The Human League – Human

Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis gave the Human League their warmest hit, and Phil Oakey later compared making it to being a puppet.

Philip Oakey spent four months at Flyte Tyme Studios in Minneapolis in 1986, and he later reckoned a single vocal took up one of them. The vocal was Human, the record that handed the Human League their second American No.1, and very little else on it belonged to the Human League. Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis wrote it and produced it, Lewis sang on it, and the band’s contribution beyond Oakey’s lead came down to a few spoken lines from Joanne Catherall. A group critics had long heard as a machine found its warmest hit in the one session where it held none of the controls.

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That surrender was not the plan. Sessions for the follow-up to Hysteria had dragged through 1985 without producing anything the band wanted to keep, and the label pointed them toward a Minneapolis team with the hottest hand in pop. Jam and Lewis had just finished Janet Jackson’s Control, released that February, and Oakey was already a fan of their work with Change. The Human League flew out in February 1986 carrying arrangements built on sequencers. The producers had the parts replayed by hand, and the album’s liner notes made a point of saying no sequencers were used, a strange boast for a band that had helped teach pop to run on them.

Human was one of three songs Jam and Lewis wrote for Crash, and they built it to pull Oakey out of his usual detached delivery. The song is a two-sided confession. A man home from a separation apologizes for straying while she was away, and in the breakdown his partner answers with an admission of her own. Catherall spoke that answer rather than singing it, and the casting carried an extra charge, since she and Oakey were a couple at the time. Oakey later said Gary Numan’s spoken passages on Are “Friends” Electric? showed him how such a monologue could work. Jimmy Jam, for his part, praised how hard the singer worked to get the performance down.

Guests on their own single

The fight came over the voices Catherall and Susan Ann Sulley did not get to use. The band had two women singers, yet the backing vocals on Human went to Terry Lewis, who took the soft melodic lines, and to the producers’ session singer Lisa Keith, who took the big notes. Jam later named background vocals as the main source of tension between the two camps. Catherall was upset when she heard another woman’s voice on the track, and the friction spread from there. After four months, Oakey took the band home to Sheffield, and Jam and Lewis completed Crash with session musicians.

The record the band walked away from did what their own sessions had not. Virgin issued Human in Britain in August 1986, and the Official Charts ranked it No.8, the band’s first UK Top 10 in more than three years. A&M carried it in America, where Billboard’s Hot 100 put it at No.1 for the week of November 22, 1986, between Boston’s Amanda and Bon Jovi’s You Give Love a Bad Name. Billboard’s dance club chart ranked it No.1 as well, and its R&B chart took it to No.3, the band’s first time in that chart’s Top 10. In the Netherlands it climbed to No.13 on the Dutch Top 40, and the band brought it to Veronica’s Countdown that year. Critics split. Billboard heard a lush, soulful dance ballad, while Spin’s John Leland argued that a song pleading human weakness gutted the joke at the heart of a band built to sound like circuitry.

Oakey’s own verdict shifted with time. In 1995 he told Sound on Sound that the Jam and Lewis album had been “just like being a puppet for four months.” By 2003, talking to Mojo, he rated Human as probably the best vocal of his career, while noting it had taken a month to get right. Both statements hold, and together they make the song’s case better than any review did. The Human League had been praised and mocked for the same thing, a coolness that sounded programmed, and their most human record arrived only when somebody else held the controls.