Nostalgia? Yes, please. The Human League are coming to town

Songs with real staying power, the ones that stick with you for a lifetime, land for a variety of reasons — whether it’s a great lyric that becomes part of your personal lexicon or an earworm of a riff that you hum without realizing it. On Saturday, June 13, in Phoenix, The Human League, Soft Cell, and Alison Moyet, three artists with “forever” hits from the 1980s, will land at Mesa Amphitheatre for The Generations Tour and remind us why they are all great.

Take the night’s headliners, The Human League. Their song, “Don’t You Want Me,” from late 1981 (and a bit later in the U.S.), was a number one hit and one of the biggest-selling singles by any New Wave artist of the era. As a 12-year-old with a healthy fascination for catchy tunes that were a bit left of center, I loved “Don’t You Want Me.” It didn’t hurt that the accompanying video was played endlessly on the fledgling (at the time) MTV.

Susan Ann Sulley, who shared lead vocals on the song with Philip Oakey, and her fellow backup vocalist Joanne Catherall were quite fetching in the eyes of this reporter. As a budding writer, I also thought the lyrics Sulley and Oakey were singing were really great. Oakey’s first verse comes off like he’s the cool guy who has helped this poor gal find success, but then Sulley subtly turns the tables on him brilliantly. There was something about this that seemed kind of fresh to my ears back then and still does to this day. Even though I wish Sulley had gotten a second verse to put Oakey’s protagonist in his place a bit more after he tells her that she’s going to regret not changing her mind, “Don’t You Want Me” is a great pop song.

When the band dropped “(Keep Feeling) Fascination” a few years later, in 1983, with its eminently danceable funky bass/synth line, my personal fandom was cemented. More recently, the band has opted to focus on touring every few years, and, according to Sulley, being a band from the ‘80s that is still working over forty years later is an eye-opening experience.

“It’s more enjoyable this time round because we’re not famous anymore... me and Joanne will just go off around together, go and do a bit of shopping or a bit of sightseeing and absolutely no one will know or be interested in who we are and then but then we get to do that most amazing thing where we go to play to a load of people that have bought tickets to come and see us,” says Sulley over the phone from her native England.

Sulley was forthright when I asked her about touring with former competitors like Soft Cell and Moyet.

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