Why The Human League’s Philip Oakey hated ‘Don’t You Want Me’
Despite what Philip Oakey says, Susan Ann Sulley has never worked as a waitress in a cocktail bar. Both Sulley and Joanne Catherall were discovered by Oakey and effectively “picked out”, as the song ‘Don’t You Want Me’ might suggest. However, the storyline in the song belongs to no one in The Human League. It was actually inspired by the 1976 romance movie A Star Is Born.
When the band released Dare in 1981, it merged with the tail-end of the punk movement. It quashed the gritty, anachronistic musicianship of the past five years and Margaret Thatcher’s political landfill in favour of a more upbeat, positively electronic piece of optimism. Of course, some songs on the album incorporated various darker tones, but for the most part, it symbolised the explosive arrival of 1980s synth pop.
‘Don’t You Want Me’ materialised after Oakey discovered a photo comic in a teen magazine and drew from the story of A Star Is Born to create a couple-style lyrical conversation. However, the earlier, sharper iteration ended up evolving into a song with more pop leanings as a result of Jo Callis and Martin Rushent’s mixing, causing a rift with Rushent and Oakey, who hated the new version so much it angered him.
In Oakey’s view, the changes made to ‘Don’t You Want Me’ made it the weakest-sounding song on the album, and he disliked it so much that he felt strongly about it sitting at the end of the second side of the album. At the time, Oakey considered The Human League a serious and innovative band, and removing the harsher synthesiser parts of the song made it sound too soft and commercial.
However, despite it being the last track, the label still wanted to release the piece as a follow-up single to ‘The Sound of the Crowd’, ‘Love Action (I Believe in Love)’, and ‘Open Your Heart’. However, Oakey pushed back, convinced “the public was now sick of hearing” them and that the song wouldn’t do as well as the previous three singles because it was a “poor-quality filler track” that would destroy their careers.
Although this internal quarrel led to one of the band’s most intense frictions, working with Rushent proved to be a challenge for Oakey from the beginning, who found it difficult to accept his domineering approach. “They were under the impression that I was going to work on what they’d done so far and improve that and carry on,” Rushent recalled, noting his approach while working on Dare.
“I said, ‘No, I’m not doing that; we’re starting again’, which was a bit of a shock for Phil [Oakey],” he said.
Adding: “He argued about that, but I said, ‘No. If I’m going to produce you, you’re going to do what I tell you to do’. This is my attitude to everybody I produce. It’s a sort of democratic dictatorship!”
While Rushent was undeniably convinced by the appeal ‘Don’t You Want Me’, he couldn’t have predicted its immense longevity and the way it ultimately catapulted the band to global stardom.
He concluded: “We couldn’t believe it. We were just making a record, and suddenly, it just exploded all over the world and has since become a legendary record. It’s just mad! If somebody had told me then, ‘Do you realise you are making history with this record?’ I’d have said, ‘Yeah, alright, calm down and have a cup of tea!'”
