When I lived in Sheffield I met Philip Oakey a handful of times through some mutual friends, and once I asked him if he knew this album and what he thought of it. With his usual lack of airs (you can imagine how some stars wouldn't admit even to listening to tribute albums), he said he thought there were some really good versions on the album, and wondered aloud if perhaps he preferred some of them to the originals. I said I'd come to the album via The Magnetic Fields' involvement. Phil looked blank, and the conversation moved on. When I got home later that night I checked the album and saw that, although Stephin Merritt of The Magnetic Fields appears on three tracks, it is always under one of his other monikers. Hence blankness.
Merritt's tactics on the those tracks are a bit too predictably postmodern. He starts by covering The Human League covering someone else (the Get Carter film theme), and then the version of Don't You Want Me is a fairly close rendering of the original but with Merritt taking the female part and fellow band member Claudia Gonson singing the male part. Gender switches like this are one of his trademarks.
The track that has always stood out for me on this album is Baxendale's (Keep Feeling) Fascination. As well as an infectious energy, they add more layers to the song, first with their cheeky tapes of teenage girls leaving obsessive crush messages on Phil Oakey's answerphone, and then rapping a wistful little commentary over the end of the song, an elegy to the days of seeing The Human League on Top of the Pops. For my 38th birthday I cajoled my friends into going to see Baxendale at the Spitz on Commercial Street. I'm sure I heard somewhere that they've split since then.
The track by Garlands is quite amusing for taking The Human League at their most off-centre — Being Boiled — and turning it into a jangly pop tune. But, like much of the album, it's a bit of a one-line joke. See, I'm not as generous in my praise as Philip Oakey.
| MusicBrainz entry for this album |
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