The Human League – Don’t You Want Me

The single Oakey tried to hold back

In October 1980, half of The Human League walked out. Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh left to form Heaven 17. Philip Oakey and Philip Adrian Wright still owed Virgin Records an album. On a night out at the Crazy Daisy in Sheffield, Oakey asked two teenagers, Joanne Catherall and Susan Ann Sulley, to join as singers and dancers. They were still at school. The first single with their faces on the sleeve, “Boys and Girls,” only reached No. 47 in Britain, and they had not even sung on it.

Virgin wanted a clearer pop record. Oakey brought in Ian Burden and Jo Callis, the latter fresh from The Rezillos, and booked Martin Rushent’s Genetic Studios in Reading. Rushent produced Dare, released by Virgin on 16 October 1981. It went to No. 1 in the UK. “Don’t You Want Me” was written by Oakey with Callis and Wright, and placed near the end of the album. Oakey took the story from a photo-strip in a teen magazine and from the film A Star Is Born: a man claims he made a woman’s career, and she answers that she was already on her way. Sulley sings the reply. She has pointed out, more than once, that she was never a waitress in a cocktail bar.

Oakey thought the song was too light to be a single. Rushent’s mix pushed the drum machine and the bright repeated synthesizer line forward. Virgin issued it anyway, on 27 November 1981, as the fourth single from the album, after “The Sound of the Crowd,” “Love Action (I Believe in Love),” and “Open Your Heart.” It became the Christmas No. 1 and stayed there for five weeks. It was the best-selling UK single of 1981. In the United States it reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in July 1982.