Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Venue: Tvornica Kulture / Zagreb / Croatia
Concert date: 11/11/2011
Attendance: 3
Ticket price: €31.23
The Human League, co-architects of the sound of mainstream music in the eighties, are back among the living after 10 years of studio-album dormancy. This March they dropped the new album “Credo” and finally broke the long spell of hibernation. “Credo” is a nifty creation. It’s as “primitive” as anything can be in 2011, a straight-up, true-believer “new wave synth pop” album, but at the same time a thoroughbred The Human League record that carries on the band’s sonic and stylistic tradition from “Dare” onward. Good morning, nostalgia!
The new world tour has happily brought the band, still going as a trio of Phil Oakey (vocals), Susan Ann Sulley (vocals) and Joanne Catherall (vocals), to the Croatian capital too. That set off a proper alarm bell, and we sworn retro romantics of the golden age of eighties hits pricked up our ears and promised ourselves there was no way we’d miss this one. Bands with a birth year like The Human League’s are a real rarity on stage these days, unless they’ve successfully morphed into permanent commercial giants (Depeche Mode).
Even though we showed up at the Tvornica Kulture hall at eight in the evening, the doors were still carefully bolted. So, off for a beer. What else, right? The show was announced for half past nine, but The Human League allow themselves a few academic minutes of lateness, and at a quarter to ten the trip down memory lane finally kicks off!
Tvornica Kulture is packed to the last corner. Whether the show was sold out or not, I don’t know, but a yes wouldn’t be surprising at all. The Human League open the show just as you’d expect, with the first track off the new album “Credo”, Never Let Me Go, which instantly confirmed that The Human League ship had sailed into a time storm and sailed out the other side 30 years later than it should have. Yep. Times haven’t changed. Not for The Human League, not for the 3,000-head crowd, at least for that “holy” hour and a half when we could surrender to the world that once ruled the “mainstream” long, long ago.
The “holy trinity” of The Human League’s lineup is joined on stage by a foursome: Rob Barton on electronic percussion, keyboardist Neil Sutton, keyboardist and guitarist Nic Burke, and stage sound engineer David Beevers. While the vocal trio writhes actively through the show in dance moves over the electronically savvy rhythmic undercarriage, the other three weave a synthetic blanket of properly rare sounds, built on a blend of programmed sampling and rustic Roland synthesizers. A quick jump to the career-defining album “Dare” with the hits Open Your Heart and Sound Of The Crowd soon signaled that we’d be watching a “best of” set get hammered out. In The Lebanon, someone sneaks onto the stage and lays down an electric Telecaster too. A tad too low in the mix, but still enough to add that special charm this famous hit carries in its original.
Even though the show ran extremely routine and by a tried-and-true pattern, Oakey thanked the audience several times for taking the time to come, since he believes this is the crowd that still supports making music by buying albums too. The crowd, this time mostly women (who of course didn’t forget to show off their charms in every way imaginable, once again gauging their fatal “range”), was eating out of Oakey and company’s hands. The energy throughout the set is excellent and the salvos of collective delight never die down.
The Human League didn’t forget their first career single Empire State Human from the debut “Reproduction” (1979), nor did they skip spicing up the very ending with Being Boiled from the follow-up “Travelogue” (1980). The obligatory Human is there, then Love Action , Mirror Man, Fascination and of course, at the end of the regular set, the expected evergreen mega hit Don’t You Want Me. For the very last song (in the encore), The Human League, in the glow of their synthetic makeup, kept a guitar on stage and lifted Tvornica one last time, tearing into Oakey’s hit Together In Electric Dreams.
With a selection like that from the catalog of their discography, you can’t go wrong. Hit after hit, dynamic cuts of a seasoned, polished stage show, enriched with a lavish lighting display that winked actively through an hour and twenty minutes in every color combination imaginable, and confident vocal execution! Not a noticeable slip-up.
A lovely evening full of nostalgic feelings suddenly flipped around. In this respect The Human League act as bearers of ancient musical structures, which were avant-garde when their career began, then slotted successfully into the very peak of “mainstream” acts and became a model for the other ultra-moneymakers from the British Isles. From Pet Shop Boys to Moby. Given that new The Human League studio albums are these days more an ultra-rare shock therapy than a regular release routine, it’s an open question whether we’ll ever get another chance to enjoy a show by the band, which makes this visit to Tvornica Kulture in Zagreb all the more valuable.
photos: Bojan Horvat
Setlist
1.Never Let Me Go 2.Open Your Heart 3.Sound of the Crowd 4.Heart Like a Wheel 5.The Lebanon 6.Egomaniac 7.Empire State Human 8.Night People 9.Human 10.Love Action (I Believe in Love) 11.All I Ever Wanted 12.Tell Me When 13.Mirror Man 14.(Keep Feeling) Fascination 15.Don’t You Want Me —encore— 16.Being Boiled 17.Together In Electric Dreams
Photo Gallery
