There is a remix album that sounds more alive than most bands’ best studio work, and it has been hiding in plain sight since 1982.
Dance arrived as a contractual obligation, more or less — Virgin wanted product, The Human League needed a bridge between Dare and whatever came next, and so producer Martin Rushent went back into the tapes and rebuilt five tracks from the Dare sessions into something longer, stranger, and more physically insistent than anything the band had put on record. It was sold as a stopgap. It was nothing of the sort.
What Rushent Actually Did
Rushent worked out of Genetic Sound in Reading, the studio he’d built himself in part to make Dare happen the way it happened. He understood these songs at a cellular level. He knew where the air was in the machines.
What he did on Dance was pull the club out of the track — not add it, reveal it. The version of “The Things That Dreams Are Made Of” here runs nearly seven minutes and it opens up like a room you didn’t know existed behind a familiar wall. The bass sits lower. The spaces between Philip Oakey’s vocals get longer and stranger. The synths breathe.
“Do You Want Me” becomes genuinely threatening in this form.
Rushent was working with Roland drum machines and a small arsenal of synthesizers — the Linn LM-1 that sat at the center of the Dare sound, various Oberheims and Rolands, the sequencer patterns that he and the Callis/Martyn axis had programmed with almost neurotic precision. Ian Callis and Jo Callis — and here’s the thing people forget — Jo Callis came from the Rezillos, a pop-punk band, and he brought a songwriter’s structural instinct to a group that might otherwise have been all texture and mood. That tension between Callis’s melodic economy and Rushent’s machine obsession is what made Dare work, and it’s what Dance amplifies.
The Album That Shouldn’t Work
Five tracks. All previously released in some form. By any reasonable description, a cash-in.
And yet. There’s something about the format that frees it. Without the obligation to sequence an album, to move listeners through a narrative arc, Rushent could just chase the sound until it broke. The extended version of “Love Action (I Believe in Love)” here is the best mix of that song, full stop. I’ll die on that hill. The production on the original is impeccable, but this version has a looseness in the low-end that makes the whole thing feel less like a record and more like a room.
Oakey’s voice — that preposterous, unlikely baritone — gets more space too. He sounds less like a pop singer and more like a man who is slightly confused about why he’s in a nightclub but has decided to commit fully.
Susan Ann Sulley and Joanne Catherall are present but pushed back in the mix, which is a loss. Their presence on Dare was part of what made the record feel inhabited rather than manufactured. Here they drift through the periphery, more texture than character.
That’s the one honest complaint.
After Midnight
The record runs about forty-five minutes and it demands a decent system. Not because it’s audiophile fare — it absolutely is not — but because the bass and the space around the synths only become coherent when you’re giving it real air. Earbuds are the wrong answer. A small room with two speakers pointed at you is the right one.
There’s a moment near the end of the extended “Sound of the Crowd” where the sequencer drops out for just a beat and a half and you can hear the room, or the absence of one, and it is genuinely eerie.
Rushent died in 2011, too young, from complications related to diabetes. He never got a proper reckoning for what he built in that studio in Reading. Dare gets the credits. Dance gets filed under miscellaneous. Neither accounting is fair to a man who understood, better than almost anyone, what it sounded like when machines learned to feel something.
Put this on after dark. Give it the volume it wants.