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The Human League + Marc Almond
Scenic Stage (Outdoor Event Space)
Friday 21st July 2023, 19:00 – 23:00, doors 18:00, last entry 21:00
This is a 14+ event. Under 16s must be accompanied by an adult (18+).
Please note, this is a standing event. Disabled access tickets are available on a first come, first served basis via AXS ONLY. Other than these areas there is no seating available for this event.
The Human League: a band best known for a song they never wanted to release as a single but that went on to become the biggest seller of 1981. “Don’t You Want Me”, a clever duet examining the death of a love affair from both perspectives, also proved once and for all that the best Christmas number ones aren’t about Christmas at all.
Over forty years later, The Human League continue to make and share the best of electronic music, their songs stirring up memories but, unlike some of the 80s nostalgia tours doing the rounds, without being tarnished by retro cheesiness.
That’s why you won’t want to miss the original lineup of Joanne Catherall, Phil Oakey and Susan Ann Sulley playing at our Scenic Stage on Friday 21st July 2023!
Plus support from special guest Marc Almond. He is an internationally acclaimed and successful artist, who originally found fame as half of the New Wave duo Soft Cell. Marc has sold over 30 million records worldwide and is an icon and influence to a generation of musicians.
There has always been a pleasing straightforwardness, a Dadaist blankness, to the League: what you see is what you get, prime numbers in a world of complex equations. Even Oakey’s handsome Yorkshire accent was never modified to a mid-Atlantic drawl for the sake of radio digestibility and it’s notable that the band never left their hometown of Sheffield for the lure of London.
Notable, too, is that the League never broke up or quit the music scene. Following their 1981 platinum selling Dare, they released a pioneering album of remixes, Love and Dancing, along with two fantastic singles – the meta-Motown “Mirror Man” and the juicy, jubilant “(Keep Feeling) Fascination” – before the successor album, Hysteria, in 1984.
The group continued to be a successful singles act with hits such as “Louise” and “Life On Your Own”. They often evoked the golden age of pop with spoken narrative (“When we were apart, I was human too…”) and self-aware personal touches that frequently broke the fourth wall (“This is Phil talking…”). There was also the oft-derided “The Lebanon”, which to Oakey’s perverse pride recently won the BBC Radio 1 Worst Lyric Of All Time poll for the couplet “And where there used to be some shops/Is where the snipers sometimes hide”.
Later the band surrendered a degree of creative control, a move which Sulley believes saved their career, by hooking up with R&B producers and former Prince acolytes Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, whose Flyte Tyme team had recently scored big with Janet Jackson’s album Nasty. The duo wrote another both-sides-of-the-story duet, “Human”, for the League and the song became a transatlantic smash.
“Human” was the group’s last significant hit for a while but even at the lowest ebb of their commercial success, the League maintained their quality: listen to “Heart Like A Wheel” from turn-of-the-nineties album Romantic? and it holds its own with the best of their back catalogue.
To many people, the joyous “Tell Me When?”, a top ten hit from the 1995 album Octopus, marked a comeback for the band but truth is the League never went away. Today they’re planning a tenth studio album and remain “tall, tall, tall, as big as a wall, wall, wall” as their 1979 “Empire State Human” lyrics put it.
Marc Almond is an internationally acclaimed and successful artist. He has sold over 30 million records worldwide and is an icon and influence to a generation of musicians.
It was at Leeds Poly that he met David Ball and together they formed the internationally successful ‘electro duo’ Soft Cell in 1979.
Soft Cell were signed to Stevo’s underground label Some Bizzare and licensed to Phonogram as part of the new electronic music phenomena. They went on to record four albums; three in New York including the iconic seminal Non Stop Erotic Cabaret, and had a number of top ten hits including the international classic Tainted Love. Tainted Love broke all records as the track that remained the longest in the US Billboard Top 100 and received a Brit award for best single of that year. Soft Cell parted amicably in 1984 to pursue solo projects.
Marc’s solo album, The Velvet Trail, was released in March 2015 and was closely followed by a sold-out European tour. In November 2015 Marc, together with poet Jeremy Reed and Composer Othon, made an album of Pop Operetta, Against Nature, based on the book A Rebours by J K Husymans and funded through Kickstarter.
Marc unveiled a brand-new album, Shadows And Reflections, in September 2017, his first for the BMG label after signing a new 3 year 2 album deal. A labour of love, it was a heavily orchestrated collection of baroque pop nuggets from the 1960’s for which Marc is revered. Shadows And Reflections was followed by a 20 date orchestral UK Tour.
Marc had the great pleasure of accepting the honor of OBE in March 2018.
The seminal electronic duo Soft Cell (Marc Almond/Dave Ball) celebrated their 40th year in 2018 with the release of their anthology, through UMC, on 7 September 2018. Entitled Keychains & Snowstorms: The Soft Cell Story, this ten-disc Box Set featured nine CDs and a DVD, encompassing both phases of their illustrious career from 1978 to 1984 and the 2001-3 reunion. It’s the story of 21 million records sold worldwide. 13 UK chart singles, five of them Top 10 hits, two gold and one platinum selling albums.
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