want Me."

"Don't You Want Me." What a triumph, what a tour-de-force! It wasn't just a song; it was a three-act play, a miniature opera of post-breakup angst, delivered not with the raw, guttural cries of a rock star, but with the cool, detached vulnerability of two perfectly coiffed individuals whose emotions were as perfectly sculpted as their cheekbones. Yet, according to Oakey himself, he considered the song so bad he didn't want it released as a single. This, of course, guaranteed its ascent to the top of the charts with a speed and ferocity that suggested the song, like the album itself, had a will of its own.

Like the 80s themselves, Dare! was a defiant blast of optimism. It embraced the synthetic, the artificial, the unabashedly pop, at a time when such things were viewed with suspicion by those who preferred their music to sound like it was recorded in a damp basement with a broken guitar. It embraced the glamour, the detachment, the sheer coolness of the new electronic frontier. Synths were, in fact, capable of the sort of high-caliber pop music that would make an entire planet want to dance, weep, and suddenly develop a tragic understanding of the complex emotional drama unfolding in a northern English cocktail lounge.

The production, courtesy of Martin Rushent, is the real wizardry here—every sound crisp, every beat precise, every synth line gleaming like the grille of a brand-new DeLorean. It redefined what pop music could be. It paved the way for a generation of synth-pop acts, from Soft Cell to the Pet Shop Boys, to dominate the buzzy speakers on portable transistor radios for much of the decade. It also cemented Sheffield as a bizarrely-fertile ground for 80s music, a city that seemed to produce great bands the way other towns produce traffic jams or questionable casseroles.

October 16, 1981. The day Dare! lands, the day the Human League stake their claim as prophets of a second British pop invasion, the day that - decades before AI - the machines took over, and the humans were okay with that. The League dared to dream, and the world’s never been the same.

Location: Sheffield, UK

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