The filler that became Christmas
A bass synthesiser counts the listener in like a bartender who has seen this argument before, and Philip Oakey starts the story from his side, already certain he is owed something.
The Human League recorded Don’t You Want Me for Dare at Genetic Studios in Reading, Martin Rushent producing, and the album came out in 1981. Oakey wrote the lyric from a photo-story in a teen magazine and from the shape of A Star Is Born, a man who finds a girl working as a waitress, makes her a face, and cannot believe she leaves. Jo Callis and Philip Adrian Wright built a harsher synth arrangement. Rushent and Callis softened it. Oakey hated the softer version. He thought it the weakest track on the record and parked it at the end of side two. Susan Ann Sulley sings the answer, the waitress who was working in a cocktail bar, which was close to the truth: she and Joanne Catherall had been found in a Sheffield club the year before, not singers yet. Virgin’s Simon Draper wanted a fourth single. Oakey fought it, then agreed if a poster came with the seven-inch, so fans would not feel robbed by a filler.
It was the Christmas No. 1 in Britain in 1981, and No. 1 in America the next year. Oakey has not quite forgiven it. In 2014 he told Classic Pop that it might have shifted gazillions, but that he had either heard it too often or the rest of Dare was simply so far ahead that the hit stood in the shade. The shade is where the public lives. The duet is the point. Her verse does not apologise. She was working, he picked her, now she is famous and five times more so, and the song, which he meant as his complaint, keeps handing her the better lines.
Don’t You Want Me might have shifted gazillions, but either I’ve heard it too many times or the rest of Dare is just so far ahead that it puts it in the shade.
(Philip Oakey, Classic Pop, 2014)
On stage the argument is choreography. He stands, she stands, the crowd sings both parts, including the threat in the last chorus, which a dancefloor has decided is romance. That decision is worth arguing with. The words are a man who will not let go. The music is so clean, so brightly produced by Rushent, that the menace arrives dressed for a party. Sulley’s vocal, inexperienced and exact, is what saves the record from being only his. She sounds as if she has already left the building. He is still explaining.
What remains is a hit its author filed under mistake. Dare is full of better-built songs, and this one has the story, the two voices, the poster, the Christmas. Pop is unfair in that way. The track Oakey hid is the one the year remembers. The cocktail bar is still in the lyric, a real job turned into a myth, and the synthesisers still sparkle as if nobody in the song were frightened. Listen again to her verse. The single is hers, whatever the writing credit says, and the man who did not want it released is still, on every tour, obliged to sing the question.
