Curiously, out of all the artists in my top 10, The Human League are the only ones I’ve ever seen live (though given how rarely some of the others tour the states, maybe it’s not that much of a surprise after all). I saw them in Houston in 2003, just as they were making the uneasy transition from working band to new wave oldies act. Their last album, Secrets, had come out in 2001, and they were still playing a couple things off it even though nothing on it had made even the slightest dent in the US charts. Otherwise, however, it was a straight run through the highlights of the band’s career, covering nearly all of the hit singles and a smattering of fan favorites. This “best of” show contained fully half of Dare!, assuming my memory still serves.

When The Human League, who had been Sheffield’s premier synth-based avant-gloom quartet, split in half after two albums, everyone who actually, you know, played anything went off to form Heaven 17 (”Crushed by the wheels of industry! Crushed by the wheels! Woo! Woo!”), leaving vocalist Phil Oakey with the band name and the guy whose job in the band was to run the slide projector. Faced with this conundrum, Oakey took the obvious first step of hiring two more people with no instrumental abilities, a pair of barely-legal girls he found at a local disco, whose entire sum of known talents was that they could dance, kinda. Go figure. (Oakey did manage to find a couple of instrumentalists eventually, including Jo Callis, the former guitarist from The Rezillos. Of course, he wasn’t allowed to play the guitar for the duration of the album. Again, go figure.)

And yet, together with Depeche Mode’s Speak and Spell, released the same year, Dare! essentially invented modern synth-pop. Previous bands had either used synths in the context of a more traditional rock band (Bowie and Roxy Music and Tubeway Army and even OMD were playing “real” instruments alongside their synths), or were playing more avant-garde music (I don’t care how high “Autobahn” placed on the charts, Kraftwerk were not a pop band). Dare! combined the dark postpunk artiness of the League’s previous incarnation with some genuine pop sensibilities, mixed them with some spare synth parts and a Linn drum, and in the process, set the template for a huge percentage of the music that would be recorded in the ’80s.

Oakey & co. try out several things on this release, all of which work wonderfully. There are a couple of unnervingly mechanical singalongs (”The Sound of the Crowd” and the gleefully deadpan “The Things That Dreams are Made Of”), pulsing pop anthems (”Do Or Die,” “Open Your Heart” and “Don’t You Want Me”), a few gloomier numbers that recall the band’s past (”Darkness,” “I Am the Law,” “Seconds”), and the slinky “Love Action,” which might still be the sexiest use of synths I’ve ever heard.

There’s a sense, actually, in which the album was too good. Even though the League went on to release a series of sparkling singles that were better than what most of their peers came up with, Dare! remained a sort of albatross around the band’s neck. They put out a series of albums that ranged from the pretty good (Secrets) to the interesting but flawed (Crash, Octopus, Hysteria), to the not very good, really (Romantic?), but they were never again able to live up to the standard they’d set with Dare!

I suppose it’s easy to smile at Dare! now, especially if what you really remember from it is the video for “Don’t You Want Me.” But I find that taken as a whole, it’s still fresh, brimming with energy and discovery — and really, really, really catchy. Partly, I suppose my love for the album stems from the fact that the League were a huge influence on me when I was first starting to play in bands; I used a bunch of keyboards that had those old ’80s sounds on them, and I tried to sound as much like Oakey as I could. But mostly, I think it’s just that this is really good music, goofy videos or no, good enough to retain its value a solid quarter-century later.

Release date: 1981
Label: A&M
Rating: 10/10

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