Monday morning’s earworm №79

Don’t You Want Me Baby by The Human League

What is an earworm?: A definition

It’s a snatch or a snippet, a captured fragment, a line or two, or maybe a bit more, that stays in your head and keeps bubbling up, accompanying your day.

It’s part of the language of your landscape that stays in your mind, whether it’s one single line, a couplet or maybe a whole verse, from a poem or song, or a part of a speech from a play, or a quote from a book, or something you heard somebody say, that won’t let you go.

Sometimes it won’t involve what we call language in the everyday. It could be purely a musical phrase that plays on your time, on a loop that follows you through day and night.

That’s what an earworm is. And so is this…

[embed]

Don’t You Want Me Baby by The Human League

UK Chart peak: №1 US Chart peak: №1

This is one of those songs that was inescapable at the time. And at the time this hit, I was working in a service station, watching the cars come and watching them go.

And on one occasion watching in disbelief through the laughter, as two dogs oblivious to the tooting horns of impatient rush hour motorists, were shagging away in the middle of the zebra-crossing outside.

This is one of those very few episodes I look back on in life before the rise of the mobile phone and think, if only we’d had mobiles then.

But I digress…

A Song of Its Time

It’s possible that this week’s Monday Morning’s Earworm was playing on the radio at the time of that episode above. It seemed to be playing constantly, but rarely for such a record, I don’t remember ever becoming tired of it.

The Human League’s sound was quite stark, typical of a lot of the synth-pop bands of the time, but that technological chill had as much allure as a tendency to repel.

“Don’t You Want Me” is perhaps the most aloof of those chilled ballads of its time, but it’s also simply a great pop song. It would’ve been a great pop song in any era. But as much as I loved the song, I loved that video.

This was an era before the perpetual instant replays of YouTube.

If you didn’t see that week’s edition of Top of the Pops, you’d miss your chance until the following week. Assuming the song you wanted to see hadn’t slipped out of the charts by then.

It’s no wonder I get the impression nostalgia sells especially well to those who grew up at the end of the analogue age, before media saturated people’s consciousness to the point of drowning their intellects in continuous repetitions of the bland.

But I digress, again

The Song of This Moment

“Don’t You Want Me” was from the band’s global smash hit album Dare. The cover perfectly reflected the atmosphere of the music inside while also retaining its own sense of timelessness.

This was their third album, following the quite modest UK chart successes of Reproduction and Travelogue, from 1979 and 1980, respectively.

The original version of The Human League had broken up while on tour in 1980 over the direction the band was taking. This led departing original members Martin Ware and Craig Marsh to form Heaven 17.

Phil Oakey and Philip Adrian Wright would recruit Joanna Catherall and Susan Ann Sulley as backing singers at the start of 1981. Between March and September that year, Dare would be recorded.

The album would be released in October. The singles “Love Action(I Believe in Love)” and “Open Your Heart”, while good singles in their own right, in hindsight served to be the warm-up acts for what would follow.

“Don’t You Want Me” was released on 27th November 1981. By mid-December, it was top of the UK charts and wouldn’t be moved until mid-January 1982, making it 1981’s Christmas Chart topper.

It was a top 5 hit almost everywhere, topping the charts in both the UK and the US among other places, and would be one of the songs that defined its era.

Oh, and by the way…It’s The Human League, not Human League. All those album covers can’t be wrong.

As always, tell me in the comments what you thought of this week’s choice of earworm

If you don’t want to miss any future earworms, you can subscribe to my publication, The Old Anorak here.