LUST’S JUST A DISTRACTION

Today’s isn’t one for the TikTok generation or folk with short-attention spans. It’s more than ten minutes long and a total contrast to the new series that was launched a few days back.

mp3: The Human League – Hard Times/Love Action (I Believe In Love)

Love Action was released in July 1981.   It climbed all the way to #3 and provided the group with its first Top 10 hit, building nicely on the success of previous single Sound of The Crowd which had got to #12.  At this stage, nobody was really sure if the success could be maintained or whether they would come to be regarded as a footnote in musical history, best recalled for having a frontman with a silly haircut and two backing singers whose appearances on Top of the Pops were a bit lacking in confidence.

Six months later, the success of the single Don’t You Want Me and the album Dare ensured that The Human League would be anything but a footnote….and fair play to them. Some of the band had long been at the vanguard of innovative synth music, and it was a bit of a eureka moment with the realisation that the addition of a pop element would take it out of the bedrooms of the geeks and into the living rooms, lounges and patio extensions of countless millions.

The 7″ version of Love Action is a brilliant four-minute pop single. The group were of course more than happy to have it pushed via the radio stations to become a big hit, but at the same time they were really keen to let people hear the fully extended version they had come up with in the studio with producer Martin Rushent, one which involved the song emerging from a near-instrumental track called Hard Times (which itself was made available as the b-side to the 7″).  

The marketing folk at Virgin Records were equally keen, possibly trying to avoid the group being pigeonholed at this juncture purely as pop-fodder, and so the 12″ was put into the shops at the cheap price of £1.49, thus offering up what in effect was more than 20 minutes of music at a cost that wasn’t that much more than the 7″.

mp3: The Human League – Hard Times/Love Action (I Believe In Love) (instrumentals)

Fun fact.   Lou Reed was a big influence on the lyric.   The song is not only named after I Believe in Love, as written and recorded for the 1976 album Rock and Roll Heart, but Phil Oakey would later reveal that the lyric “I believe what the old man said” was a specific reference to the gruff New Yorker.

JC