★★★★☆
This had all the hallmarks of a slip into despair. A show by a once-groundbreaking band playing hits from 35 years ago to a crowd in their forties and fifties trying hopelessly to relive their youth — what’s not to write a seasonal suicide note about? Yet the Human League proved that glamour, wit and evergreen melodies really do live for ever.
At first it did not look promising. To the sound of the band’s icy 1978 debut Being Boiled, Phil Oakey, with the asymmetrical haircut and androgynous fashion sense of old replaced by a shaven head and black leather coat that made him look like Ming the Merciless, stalked the stage on his own. Then Susan Ann Sulley and Joanne Catherall, mere schoolgirls when Oakey spotted them dancing in a Sheffield nightclub in 1980, joined him for Sound of the Crowd. Then a screen rose to reveal three besuited musicians with suitably retro-futuristic instruments such as keytars and electronic drums, and we were off.
You couldn’t argue about the strength of the tunes. From The Lebanon — a rare moment of the Human League going political with a protest against the Lebanese war — to the Motown-themed Mirror Man, these were modern classics. And they approached the concert with a refreshing spirit. There wasn’t the desperate posturing you often get from 1980s bands who refuse to accept that they’re no longer the biggest thing in the world. Even so, a lot of thought had gone into the presentation, from Sulley bringing the songs alive with camp theatricality to a bank of screens showing images that related, however abstractly, to the music.
The set ended, as it had to, with Don’t You Want Me before an encore of a singalong for Together in Electric Dreams. Of course it was nostalgia. No one was pretending the new numbers were anywhere near as good as the old favourites. But nostalgia can be an art form too, as the Human League proved at this stylish, semi-ironic, undeniably enjoyable concert.
December 15, Barbican Centre, York; December 16, Royal Concert Hall, Nottingham