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7 INCH VS-466: DON'T
YOU WANT ME - (3.57) / SECONDS - (4.59)
(LIMITED EDITION ALSO RELEASED WITH FREE POSTER)
12 INCH VS-466-12:
DON'T YOU WANT ME - (3.57)
/ SECONDS - (4.59) /
DON'T YOU WANT ME - EXTENDED DANCE MIX - (7.30)
Don't You Want Me
Part One
 There
is something of a tradition of pop stars almost consigning
their most monstrous hits to a bin marked "not good enough
to be a single". Madonna's "Vogue", The Pet
Shop Boys' cover of "Always On My Mind", Donna Summer's
"I Feel Love" - all were at one point pencilled
in as B-sides. The Police nearly didn't include "Every
Breath You Take" on their "Synchronicity" album,
thus nearly sparing us both Puff Daddy's terrible cover version
and a lifetime of hearing the original on TV adverts for life
assurance companies.
So it was that one Philip
Oakey - returning to the studio after a rare break from the
recording of "Dare" - was dismayed to find that
his League colleague Jo Callis and producer Martin Rushent
had perverted one of his band's embryonic left-field electroditties
into something with - the horror! - middle-of-the-road appeal.
And try as he might to bend the as-yet-untitled song (in accordance
with another pop tradition, it was surely called "Booby
Booby Wooby" at this point - see ABBA's number one hit
"Boogaloo" AKA "Dancing Queen") back towards
the avant-garde, it remained somewhere
that the Green Cross Code Man
wouldn't advise that you linger.
Thus, the soon-to-be defining
song of the 80s was unceremoniously dumped at the end of the
completed LP, as a bit of filler (Philip was going to get
"filler" and "massive hit single" mixed
up once again, five years later, with less happy results -
to wit "I Need Your Loving").
Thankfully Virgin mentor
Simon Draper and manager Bob Last thought rather more of this
song that The Human League didn't want (oh-woah-woah-woah!),
and persuaded the band to put it out as a single by dint of
including a free poster, so that the fans didn't feel ripped
off by the release of a fourth track from the
same album (said poster sees The Human League taking colour-coordination
of a photoshoot to levels of unsubtlety previously only achieved
by ABBA - indeed, hipper schoolteachers with an eye for an
opportunity must surely have used it as a tool for teaching
the kids their
primary colours).
 Any
doubts were swept aside when the unleashed Don't You Want
Me ram-raided into the UK charts at number seven, ate the
competition within seven days and
perched atop the Christmas '81 pile for five weeks, weeks
in which the world of pop must've felt giddy with its own
perfection (except that Sir Clifford
Richard was at number two with something hideous involving
a sample of an answaphone).
And six months later, Don't
You Want Me did the same in the USA, but only for 3 weeks,
because the Americans had some AOR that they were quite keen
on
getting back to. Not bad for a song that you thought would
end your career, eh Philip?
Only at the same time as
he was completely wrong about
Don't You Want Me ending his group's career, Philip Oakey
was (in a contradictory very Human League way)
absolutely right. Don't You Want Me both made and destroyed
the new Human League. Whilst it caterpulted
them into global pop superstardom, it also began to paralyse
them with anxiety that they might not be able
to follow it up and maintain their global success (this fear
resulted in two singles in two years, in-fighting, Rushent
walking
out and the likeable but
career-slowing album "Hysteria").
Even now, Don't You Want
Me remains a mixed blessing: at the same time that it ensures
that thousands of people will always want to hear The Human
League play live, it poses the threat that half of them will
want to hear Don't You Want Me and nothing else.
But enough of these after-effects.
What of the record itself? Well, as soon as it begins, you
can forgive
Don't You Want Me anything. It's absolutely perfect.
Evidence of its perfection lies in the way that it has withstood
hideous overexposure and yet emerges
sounding as fresh as a daisy (whereas even the great Tainted
Love has begun to sound a little tiresome - play Bedsitter
instead, please!).
It's also a magpie's nest
of clever steals. The famous sequencer line blends the severity
of Kraftwerk and the friskiness of Moroder (both of whom had
made similar sounds before). The opening bass melody melds
the riffs of ABBA's Eagle and Kraftwerk's The Robots (a strange
pairing that pretty much sums up The Human
League), whilst - less obviously - that incredible chorus
is just the notes of The Righteous Brothers' "You've
Lost That Loving Feeling" in a slightly different order
with a dash of "We Don't Talk Anymore"
(Sir Clifford again) thrown in for good measure. Even
the story was pilfered, from an American magazine
(Philip: "a terribly trashy one, like 'Intimate
Confessions'").
Yet by some strange and
wonderful alchemy, Don't You Want Me sounds completely new,
different and a whole
lot better than absolutely everything that was thrown into
the melting pot. For instance, the trashy story is somehow
a lot more intriguing that it probably
looked on paper:
Did she make it on her own merits or did he - as he claims
- put her where she is now? Is he really the menacing svengali,
a puppeteer pulling the strings of
her fortunes, or just a sad, angry man with a revenge fantasy
and a slight grasp of reality (the later follow-up, "Louise",
supports the latter)?
Do her independent claims really just mean
"hold me tight", or is her "I still love you"
just a misguided attempt to soften the blow?
If it is, perhaps she's only got herself to blame
that he's still hankering after her
in the bus station all those years later.
And, as others have pointed
out before, there is added
frisson in the fact that this story seems to echo Philip's
famous plucking (careful how you say that) of Joanne and Susan
from the obscurity of the Crazy Daisy disco in Sheffield.
Susan is at pains to deny any semi-autobiographical intent
(most recently in ITV's "Smash" documentary) but
Freud would surely argue that Philip's unconscious must have
drawn him to *that* story in his trashy magazine above all
others...
But this famous story would
not have sold millions of copies without the wonderful music
behind it. And what a backing track!
Surely the secret of Don't
You Want Me's scuff-free
resistance to overfamiliarity, bad cover versions and
hi-jacking by car adverts is in
the brilliance of its arrangement
and production.
There is tremendous use
of light and shade, with a dark, brooding opening giving way
to a saccharine pop
verse, which in turn turns to the threatening urgency of the
climb (cleverly using the same chords as those in the intro).
And there's always so much going on - the bassline introduction
backed by eerie strings (or
is it horns?), the calm electric piano chords coming out of
one speaker whilst synths chatter frantically from the other,
the way in which one of the speakers
briefly falls silent during Philip's first "Don't, don't
you want me" and - to cap it all - some
thrilling stacatto piano and synth "guitar riffs"
that
mark the song out as 1981's answer to Sparks' "This
Town Ain't Big Enough For Both Of Us".
The world wanted it desperately,
and I want to mark it out as one of a handful of records in
history that go beyond perfection, to gain a
Secrets Online Score of
11/10.
For DYWM lyrics and
the lowdown on the b-side Seconds, click
here
Review
© Angus
Tindle 2002 - screen grabs
kindly provided by Tony
B
Being
Boiled / Sound Of
The Crowd / Love
Action / Don't
You Want Me / Mirror
Man /
(Keep Feeling) Fascination /
The Lebanon /
Life On Your Own /
Louise / I
Need Your Loving /
Heart Like A Wheel Review 01 / Heart
Like A Wheel 02 /
Tell Me When
/ One Man In My Heart
/ AIEW
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