Human League

Before The Human League owned a synthesizer between them, Ware described the epiphany that pushed the trio toward electronic music: an NME interview where Brian Eno argued rock and roll was dead and all you needed was "a synth, a mic and a tape machine" — "we all believed him," Ware said. The band that resulted modeled itself on one act above all others. "Who were the important group of the 20th century?" Oakey has asked. "It's Kraftwerk, the first ones to get hold of the new technology and do something fantastic of their own with it."

listen: upstream & heresource: Hotpress — Interview With a Human (Kraftwerk and Roxy Music influence quotes) ↗share

1978

The ModelKraftwerk

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1980

The Black Hit of SpaceHuman League

listen forKraftwerk's "The Model" moves in perfect, unhurried lockstep — a synthesizer pulse with no swing in it, and a vocal that reports rather than performs. Play "The Black Hit of Space," from the period Ware admits the trio "tried to avoid anything that sounded similar to us apart from Kraftwerk," and listen for that same refusal to rush: the sequencer holds its line even as the track distorts and screeches around it, discipline surviving inside deliberate chaos.

Phil Oakey names one night, around 1972, as the hinge of his life: seeing Roxy Music live. "I saw Roxy Music one night... it completely changed my life," he has said, and the debt runs deeper than admiration — when the group wanted to release music outside the confines of an album, they copied Roxy Music's own move directly. "Our favourite bands like Roxy Music did singles that were not part of an album, like 'Pyjamarama'... that was the rationale behind 'I Don't Depend On You,'" Ware explained.

listen: upstream & heresource: Hotpress — Interview With a Human (Kraftwerk and Roxy Music influence quotes) ↗share

1973

PyjamaramaRoxy Music

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1979

I Don't Depend on YouHuman League

listen forRoxy Music's "Pyjamarama," a 1973 non-album single, is arch and stylized, Bryan Ferry crooning over a track that sounds aware of its own artifice. "I Don't Depend on You," released the same way under the alias The Men in 1979, borrows that same posture: a deadpan vocal riding a deliberately synthetic backing, a band announcing it can be a pop group and a piece of conceptual art at once.

Martyn Ware has said the group "were obsessed with disco music," Giorgio Moroder above all, and Oakey told Record Mirror in 1981 the band wanted to sound "like ABBA or Donna Summer" — code, at the time, for Moroder's pulsing productions. The influence stopped being secondhand in 1984, when Moroder produced and co-wrote Oakey's solo hit "Together in Electric Dreams": the disco producer and the synth-pop singer he had shaped from a distance, finally in a studio together.

listen: upstream & hereshare

1977

I Feel LoveGiorgio Moroder

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1984

Together in Electric DreamsHuman League

listen forMoroder and Donna Summer's "I Feel Love" runs on one relentless synthesizer pulse under a voice that floats above it, barely touching the beat. "Together in Electric Dreams," the song Moroder built for Oakey a few years later, keeps that same throbbing four-on-the-floor foundation but hands the melody to a colder, more detached baritone — the producer's sound, finally paired with the voice it had shaped from a distance.