“We recorded that song in a toilet with quite a cheap microphone, a Shure SM58”: Phil Oakey lifts the lid on the birth of The Human League’s Don’t You Want Me

RECORDING WEEK 2024: It may be one of the most successful UK singles of all time, but it turns out that The Human League’s Don’t You Want Me was born in a rather inauspicious place: a toilet.

Speaking to WA Today, Phil Oakey, the band’s lead singer, says that the location was chosen because it had the best acoustics of any area of the Sheffield studio they were recording in.

“At one stage, while I was recording with the headphones on, our producer Martin Rushent sent the engineer to scare me by jumping down from above,” Oakey recalls. Someone kept flushing the toilet behind me as well. Martin had quite a lot of little jokes for the artists and we did record that song in a toilet with quite a cheap microphone, a Shure SM58. But I’m not complaining.”

The Human League - Don't You Want Me (Official Music Video) - YouTube

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Don’t You Want Me was released when The Human League were in their first flush (sorry) of commercial success, with its parent album, Dare, going on to sell huge numbers of copies.

The band's Australian tour earlier this year saw them playing the album in its entirety, which necessitated them shipping out synths from Sheffield. “We can’t hire them in because then we’d sound like a cover band,” Oakey says.

Despite The Human League’s longevity, Oakey is modest about the band’s talent and achievements. “We’re not musicians. We never trained,” he says. “We’ve managed to continue as a band by always just feeling lucky about everything we’ve ever done. I have never been the greatest songwriter in this group. I’ve never been the best singer in this group. I’m not a very good frontman or anything, we just do our best and hope that the audience will fill in the rest.”

You can check out our guide to recreating Don’t You Want Me’s monster synth riff here, and the good news is that we won’t make you do it in a toilet.

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