UK synth-pop pioneers The Human League last performed their unforgettable Eighties hits live in the U.S. in 2023, but not every stop went exactly as planned. Just five songs into the group’s set at the Cruel World festival in Pasadena, California, that May, festival officials from Goldenvoice beseeched founder and frontman Philip Oakey and singers Joanne Catherall and Susan Ann Sulley — the core trio since 1981 — to take their band and evacuate the stage.
The reason for the evacuation was danger and unpredictability: there were serious concerns the band could get electrocuted by a thunderstorm approaching in the distance.
“It’s something that happens occasionally,” Oakey said in an interview with Pollstar, “although usually in America. Exactly the same thing happened in Las Vegas. We were at one stage, and we were charging along, enjoying ourselves, and someone said, ‘Watch out!’ It all started raining. We ran off.”
The festival ended before The Human League could do their two number one hits. “Don’t You Want Me,” which in 1982 sat in the top spot of the Billboard Hot 100 for three weeks spending a total of 28 weeks on the chart. Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis wrote and produced their next biggest tune, “Human,” an unusually organic and tender ballad for such an uptempo synth band. It peaked at number one in 1986 and hung around on the charts for 20 weeks.
According to Pollstar Boxoffice Reports on Human League, which includes 65 reported shows from Aug.1, 2003 to April 29, 2006 with their three-year average gross totalling $248,871 and 3,563 tickets per show with an average ticket prices of $69.95. Human League’s is managed by Simon Watson at Sidewinder Management:, repped by United Talent Agency’s Mike Hayes and Cori Gadbury with press led by the estimable Rey Roldan at Rebee, Inc. This latest run will include some of the group’s most prominent shows.
“The Generations Tour,” which includes a combination of theaters, sheds and large amphitheaters, begins at Cal Coast Credit Union Open Air Theatre at SDSU in San Diego (June 2). Notable venue highlights on the North American itinerary include the band’s first Hollywood Bowl date in 15 years (June 4), Atlanta’s historic Fox Theatre (June 19), a visit to Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry House (June 21) and an engagement at NYC’s Radio City Music Hall (June 26).
“It’s a real joy to me,” Oakey says of his tourmates. “I love seeing Soft Cell. I love Marc’s voice. They’re really great. We’ve never toured with Alison before. But again, I think she’s one of the great, great singers from our time and I can’t wait to hear it.”
Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” peaked at number eight on the Billboard Hot 100 in January 1982, but the song hung around on the charts for an impressive 43 weeks.
Sadly, Soft Cell’s founding producer Dave Ball passed away in his sleep in October 2025. Almond will be joined on tour by longtime collaborator Phil Larsen, who has joined Almond for several live shows in recent years. The final Soft Cell album, with Ball’s production, will be released later this year.
Before her prolific solo career, Moyet was in the band variously known as Yazoo or Yaz, a partnership with Erasure’s Vince Clarke (also a founding member of Depeche Mode) that won Best Breakthrough Act at the 1983 Brit Awards on the strength of songs like “Don’t Go,” “Situation” and “Only You.”
Longtime manager Simon Watson of Sidewinder Management keeps a keen eye on The Human League’s touring business.
“Our manager is always trying to find bills that we can go to America with, and as the world seems to have got more expensive and a little bit more regulated, it gets hard to go places,” Oakey explains. “We love going to America. Every couple of years someone who’d come up with a bill and routing, as it got closer, it would all fall apart. But I think the pop business is a little bit perilous nowadays.”
The Human League’s enduring calling card, “Don’t You Want Me” hasn’t left the crates of countless old-school DJs since the Eighties. The classic track captivated a whole new generation of spinners, listeners and dancers in 2021, when the German remixer known as Purple Disco Machine released a tuned-up version. The song has also been sampled or interpolated by a wide variety of contemporary artists including Metronomy, Girl Talk, The Juan MacLean and Pitbull.
Outside of the tour’s marquee plays, Oakey said he’s particularly looking forward to returning to Charlotte, NC. The Generation Tour is slated to stop in the Queen City at The Amp Ballantyne on June 20.
“For some reason, I really enjoy Charlotte,” he shares. “We’ve been a couple of times and there are strange things. One day we went and it was really foggy. It was like being in one of the original Batman movies. The atmosphere was great and these little things pop into your mind.”
Photo By Perou/Courtesy Human League
Oakey and his partners make a point to see the places where they perform. “The Generations Tour” itinerary, and their tours in general, allow them to take a bit of time to explore while on the road.
“We do the easy part of the job,” he says. “It’s the crew that does the hard part of the job. We just go and jig about for 90 minutes. I try to go into every town that I stay in — I don’t want to sit in a hotel room. I like people, strangely. I want to go and just see what’s going on in the town.
“Really, it’s the best part of the job,” Oakey contines. “Travelling around and seeing new places, meeting new people who nowadays seem to like us. That’s a help. We
started in the middle of punk, so you weren’t quite sure what was going to happen when you went to a show. But now everyone’s cool! We meet people, they tell us new music they’ve found, it’s great.”
“The Generations Tour,” with The Human League, Soft Cell and Alison Moyet concludes at OLG Stage at Fallsview Casino in Niagara Falls, ON, Canada (July 2). The Human League has a a string of summer dates in the United Kingdom with “The Generations Tour,” hitting Australia and New Zealand is early 2027.
The Human League has a lot more classics in their catalog: “(Keep Feeling) Fascination,” “Heart Like a Wheel,” “The Lebanon,” “Love Action (I Believe in Love)” and “The Sound of The Crowd” are but a few. And they are presented relatively faithfully when played live. Oakey knows that their older audience does not want to hear radical re-works, like the recent meme that made the rounds on Reddit, YouTube and SoundCloud. The unauthorized social media sensation pairs the music for “Don’t You Want Me Baby” with a running and melodically appropriate loop of the lyric, “You were working as a waitress in a cocktail bar” blaring over the top for the entire duration of the song. Oakey chuckles when he’s told about this meme..
“We try to keep it as close as we can to the original stuff,” he says of their live arrangements. “We’re really happy doing it. We’ve got a lovely band — the best band we’ve ever had by a mile and we’re really happy to go out and do it. Sometimes we do extensions. We have worked with some bands who extensively change their stuff and that can be something that the audience doesn’t really want.
“We’re very aware that the people who followed us for a long time followed us because they love our stuff and we’re happy to not change it. We introduce a few other things because we’re doing a longer tour than the amount of hits that we’ve got, and that’s more where we go somewhere a bit different.”
Oakey established The Human League with Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh in 1977. Catherall and Sulley joined in 1981, as Ware and Marsh departed and formed the still-touring Heaven 17 with Glenn Gregory. Since then, the early songs as well as the pop hits have had an audible influence on every generation and multiple subgenres of electronic music.
“It’s great to be part of it,” Oakey humbly says. “I never know if we’re influential or if we just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Our band really started because we so much loved, say David Bowie, but very especially rock music and some other slightly more obscure bands from our time. So if it can mean anything to other people the way that Roxy Music meant to us…
“You can be in a band,” he advises. “You can do something of your own and get there. I still follow program music, synthesizer music, and you see these strands going through and I love being part of it.”
Oakey continues to closely keep up with advances in studio hardware, which means reading a lot of dense user manuals. He’s also paying attention to the AI and music production.
“I’m not a software sort of a person,” he says. “I still buy little bits of synths and just wire them together and try to have something a bit crazy [happen]. We always went for something different. That’s why I’m not particularly scared of AI. A lot of people are talking about AI, which seems to try and make everything what it was before, but a little bit better. We always made horrible noises and then had to work hard to try and turn it into acceptable music.”
With the core of The Human League still together, Oakey, now 70-years-old, says “We’re at the best stage we’ve ever been. And after you’ve been doing it for a few decades, the fact that you get on the bus in the morning and look at who’s there and go, ‘Great, I’m glad to be with them.’ That means so much.”
The Human League, at this stage in their career, is experiencing a buoyancy and a new excitement for being out on the road. It doesn’t hurt that the touring band is almost too responsible.
“The difference between the troublesome people that we were in the 1980s and the young musicians now who want to do their best and want to fit in is like chalk and cheese really,” Oakey says. “The difference is fantastic! We tell them we’re going at 7:30 in the morning — they’re all there at 7:15. You don’t have to worry if somebody’s trashed the hotel room the night before or something like that. I think that’s a bit old-fashioned now. If no one else had done it, we would do it. But, you know, we don’t want to be the same as Keith Moon.”