There are eight people credited on Dare, but the album was essentially saved by two teenage girls Philip Oakey spotted working a nightclub in Sheffield.
Susan Ann Sulley and Joanne Catherall were seventeen and eighteen when Oakey walked up to them at the Crazy Daisy disco and asked if they wanted to be in a band. No audition. No demo tape. Just a gut feeling from a man with an asymmetrical haircut who needed something his existing lineup couldn’t provide. Within months, they were singing on one of the best-selling British albums of the decade.
The Room Where It Happened
Dare was recorded at Genetic Sound in Berkshire across the spring and summer of 1981, produced by Martin Rushent — a decision that changed everything. The original Human League had split acrimoniously the previous year, with Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh walking out to form Heaven 17. Oakey was left holding a name, a record contract, and not much else.
Rushent brought a Roland MC-8 microcomputer sequencer and an obsessive patience for programming that matched Oakey’s own stubborn vision. The two men spent weeks building sequences that felt both mechanical and strangely alive. The Linn LM-1 drum machine — then a relatively new and expensive piece of kit — was used throughout, and Rushent knew how to make it breathe rather than just click.
Engineer Dave Allen held the room together during sessions that often ran into the early hours. By the time Sulley and Catherall arrived to track vocals, the music was already there, fully formed and waiting for them.
What the Synthesizers Actually Sound Like
The production on this record is a lesson in negative space. Listen to “The Sound of the Crowd” on a decent system and notice what isn’t there — no guitars, almost no reverb wash, just sequenced basslines cutting through clean open air. Rushent kept things dry, and it gives the album a tautness that most synth-pop from this period completely lacks.
“Love Action (I Believe in Love)” still sounds like 1981 in the best possible way, which is to say it sounds like a very specific and accurate idea of the future that turned out to be correct. The chord movement underneath Oakey’s baritone is almost classical in its patience.
And then there’s “Don’t You Want Me.” I’ll just say it plainly: this is a perfect pop single. The call-and-response structure, the slightly threatening undertone in Oakey’s vocal, Sulley’s restraint — it’s three minutes and fifty-eight seconds of everything working. Rushent apparently didn’t think it was strong enough for the album. Oakey had to fight to include it. It spent five weeks at number one in the UK.
The sequencing of the album matters, too. Side two opens with “I Am the Law,” which is sufficiently weird and dark to remind you this band came from Sheffield’s post-punk scene, not some pop factory. They hadn’t forgotten where they started. They just decided to make it work for everyone.
Oakey’s lyrics get underestimated. He wrote about ordinary emotional life — jealousy, longing, the strange power dynamics of couples — without any of the affected coolness that made a lot of his contemporaries feel airless. There’s something almost working-class blunt about it, which suits Sheffield, and which suits the Linn LM-1 thudding away underneath.
Dare sold over five million copies worldwide. Sulley and Catherall are still in the band. Rushent died in 2011, which remains one of the quieter losses in British production history.
Put it on after midnight and turn the bass up slightly. It holds.