PhilPaine.com

This is a British syn­th­pop band orig­i­nat­ing in Sheffield, Eng­land in the ear­ly 1980s, part­ly from for­mer mem­bers of the Human League. I have their first two (and most suc­cess­ful) albums, Pent­house and Pave­ment (1981) and The Lux­ury Gap (1983). From the first album, the sin­gle “We Don’t Need This Fas­cist Groove Thang” gained some noto­ri­ety when the BBC banned it from play for polit­i­cal rea­sons. How­ever, “Geisha Boys and Tem­ple Girls” and “We’re Going to Live For a Very Long Time“ appealed to me more. They achieved greater suc­cess with the sec­ond album, from which “Temp­ta­tion” and “Let Me Go” were the band’s biggest UK and US hits respec­tive­ly. A cur­rent lis­tener will be most tak­en by the prim­i­tive “pro­to-tech­no” ele­ments: cheesy syn­the­siz­ers and drum machines. Unlike most of the syn­th­pop bands of the time, they had catchy melodies, and used the crude elec­tron­ic tools to good effect.