The Human League Raid Their 70s Vaults

Seminal Sheffield electro pioneers the Human League are to release a compilation album of their earliest recordings from the 70s when Heaven 17 producers Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh were still in the band. The album includes the duo's earliest experimental recordings made under the name The Future plus commercially unavailable tracks from when Phil Oakey joined in 1977 (when they became called The Human League.)

"Being in a band is what I always wanted, so back then I behaved very much like a student, even if I wasn't one," Phil Oakey recently told Skrufff.

"I was interested in all those 'arty' forms of expressions, like listening to experimental music such as Philip Glass or watching subtitled French films and so on."

His day job, in fact, involved working as a hospital porter, which sometimes meant disposing of body parts, watching amputated limbs crackle and burn as he threw them in the hospital's furnace.

"It was a good job for many reasons even though there was no money in it," he recalled.

"It made you look at life in a different way and you didn't even have to be mentally strong to do it, because you'd be running around all day doing things that made you forget the darker aspects of the job. Watching people doing it would have being more disturbing, but in my case I just carried on."

The Golden Hour of the Future (Early Recordings by The Future and the Human League) is out in September on Black Melody Records and is a surprisingly contemporary selection of electro-disco cuts.
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