|
7 INCH (VS 1262) :
HEART LIKE A WHEEL - (4.30)
/ REBOUND - (3.57)
CASSETTE SINGLE (VSC 1262)
: HEART
LIKE A WHEEL - (4.30) / REBOUND - (3.57)
12 INCH (VST 1262) :
HEART LIKE A WHEEL (EXTENDED)
- (6.55) / HEART LIKE A WHEEL - (4.30) REBOUND - (3.57)
CD5 SINGLE (VSCDT 1262)
: HEART
LIKE A WHEEL - (4.30) / HEART LIKE A WHEEL (EXTENDED) - (6.55)
/
REBOUND - (3.57) / HEART LIKE A WHEEL REMIX - (4.36)
CD5 SINGLE (VSCDX 1262) :
HEART LIKE A WHEEL - (4.30)
/ HEART LIKE A WHEEL (EXTENDED) - (6.55) /
REBOUND - (3.57) / HEART LIKE A WHEEL REMIX - (4.36) / A DOORWAY?
(DUB) - (4.28)
Heart Like A Wheel - Review 1
“Most
people think of us as a light synthpop version of ABBA,”
shouted Phil Oakey when introducing Heart Like A Wheel during
the Human League’s London show in November 2001,
“so
here’s our third song tonight about American military
imperialism.” None
of us expected him to say that, and the comment prompted my
mate (who I’d dragged along to the gig and up until this
point was only really a fan of punk and left-wing protest
rock), to admit that Oakey was in fact very cool indeed. He’s
now a firm devotee of electro, by the way. For this reason
alone, Heart Like A Wheel is a very important record.
Okay, so maybe there’s
a couple of others. Done properly, pop music can be a devastatingly
powerful way of delivering a social or political message.
Done badly, it can be a total embarrassment to all concerned.
The Human League had made a pretty valiant stab at this elusive
genre of songwriting a few years earlier with The Lebanon,
with its uncharacteristic guitar screech and earnest, totally
straight-faced delivery of the lyrics; sadly, it was the lyrics
that caused the song to fall flat on its face.
Put simply, if you want
to do a political song well you can take one of two approaches.
The first, and by far the most popular, is to voice an all-encompassing,
non-specific viewpoint at a time of crisis without being too
specific - war is bad, let’s all just get along, and
so forth. That way, your song will continue to be relevant
for future generations until we finally achieve world peace
and have no further need of protest songs.
 The
alternative approach, and by far the more risky, is to ‘name
and shame’: to make direct reference to the key movers
and shakers in whatever issues you’re writing about,
giving your song impact at the time of release but ensures
that posterity will view it more as a historical artifact
than something they’d actually dance to. Heaven 17 just
about got away with the throwaway line “Reagan’s
president elect / Fascist god in motion”
because the rest of the lyrics to Fascist Groove Thang had
that critical balance of abstraction and contemporary awareness.
 The
Human League went straight for the jugular with The Lebanon,
wearing its political agenda on its (record) sleeve, but what
lets it down is the fact that the lyrics are not just dated
but so awful they’re hysterically funny: “And
where there used to be some shops / Is where the snipers sometimes
hide” has quite rightly
gone down as being one of the most terrible lines ever committed
to vinyl, and an honourable mention has to go to “Her
life was cheap on bread and wine / And sharing meant no shame”.
There’s a good reason why newspaper reports about wars
rarely rhyme, and this is it.
 Thankfully,
Heart Like A Wheel corrects this earlier blunder by taking
the first approach and not spelling exactly who or what Jo
Callis was riled by when he wrote the song. The words are
based on a simplistic, not particularly original but nevertheless
powerful set of images suggesting that this sort of conflict
turns the fighter from a man into a machine - specifically,
a killing machine, hence the title: his heart, one of the
essential organs giving him life and traditionally associated
with the emotions, has become like a wheel, perhaps the most
basic mechanical component of them all.
 One
of the most striking aspects of the lyrics is how pertinent
they are to the international climate of 2003. The lines “Sell
your soul to a holy war / Set the captive free”
sum up much of the controversy surrounding recent operations
in both Iraq and Afghanistan: the suspicion that the invasions
might have been commercially motivated, the added emphasis
on religion and cultural history (let’s face it, “jihad”
wasn’t a word that figured in the vocabulary of many
Westerners before 11th September 2001) and the references
to invading parties as ‘liberators’.
Even more impressively, the blunt yet brilliant claim in the
bridge section that no-one can ever “make
any friends with an M16”
echoes a remark made by a regular in my local - that there’s
no way you can bomb people into liberal mindedness.
The words are powerful and punchy, helped by the short, sharp
clauses which make it all the more difficult to issue a retort
that’s as strongly phrased.
Releasing Heart Like A Wheel as the lead single from the album
Romantic was either a very good idea or a very stupid one.
It was definitely the band’s best single for nearly a
decade, offering smart lyrics, an arms-in-the-air singalong
chorus and ballsy, relentless production. If the band lost
a few fans through the guitar histrionics of The Lebanon,
then by the time of the I Need Your Loving fiasco they were
haemorrhaging them badly, for obvious reasons (who could forget
his cry of “Breakdown!!” in Money? Me, for a start).
 Heart
Like A Wheel’s popularity with the fans (not the general
public, they couldn’t give a toss about it) is attributed
to the fact that it “sees a return to the classic Dare
sound” - not a direct quotation, just the sort of thing
I can imagine a Human League devotee saying. This is clearly
rubbish, a lazy comparison based on the presence of Martin
Rushent. The Dare sound was all about detachment and the slightly
wonky interface between man and machine. A better comparison
with an early League sound would be with Blind Youth - the
two songs share a frantic urgency, a focussed anger and energy
that Dare never aspired to.
 On
the other hand, releasing it as the lead single from the album
was a bad move because its brilliance served to highlight
how weak the rest of the album was. Someone once described
Romantic as a single with nine B-sides, which is a pretty
good way of looking at it. Rushent clearly pulled out all
the stops and used every trick he knew to give Heart Like
A Wheel its thunderous sound, and had he stopped there his
reputation as the ultimate Human League producer would have
been assured. Sadly he didn’t, and turned in Get It Right
This Time as well, which is the complete opposite: tinny,
flaccid and boring.
 The
level of production achieved on Heart Like A Wheel only highlights
the ineptitude of the production throughout the rest of the
album -
hackneyed drum loops sloppily grafted onto cheap synth presets,
not an EQ in sight and with only the barest reference to a
mixing desk. If you bought the single then you didn’t
really need the album. Why else would Virgin promote it by
releasing Dare to be Romantic, an album promo that contained
a bunch of songs from Dare?!
 There's
nothing more annoying than finding that the b-side to a single
you've bought is on the album. Sure enough, the single of
Heart Like A Wheel came backed with Rebound, aka Track 7 from
Romantic. Rebound is one of the better tracks from the album,
although this doesn't really say much; it's still a woefully
under-developed ragbag of ideas ill-served by the tinny production.
It's an example of the concept being far more interesting
than the track - had they got The Orb or someone similar into
the studio to tart up the sounds and give it a bit of movement
then it could have been an ambient classic, but as it stands
it just sounds like they ran out of lyrics.
Far more worthy
of mention is the remix by William Orbit.
Admittedly he doesn't do much more than warm up a couple of
the synth lines to give it more of a clubby feel but next
time someone tells you the Human League are behind the times
just tell them that they were working with Orbit before Madonna
was and see if that doesn't shut their lying mouths for good.
The video’s pretty unremarkable, featuring the band singing
the song whilst some wheel-like graphics flash around them.
Phil looks terrible, as if he’d decided around Christmas
1981 that he’d cut his hair when he next had a number
1 hit and had stuck to his guns for nine long years.
The one-man style revolution of the early 1980s now looked
like he’d been living in an attic for a decade.
 Jo
and Susan, meanwhile, look really, really hot, finally losing
that schoolgirl awkwardness that surrounded their early appearances
and that diabolical transvestite war paint of the Crash era.
They finally look like proper popstars, confident, moody and
sexy. Recent tours have shown that they (Susan in particular)
now know how to hype up a crowd as opposed to just dancing
in the background, and I have a feeling that this video marks
some sort of turning point in that sense. From this point
onwards they were fully fledged performers rather than just
eye candy.
The early 90s is seen as being
a particularly bleak spot for the Human League: no-one bought
their records, two of them had breakdowns and they released
an album that was fatally out of synch with its time. Yet
amazingly, they managed to pull one of their best songs out
of the bag, a sign that the downwards qualitative trend that
had dogged them from about 1984 onwards was about to be reversed.
Heart Like A Wheel returned the band to pure electronica and
its freneticism hinted at the kind of edgy, nervous tension
that would crop up several times on Octopus and finally define
pretty much the entire sound of Secrets.
The accompanying album may have disappointed, but the song’s
importance lies primarily in what followed it.
Secrets Online Ratings:
Heart Like A Wheel:
9
Rebound:
5
Text © Matt
Nida 2003 /
screengrabs by
Tony B / Photoshop manipulation
- orac
Heart Like A Wheel Review 2.0 here.
Being
Boiled / Sound Of
The Crowd / Love
Action / Don't
You Want Me / Mirror
Man / Louise / I
Need Your Loving /
Tell Me When / AIEW
|
