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And meanwhile, the rest of the Human League had been pretty busy too. Phil Oakey had made a conscious decision to pursue a more pop-oriented sound; and a lucrative one too, this being their sixth consecutive Top 10 hit. For me, though, it's mostly annoying (with the exception of the revived 'Being Boiled', which is odd enough to be forgivable), because I often get the impression of a band looking down their noses at the audience, pretentious in their dismissal of seriousness, self-important in their heavy-handed lack of importance. As I've tried to keep in mind throughout this blog, I don't think there's anything at all wrong with simple or meaningless pop music; the very problem I have with the League is that they seem to be trying to impress you all the time with how lowbrow they are. Of course they weren't alone in that at the time, but the fact that they're still trying to do it now, and their apparent insistence on being recognised as some sort of pioneers, as well as the fact that so many people actually seem to do so, just exacerbates it and makes them feel like the start of something I dislike. I'd be less concerned about any of this, of course, if I felt that it worked as pop music but for me the vast majority of it doesn't. I'll surprise nobody by saying that they weren't a great reserve of vocal talent, but nothing else has ever drawn me in either. Now I know that persuading the relatively primitive synthesisers of the era to play in time with themselves let alone each other was more of a challenge than we realised then; but I don't think much of it was worth the effort.
All of which said, I tend to find 'Fascination' one of their more tolerable ones, so I was glad that it was this I had to listen to rather than any of those others. It seems odd to say that they're playing to their strengths when I've just implied that they didn't have many, but perhaps they're playing against their weaknesses - they spread the vocals around a bit, and that's an undeniably catchy riff despite or maybe because of the the fact that it's a bit out of tune. And not a bad bassline too, albeit a bit like 'Shake Your Body (Down To The Ground)'. Maybe that's why this single actually managed to reach the US R&B chart.
Also appearing on: Now 8, 13, 30, 31, 32
Available on: The Very Best of the Human League
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