Human League – Live Review – Scarborough Open Air Theatre
By Roger Crow, June 2025
Some say time travel isn’t possible. Clearly they’ve never spent a few hours in the company of Blancmange, Tom Bailey (of Thompson Twins fame), and the Human League.
On one of the hottest days of the year, the first two acts in the eighties legends event looks like a battle of the silver foxes. Blancmange’s Neil Arthur looks a bit like David Morrissey in cool Hollywood mode, match-fit in shades, and note-perfect with some of those songs I recall, but haven’t heard in a while. And then the absolute banger that is ‘Living on the Ceiling’. My God the eighties was a great decade for music, and that was quite the experience in the audio flesh.
I’d always loved that tune, but forgotten how great a track ‘Blind Faith’ is, as well as ‘Don’t Tell Me’, and live? They’re off the scale.
“Cooler than liquid nitrogen”
Then there’s Tom (Thompson Twins) Bailey, who is also cooler than liquid nitrogen, backed by three musicians who look like they’ve stepped off the catwalk. Again, an absolute feast of nostalgia with some of my favourite tracks, including the immortal ‘You Take Me Up’, ‘Doctor Doctor’, ‘We Are Detectives’, and one of my all-time favourites, ‘Hold Me Now’, which has been on hard rotation at Crow towers since lockdown.
The main event of the evening is Human League, one of THE greatest synth pop bands of the eighties who traversed the realms of avant garde techno noodling, ripe with portent. It was the soundtrack to a generation threatened by mass unemployment, nuclear war and extraordinary fashions. Then they rose to the vertiginous high ground of mainstream crowd-pleasers.
And yes, we do get to THAT track, eventually, but those other fabulous tunes play out like the whole of Scarborough’s Open Air Theatre has been taken back in time 40-odd years. I’d not seen the band live until 2023 when they played York races. And that was a phenomenal set. Phil Oakey, like Simon Le Bon, has that utterly unique voice, and at 69, he looks incredible, like some galactic warlord who beamed in from 23rd-century Blighty, or a tech bro in a Ridley Scott sci-fi movie.
“Screaming fans”
And what a journey we all go on. The stratospheric highs and those lesser tracks all backed by one of those retina-searing screens displaying masterful visuals. Abstract, pulsing, eye-popping gloriousness, all in synch with that incredible band.
And while Phil might look like a futuristic potentate, the joy radiates from him. Little wonder. Thousands of screaming fans, many in their fifties like me who had those tracks baked into their DNA as teenagers. When ‘Mirror Man’ strikes up, there’s a primal scream of happiness that emanates in my toe nails and erupts, Etna-like, from my tonsils. And I’m not the only one screaming: “The water shines. A pebble skips across the lake…” I’m transported back to the weeks after THAT number one smash turned Human League from cool indie band to piping hot A-listers.
Joanne Catherall and Susanne Sully have of course been there since the early days, the chorus to Oakey’s leading vocals, and they’re always entertaining on stage. Susan especially is having a ball, and when she delivers the lead vocals on that 1995 track ‘One Man in My Heart’, the masses happily lend a hand with the vocals.
“Epic”
We ‘end’ with the immortal ‘Don’t You Want Me?’, one of the most epic singalongs I’ve ever been witness to. And it’s better than Christmas. But I know from experience the best is yet to come. Following the inevitable encore, and the thumping techno of the band’s 1978 debut single ‘Being Boiled’, Oakey turns on the musical afterburners with one of THE seminal tracks of 1984. ‘Together in Electric Dreams’ is like plugging every nerve ending of my body into the mains.
I’ve always loved the slightly off-key stylings of Phil’s vocals. Yes, I adore a singer with perfect pitch (hello Sharleen Spiteri), but that slightly fractious Oakey voice is a delight. His musical union with techno wizard Giorgio Moroder was a marriage made in heaven, and like Duran Duran’s ‘Wild Boys’ (from the same year), every time I hear it live, it’s like winning the lottery.
We loved the action; we opened our hearts, and Phil, Joanne, Susanne and the rest of the band, please tell me when I’ll see you again. The sooner the better as that was easily one of the best gigs of this, or any other year.
Images: Cuffe & Taylor
Adopted Yorkshireman Roger Crow developed a passion for film and TV in the 1970s and 1980s. He has been a published film and TV reviewer since the 1990s; a world travel and restaurant critic since the noughties, and for the past decade has assessed the pros and cons of live gigs and theatre productions around the UK. His ideal day would involve reviewing a performance of Bat Out of Hell, followed by a Pad Thai while being serenaded by Texas on a cruise around Europe.
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