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Tracklisting: CD1 1
Don't You Want Me 1. 'Don't You Want
Me' Majik J Original Booty Vocal Mix 7.53 *
denotes brand new remixes not featured in Vinyl Series
The Sunday Times (30/08/03)
Packed with 80's electro pop brilliance.
10 out of 10 Bang (October 03)
The Human League's shit-sandwich.
David Buckley
01:
DON'T YOU WANT ME Second
Virgin
compilation with three extra tracks including Tell Me When released
to cash in on the success of the Octopus album in 1995.
Media Reviews Q Magazine
(11/95) "And the stars look very different today . . ." wrote a poignant Charles Shaar Murray in March 1979, having witnessed The Human League play London's long-lost Lyceum Ballroom, declaring the gig "a watershed between the '70s and the '80s". Phil Oakey's "electronic entertainers from Sheffield" were as good a band as any to turn on the decade's lights - within two years they would hold the 1980s in the palm of their hand. Murray also deemed them "Fun rather than Art," a lenient viewpoint, since their earliest noises were of the macho-cerebral, Northern industrial kind. Being Boiled, a grumbling, apocalyptic mantra recorded in '78, remains the only old League to make the Greatest Hits - its Top 10-scaling re-release in 1982 a mark not of any covert commerciality but of the band's do-no-wrong status of the time, as anointed by the arrival of dancing girls Joanne Catherall and Susan Sulley. However, even by 1984, they had entered such previously uncharted chart depths as 13 (Louise) and 16 (Life On Your Own), and 1986's Crash album - despite the let's-do-it collaborative coup of US production maestros Jam and Lewis - chalked up a modest six-week run. With the release of this re-upholstered Greatest Hits (coinciding with a Sound And Vision-style live tour), let us celebrate the greatness rather than quibble over hitness; as Paul Morley's otherwise worthless and facile new sleeve notes observe, they "were hip, and then not hip, and then hip, and then not, and then again, and then hardly etc." Additions
to the 1988's original Greatest Hits are threefold: Tell Me When,
surprise box office from this year's mostly lacklustre Octopus album,
a new non-hit of similar stripe, Stay With Me Tonight, and an insulting
Snap remix of Don't You Want Me, which we categorically do not need.
(Wouldn't 1990's Heart Like A Wheel have been a more logical supplement?)
Reshuffled by way of a Lottery machine, if the running order seemed
random in 1988, now it's just unsightly, the more sophisticated
techno-sheen of 1995's tracks shoehorned between the beautiful Northern
English Motown of Mirror Man (1982) and whistling Open Your Heart
(1981), classic League whose indelible charm lay in the staccato
drumbox and by-the-manual synth combination. They don't make 'em
like that anymore, because they can't. In truth, the League's accidental
heroics do not suit the modern age; where once they were too clever
for it, now it is too clever for them. Handled without care, the
crystalline English pop album in here has been, sadly, rendered
imperfect. Ah well - and this is Phil taking - we'll always be together
in electric dreams.
01:
MIRROR MAN
NOTES A
hit friendly collection compiled with the casual fan in mind , Being
Boiled serves as the only representation of the pre-Dare era. Welcome
however for the inclusion of Mirror Man and Fascination (the first
time they had been available on CD).
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As
the 80's finally get their due respect few bands are better poised
for rehabilitation than the League. No selection can ever do full
justice to their range, but from the pure pop perfection of Mirror
Man and the iconic Don't You Want Me to the majesty of Empire State
Human, this one has an extremely good try. A second disc of remixes
further emphasises the debt modern electronic music owes them.
Greatest Hits 
design © robert
windle 2001/03. an opium
visual
presentation. jo-eye header
© papillon
2003
