Octopus

THE HUMAN LEAGUE: “Octopus” (eastwest)

THERE’S AT least one song on Octopus that needs to be piped into every home, like running water and amusingly awful satellite channels. ‘These Are The Days’ is its name, it’s about the bloodsucking menace to society that is phoney nostalgia, and it goes like this: “Here’s a song about living in the past/If it was so good then how come it didn’t last . . . You’re longing for a time there never was/Now tell me the truth/You’re looking for the reason/It’s because you’re fighting for youth . . . Those were the times/But these are the days.”

Considering that the very same epidemic of failure to live in the present against which Phil Oakey so vehemently rails in this refreshing spurt of spot-on bile has just aided his re-entry into the Top Ten with ‘Tell Me When’, ‘These Are The Days’ is likely to seriously miff any potential punters whose reason for purchasing this latest Human League comeback record is to recapture their first flush of long-faded youth. (Ah, those halcyon days of the early 80’s! Limahl! Black Lace! Jaki Graham! Pop gods all...) As such, its inclusion on the LP is a brave move and thoroughly rock’n’roll. For this and, belatedly, for ‘Electric Dreams’ (with Giorgio Moroder), Phil Oakey’s beatification is surely imminent.

(By the way, all nostalgia isn’t evil. For example, the Boo Radleys’ Giant Steps is intensely nostalgic and rings 100% true. It’s just when the memories being celebrated are so blatantly manufactured and horribly twisted, like claiming that the Summer Of Love was the end of Evolution when all it was, really, deep down, was an excuse for a shower of rich, idle twats to get so stoned that they somehow failed to notice Richard Nixon getting in, thus bequeathing my much-derided generation not only a planet on the cusp of economic collapse but also – and much, much worse – the curse of 98FM. Thank you so much, you bunch of black-hearted babybooming bastards.)

But back to the rest of the LP, which isn’t so bad, either. The sound is as you’d expect, that is a little anachronistic but instantly recognisable: the good songs are not too far from ‘Don’t You Want Me’, but without that eye-boggling blind man’s haircut, while the poorer tracks attempt inexplicably to be experimental and end up not a little absurd. ‘Houseful Of Nothing’ has a commendably spooky lyric which is unscrupulously trampled on by Phil’s comedy vocal, and ‘Never Again’ should take its own advice.

‘Tell Me When’, ‘One Man In My Heart’ and ‘Filling up With Heaven’ are all archetypal League, deliciously existential-angst-ridden anthemic electropop about the healing and wounding powers of love, while ‘Words’ is gently, touchingly despairing. And ‘These Are The Days’ is the sun, moon and at least some stars, as I’ve mentioned.

This famous five aside, Octopus can be taken or left. So, it may not be the sort of monstrosity that Adam Ant is about to foist on us but neither is Octopus an eight-legged groove machine, exactly. Ah, but, y’know, they’re only human.

• Niall Crumlish