Gotta get some jam
Continuing my trip back through the 1986 album charts
14/09/86 : Crash - The Human League
This year feels to have provided a few albums which were the last throw of the dice for early 80s stars and this has to be another one - I feel this is either going to be surprisingly good or completely dreadful, but can't tell which is more likely.
Well, it's not completely dreadful but it's closer to that than surprisingly good - it's all pretty average. The singing isn't great, but I'm not sure anyone comes to Human League for vocal abilities - I did remember "Human", but apart from that and "Love On The Run" which I quite liked there was nothing I recognised or am going to remember, I'm afraid. Bizarrely, it starts with the expected Human League feel first up, but there's a surprising number of tracks that have more of a Five Star vibe to them, which I really wasn't expecting. Overall, I'd say it's just a bit of a mess - it's hard to know what they were trying to do here.
We're at #7 with a new entry on the chart this week on the start of a six week run - and the fact that even Iron Maiden managed ten weeks, suggests this was not well received. The top five this week were Now 7, Tina Turner (a new entry), Eurythmics, Paul Simon and Five Star with the next highest new entries being Bon Jovi (#8) and Huey Lewis (#11).
Wikipedia tells us this is their fifth album and goes a long way to explain why it all sounds such a mess. Virgin were worried about the lack of progress on the album so decided the obvious way forward was to pair the band up with US producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, who had just worked on Janet Jackson's Control album - giving the producers total control over the final album. It's fair to say things didn't go well with the US duo being "intolerant of the band's laid-back working methods and lack of musical technical ability" and gradually sidelining the band, such that in the end they all just flew home (and one of them even left the band) and the album was completed with session musicians.
As if that wasn't bad enough, Virgin then arranged for a photoshoot for the album cover with Paris-based Vogue photographer Guy Bourdin and spent a fortune flying them all over there - where Guy only had eyes for the ladies and tried to get them to do handstands in miniskirts which they were not having and the whole thing broke down in a huge argument. So they used a out-of-focus shot which has a real "that'll have to do" feel to it instead. And out of all of this carnage, the album was actually surprisingly successful with the critics being much nicer about it than I have been and it charting in quite a few countries, getting to #24 in the US - a lot of that was driven by the lead single "Human" which actually got to #1 in the US. The group's entry also tells us this very much wasn't their last throw of the dice, with another four albums coming along after and they're still out touring, albeit playing a lot of anniversary tours nowadays.
"Customers also listened to" ABC, The Thompson Twins, Howard Jones and Heaven 17 - you can't fault that for a list of British 80s pop providers, can you? I'm not a huge Human League fan, but I think they do what do well - but, for a large part, this album doesn't really feel like it's the sort of thing they do at all.
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