★★★★☆
Sheffield electro-pop pioneers the Human League have been a greatest-hits nostalgia act for so long now, it is easy to forget what a gloriously weird, arty, eccentric prospect they were in their heyday. Sumptuously mounted with an architecturally complex stage and multiple costume changes, this Wembley show was part of a grand-scale tour celebrating the 40th anniversary of the band’s third album Dare, a hit-packed career peak which sold six million copies. Indeed, exactly four decades ago the album’s biggest single Don’t You Want Me was beginning its five-week reign atop the festive charts.
Still an impressively lithe and full-throated frontman at 66, Philip Oakey arrived in Wembley dressed like a warrior monk. He was flanked as ever by Joanne Catherall and Susan Ann Sulley, the backing singers he first recruited from a nightclub dancefloor when they were 17-year-old schoolgirls, who modelled a series of Absolutely Fabulous outfits throughout the evening. The bulk of this set featured Dare played in full, but the album was bookended by earlier and later career highlights including the stomping faux-Motown pastiche Mirror Man, the opulent soul-pop ballad Human and Oakey’s soaring 1984 collaboration with Eurodisco legend Giorgio Moroder, Together in Electric Dreams.
Inevitably, Don’t You Want Me received the warmest, loudest reception in Wembley. But the true test of this kind of full-album show is how well the lesser, rarely performed numbers hold up. Some Dare tracks, notably Darkness and Do or Die, have not aged gracefully. But the sinister gothic waltz I Am The Law and the discordant disco-glam anthem The Sound of the Crowd still sounded refreshingly bizarre. The beauty of Dare is that it arrived in a transitional period when the League still had one foot in Sheffield’s arty, ambitious, futuristic post-punk scene. However much the band pander to cosy mainstream nostalgia nowadays, this enduring streak of avant-pop weirdness means these songs will live for ever.
Nottingham Theatre Royal, December 13 and touring to December 18
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