September 25 – Bobby Wonders Why This Was His One Hit

September 25 is designated “National One Hit Wonder Day” so in honor of that we look at one of the best examples of that from the 1980s. Don’t worry, this day shows your dreams can come true – but maybe also become your nightmare! Bobby McFerrin was at #1 on Billboard this day in 1988 with “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.”

The bumper-sticker philosophy knocked Guns’N’Roses out of the top spot and also went to the top in Canada. Quite a shift in gears there – from one of the few heavy metal #1s to a wacky, acapella one driven by whistling! He got the idea from a philosophy espoused by Indian spiritualist Meher Baba, who counted Pete Townshend among his followers. “It’s pretty neat philosophy in four words,” McFerrin says. One which won McFerrin Grammys for Record of the Year, Song of the Year and Best Pop Performance by a Male. One would think this would be a wonderful thing, but McFerrin might have had regrets. He’s a pretty well-respected jazz pianist and singer, who’d won three-straight Best Jazz Vocal Performance Grammys before (by now he’s collected 10 Grammys in total) and had worked on records for the likes of Al Jarreau, Herbie Hancock and Chick Correa. But after this song, he has largely been written off as a novelty act – a rich one though, given the revenue from this gold single and its use in commercials and the Cocktail movie.

It wasn’t that movie’s only cheery contribution to the top of the charts. A few weeks later the Beach Boys had a remarkable comeback with their first #1 since the ’60s with “Kokomo” off the same soundtrack.

September 24 – Plant Moved Foward By Looking Back

Led Zeppelin have been at times considered the originators of Heavy Metal, but anyone with a perfunctory knowledge of their output realizes they put out a diverse range of sounds spanning various rock/pop genres over the ’70s. Much of that might have come from singer Robert Plant’s interests. Nonetheless, once Zeppelin was done, Plant seemed eager to differentiate himself and explore even more territory (as continues on to date as his projects with Alison Krauss show, for example). After a couple of solo albums, he got together a side-project who looked back to the pre-Zep days. The Honeydrippers were the result and they put out their only record, Volume 1, on this day in 1984.

Their origins date back to ’81, when he would sometimes perform under the name – which they took from early Bluesman Roosevelt Sykes’ nickname – and play old retro early rock or blues numbers. Atlantic Records boss, and Plant’s friend, Ahmet Ertegun liked the idea and had played around with the idea of having an album of old ’50s songs he liked done by a new band. So he recruited Plant, who in turn brought in some high-profile talent, most notably including ex-bandmate Jimmy Page, as well as Jeff Beck on guitars. Rounding out the lineup were Paul Shaffer on keyboards (who at the time played with the Blues Brothers when they were active) , Stray Cat Brian Setzer on an uncredited guitar appearance, drummer Dave Weckl, bassist Wayne Pedzwater (who’d soon go on to work frequently with Michael Jackson) and Nile Rodgers who added yet some more guitars and co-produced the record with Ertegun himself. Like our reader Mike Ledano pointed out it was “as close to a Page/Plant reunion as we were likely to get in the ’80s but this is very different from Led Zeppelin.”

The result was an 18-minute, five song EP (which eventually came out on a CD with a live bonus track) consisting of Rudy Toombs “I Get A Thrill” (Toombs was an old Vaudevillian who became a staff songwriter for Ertegun in the ’60s), Ray Charles “I Got A Woman”, “Young Boy Blues” , a song co-written by Phil Spector and the two singles – “Rockin’ At Midnight” and “Sea of Love.” The former was said to be Plant’s favorite of the lot, a cover of a 1947 song. The latter, the lush, “Sea of Love”, a 1959 song by Phil Phillips, became the breakout hit.

Allmusic rated it 4-stars, noting “Plant always harbored a deep abiding love of early rock & roll” and suggesting while “it may not be much more than a lark but it’s truly fun.”

The surprised public figured so too. “Rockin’ at Midnight “ hit the top 20 while “Sea of Love” got to #3,and #1 in Canada, where the EP went triple-platinum in about four months. Overall the record got to #5 in the U.S. but did little overseas.

The Honeydrippers toured in ’85, joined by the Uptown Horns , but plans for a full-length followup album never materialized.

September 23 – Billy’s Experiment In Nylon

The two of them might not love it, but many of us seem to lump today’s birthday boy, Bruce Springsteen (wishing him a happy 73 today!)  and Billy Joel together in the same sort of musical box. Here we like both so it doesn’t seem to be much of an insult to me, but I digress. Anyway, both singer/songwriters came to prominence in the mid-’70s, emerged from the greater New York area and were quintessential blue collar musical heroes, singing about the ordinary people they knew and respected. And by 1982 we thought we had them both pegged when they both took a hard left turn and came out with surprisingly downbeat and different-sounding records. On this day, Joel released his eighth studio album, The Nylon Curtain. A week later, Springsteen gave us his acoustic Nebraska.

Anyway, Joel’s The Nylon Curtain was something of a polarizing album. After delivering his most rock & roll-oriented, fun-loving Glass Houses in 1980, this one was a deeper but more challenging release. The short story – critics loved it, fans more or less panned it. But there’s more to it than that.

Joel was looking around America and wasn’t optimistic about what he was seeing. It was, after all, an era of inflation, unemployment, a growing chasm between the Wall Street rich and the ordinary workers in the companies they owned, fear about the Cold War… “It was during the Reagan years and… all of a sudden, you weren’t going to be able to inherit the (lifestyle) your old man had,” Joel remembers. Curiously, he was also listening to mid-era Beatles a lot at the time. Thus The Nylon Curtain came to be, an album Rolling Stone considered his most ambitious.

The album is a loosely thematic look at the U.S. in decline through the eyes of a blue collar Baby Boomer. Although the first single was the jarring “Pressure” and it contained a few missteps, like the “venomous” (in the words of Rolling Stone again) “Laura” about a guy who hates his girlfriend but realizes “living alone isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be” either, and perhaps the experimental “Scandinavian Skies” which he says was directly influenced by the sound of Beatles singles like “I Am the Walrus”, it contains some very good material and two of his best – and most under-rated – tunes: “Allentown” and “Goodnight Saigon”.

The former was actually inspired by a trip he paid tt Bethlehem, PA but that name didn’t fit the song structure as well. Regardless, it described any number of “Rust Belt” cities and the unfortunate workers caught in the changing times and closing factories. Rolling Stone applauded the “tune, language and singing are all brazenly direct” and felt it “could be a scene from The Deer Hunter set to music.” The mayor of Allentown, PA was impressed enough to give Joel the keys to the city next time he played there.

“Goodnight Saigon” is a haunting, 7-minute epic complete with helicopter and cricket sounds (the Beatles experimentation rubbing off) that Rolling Stone called “the ultimate pop music epitaph to the Vietnam war”… “a stunner”. The piece about the band of brothers trained on Parris Island shipped out to the horrors of the Asian war with only their Doors tapes and Playboy who’d “All go down together” indeed is one of the most compelling musical takes on the reality of war and one of Billy’s best achievements.

People magazine approved, saying “Joel jackknifes (sic) into adulthood (with) a striking cycle of nine songs about the current plight of boomed babies” which are “vintage Joel with clever hooks.”

For all that, the public wasn’t nearly as enthusiastic. While by no means a flop, it was his least-successful release since 1976, selling less than even 1981’s compilation of live tunes and outtakes, Songs in the Attic. At home in the U.S. it charted to #7 and went double platinum; it topped out at #12 in Canada and only #27 across the sea in the UK. Somehow though, it did hit #1 in the Netherlands. The singles “Pressure” and “Allentown” both it the top 20 in the States, his 10th and 11th such hits, and “Allentown” although it never got higher than #17 on the weekly charts, had such enduring popularity that it was among the 50 biggest records of the year. “Goodnight Saigon” was released as a third single, but being 7 minutes, lacking a normal kind of verse/chorus structure and being about the horrors of war, was a tough sell in a time of happy synthesizers, safety dances and Duran Duran playing with bikini-clad models on yachts.

For it all, Joel says the album is “the recording I’m most proud of.” And he rebounded very nicely the next year with his more upbeat An Innocent Man which catapulted him back to the top. (Springsteen’s fate with his Nebraska similar and he too bounced back with the multi-million selling Born in the USA less than two years down the road.)

September 20 – Knopfler’s Passion Over Profits Paid Off

Dire Straits chose Love Over Gold for their fourth album, out this day 40 years ago. We’re not sure precisely why it was called that, but it might well have suggested a desire to put out songs and music they loved at the risk of not making much money. It was the first album of theirs to be entirely produced by Mark Knopfler and he took some commercial risks in creating this solid work.

Love Over Gold contained only five songs- the shortest of which was the North American single, “Industrial Disease”, which is nearly 6 minutes long. The epic “Telegraph Road” (about the rise and fall of Detroit) runs some 14 minutes! The other single, “Private Investigations”, which hit #2 in the UK was inspired by the detective novels of Raymond Chandler. Hardly radio-friendly but the music found its fans. It was their first #1 at home in the UK, also a #1 in Australia and a top 10 in Canada. It managed to spend an incredible four years (give or take a week or two) on the British charts and go double-platinum there as well as Canada. Even in the U.S. it scratched into the top 20 despite not registering any hit songs. All in all, it gave them a good base to build upon later with Brothers in Arms.

Most critics liked it. Rolling Stone rated it 4-star, calling it a “quantum leap from the band’s early LPs” but suggesting Knopfler exhibited “almost suicidal defiance of commercial good sense” releasing a work of such dense and lengthy songs, which they termed “radically expanded epics and evocative tone poems that demand the listener’s undivided attention” . Allmusic also gave it 4-stars, admiring their attempt to “expands (their) sounds and ambitions” and complimenting Knopfler’s guitar-work, but finding a few of the songs guilty of being overly-lengthy and “languid.” There nearly was a sixth song on it, one you probably know. Knopfler had written and recorded a demo for “Private Dancer” but pulled it at last minute, figuring it better-suited to a female singer. A few years later, Tina Turner would agree!

By the way, if you were wondering about the “brewer’s droop” mentioned in the cheeky single “Industrial Disease”, it’s a little double-entendre from the singer. It refers to a nickname for ED caused by heavy drinking – and was the name of his previous band.

September 16 – World Found There Was Something About Level 42

In the novel A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, “42” was the answer to the meaning of life. That was the reason for the number in the band name Level 42, originally a jazz band started in Manchester back in 1980, led by Mark King. King had left a job selling bass guitars to play bass guitar barely out of high school. “I do remember thinking that guys over 40 should have the good grace to step aside,” he recalled not too long ago. “Now that I’m (older) I consider those thoughts hurtful not to mention childish.”

Indeed, people still like to hear Level 42, nearly four decades in. That in no small part due to World Machine, the great fifth album by the quartet which was released this day in 1985. In Britain at least, American listeners would have to wait six weeks more, which at the time wouldn’t have bothered them since they were more or less unknown here. this album would change that in a big way.

They were signed to Polydor, and while they’d had middling success at home on album charts and with a couple of dance hits, they had fallen short of the success their talent suggested they could have. For this record, Moving the Record suggest “Polydor wanted a more concerted assault on the singles charts and a more current sound” than the jazzy, often instrumental work they had been known for. Mark King stepped up and delivered. That site considered World Machine the “most cohesive, streamlined collection of songs in their catalog.” Fans would largely agree.

The record by the quartet of super-bassist and singer King, the brothers Boon (drummer Phil and guitarist Boon) and keyboard wiz Mike Lindup. Producer Wally Badarou was essentially a fifth member, co-writing six of the songs, including all the singles off it as well as adding backing vocals and more keyboards to the expertly crafted record.

There were a number of great songs on the record, including the slow, melodically-hurting love song “Leaving Me Now”, the funky title track and “Physical Presence” but for most, there was really something about “Something About You.” The great single put Level 42 on the map, so to speak, hitting #6 at home, and #7 in the U.S. (their biggest hit there) and , according to allmusic a song which “proves how good a song can sound coming from the radio.” Allmusic graded the record 4-stars, noting “Leaving Me Now” “should’ve been a hit” and was a typical of an album that “has more than its share of fine tunes.”

Indeed it did. The album spent almost a year-and-a-half on the UK charts, peaking at #3 while going double platinum, while it was also a top 20 in the U.S., Canada and New Zealand. They followed it up with an album also full of bright singles which had nearly the same success, Running in the Family. However, there was a price to be paid for it. The decidedly “pop” sound irritated the Boon brothers who wanted a more straight forward jazz outfit, and Phil quit shortly afterwards.

The band continues to this day with King, Lindup and Badarou. Boon Gould, unfortunately, passed away in 2019.

September 15 – ‘Express’ Fast-tracked L&R For Success

It was “the first time we were really exposed to music, when we were at the age where we could really appreciate it,” David J says of 1986, “and we were like little sponges …Bowie, T-Rex, the glam thing (also) Roxy Music and the electronic artists like Kraftwerk and before that, Can.” Thus Love & Rockets second album, Express which came out this day that year came to be a rich, different-sounding kind of album that drew from a fair number of inspirations. Seemingly the band’s earlier version, Bauhaus (the members of Love & Rockets were three-quarters of that band, with only singer Peter Murphy missing) was one of the least important ones. Gone was the brooding-in-black Goth; in was wild psychedelic pop they’d hinted at with their debut, Seventh Dream of Teenage Heaven the previous year.,

Drummer Kevin Haskins held the fort behind the kit and added some synths here and there, but the band was essentially a partnership between Kev’s brother, David J, and Daniel Ash with both having times at the mic; David playing bass and Daniel guitars and saxophone to boot. Ash wrote the majority of it but the bassist contributed two of the eight tunes on the original LP. Those who were ahead of the curve technology-wise got a bonus – the CD had three more tracks, including a brand new one (“Angels and Devils”) , a remix and their previous single, a cover of the Temptations “Ball of Confusion.” That one had been a hit on American college radio and was on some editions of Seventh Dream... but had been omitted from some due to length constrictions.

That one notwithstanding, the new songs were the album’s real draw, particularly the trio of singles – “Kundalini Express”, which got used in Miami Vice, “All in My Mind”, their first to hit U.S. mainstream rock charts, and the enigmatic and energetic “Yin and Yang (and the Flowerpot Men.)” Despite its bizarre title, its inspiration was apparently quite straight-forward…if you were British. There was a popular kids TV show called The Flowerpot Men.

Most publications seemed to miss Express when it arrived, but remarkably metal-loving Kerrang gave it a listen and then rated it 4-stars. Later on allmusic outdid that, giving it 4.5-stars. They offered that producer “John A. Rivers outdid himself with the sound in this disc” and praised its “rich in sonic detail” approach, “guitars spiral to dizzying heights from beds of sound, arrangements swirl, songs change and mutate.” Diffuser FM seconded that idea, noting it was “tighter and more focused” than their debut and “more diverse…than Bauhaus…mixing psychedelic pop and vintage glam.”

As good as those reviews were, it was a case of those who liked it, liked it a lot…but most ignored it. It did well on North American college radio and on the alt rock superstations, finishing at #45 on L.A.’s KROQ year-end countdown and in the top 10 to the north on Toronto’s CFNY. However, they’d have to wait about three more years to find widespread popularity and gold and platinum success, with their self-titled album and the song “So Alive.”

 

September 14 – Trio Found The ABC’s For A Hit Record

And then there were three, by three! Genesis released their 11th studio album this day in 1981, the third with the band consisting of only the core trio of Tony Banks, Phil Collins & Mike Rutherford. Abacab came out only months after Phil Collins first solo album (Face Value) and to many sounded rather like a follow-up to that instead of a follow-up to Duke and prior Genesis recordings. (Perhaps that was in part due to Hugh Padgham’s presence on both, although on this one he only assisted the band self-producing the record.)

Few complained though. It hit #1 at home in the UK , where it was their second chart-topper, and scored them their first top 10, multi-platinum release in the U.S. The abstract title track and “No Reply At All” were both hits on both sides of the ocean, the latter being noteworthy for the prominent, lively horns borrowed from Earth, Wind & Fire. With “Man on the Corner”, it gave them three American top 40 hits, after having only a pair in total before. It could perhaps have had four; they also recorded the song “Paper Late” at the time, and while it wasn’t in the finished product, they did put it on their ’83 album Three Sides Live and released it as a single then.

If Abacab sounded a bit different for Genesis, it was no fluke. They self-produced the record, and made it at an old farmhouse they’d bought and converted into a studio. Tony Banks says they made a conscious decision to sound different than before and to keep the melodies simpler. Also a little different, six of the nine tracks were written collectively, but each member got to pen one song by themselves. For Tony Banks it was the pastoral “Me and Sarah Jane,” Mike Rutherford came up with “Like it or Not” while no one could miss Collins’ mark on “Man on the Corner”, which he wrote. Rolling Stone liked what it heard, comparing them to XTC and the Police and noting it “Contrasts sharply with the forbidding ivory-tower artistry of the past.” Even Melody Maker, which found the record “inconsistent” and stamped with a “heavy Phil Collins twist” described it as the band’s “most exciting ” work in years.

The odd title by the way is derived from the making of the title track. Mike Rutherford says they were jamming together and decided to mix up three separate parts of a song in the works. They dubbed them “Section A”, “Section B” and “Section C.” At one point in the studio, the record had parts played A-B-A-C-A-B. Hence the name. He noted though that after the final play through and mix, it ended up more like “Accaabaac.” Which would have been harder to say.

September 11 – Daniels Defiant Anthem For The Day

There’s no real need to remind people, Americans especially, what this day is the anniversary of. One of the very few slivers of a silver lining that might have come from 9/11 though was that for a little time it certainly seemed to unite Americans, regardless of color or political affiliation. Curiously, a song all about that was in its 11^th and final week on the top 40 this day 21 years earlier, in 1980. With its lyrical theme, perhaps then there’s little surprise that “In America” by the Charlie Daniels Band had a renewed popularity after the 2001 attacks. Daniels even put out a new video for the song at the time. The defiant, in-yer-face approach and lines like “we’ll all stick together, and you can take that to the bank – that’s the cowboys and the hippies, the rebels and the Yanks” suddenly seemed relevant. Necessary even.

Daniels was by then a big-time country star, albeit one who flew a ways from the mainstream of country, building his music around his bluegrass fiddle skills and Southern redneck themes. He’d had a surprise, major crossover into mainstream pop/rock territory a couple of years earlier with his rollicking “Devil Went Down To Georgia.” “In America”, from his 11^th album, Full Moon, likewise crossed over to conventional hit radio, eventually reaching #8 and pushing the album to platinum status.

That might not have been entirely unpredictable. Even though the six-man band came across as backwoods hicks, they had real musical talent…and backing. The album was produced by John Boylan. Boylan was not only a vice president of Epic Records, he’d worked with Linda Ronstadt and Little River Band before and co-produced Boston’s multi-million selling debut. So he knew a thing or two about making a record the masses to hear!

Daniels said he wrote the song as a sort of antidote to the country’s malaise of the time. Iran had American hostages, people were still shaken by Watergate, and unemployment and inflation were both high. Morale was low. Daniels felt “the strength of America isn’t in Washington DC, it’s in our people. It’s in our farms, in the factories, it’s the people out here that make the country work.” He picked the Pittsburgh Steelers fans as a lyrical example in the song because , even though he was from North Carolina, he figured Pittsburgh people were “the salt of the Earth. The finest, just the greatest people on Earth.” He particularly enjoyed going to watch the Steelers play in their hometown.

Daniels passed away at 83 in 2020. And whether we like his redneck stance or not, the idea “you never did think that we’d ever get together again, but we damn sure could” seems all the more relevant than ever in 2022. We can only hope it won’t take another 9/11 to get people to realize it.

September 10 – Sweet Love Letter Rose To Top For GNR

The ’80s may be largely remembered for the new wave movement but the “hair metal” phenomenon was also a large, although more dubious, sound that characterized it. For all the Cinderellas, Poisons or Ratts that MTV could throw at us, none did it better than Guns N’ Roses. Perhaps that’s because they seemed the most sincere in their hard-rock posturings, less interested in the coifs and makeup than in the loud, authentic rock music they made. Anyway, GNR had a big day this day in 1988, hitting #1 on Billboard‘s singles chart with “Sweet Child O’ Mine”, making it their only chart-topper.

It certainly stood out in a year when Tiffany and Debbie Gibson each had #1 hits and Michael Jackson scored three! Singer Axl Rose wrote the lyrics for his girlfriend, soon-to-be-wife (and also soon-to-be-ex-wife) Erin Everly – daughter of Everly Brother Don. The song, along with “Paradise City” and “Welcome to the Jungle” helped their debut Apetite For Destruction album hit #1 in the U.S., sell 18X platinum (and go diamond status in Canada as well) and replace Boston as the biggest-selling debut ever. To date, the album’s sold over 31 million copies worldwide, about as much as their two next-biggest albums combined.

Although top-hatted Slash thought the song a little too simplistic, the fans disagreed. Not only being the #5 single of the year on Billboard, it’s one of the few videos from that decade to have been watched over a billion times through YouTube. It’s also ranked among Rolling Stone‘s 200 Greatest songs of all time. They describe it as “southern rock cosplay” noting that Axl “went out and got some old Lynyrd Skynyrd tapes (to listen to) to make sure we’d got that down-home heartfelt feeling.”  Apparently a little love, a little Sunset Strip flash and a little backwoods Southern flavoring can be mixed up into a winning formula.

September 8 – Human League Got ‘Jam’med Into Making A Hit

Electronic new wave was on the wane in the second half of the ’80s (despite stronger than ever response to New Order and the Pet Shop Boys), so what’s a group to do that built their fortune on that sound? Well, in the case of the Human League, it was take a look at the charts and see what was happening across the ocean and think about how to adapt. The result was their fifth album, Crash, which came out this day in 1986.

In the States, a new brand of highly-produced R&B-crossed-with-pop was taking off, noticeably with Janet Jackson who was quickly beginning to be seen as the Queen of Pop, just as her brother was the “King of Pop.” Meanwhile, despite already having ten top 20 hits in their native Britain, the band was finding itself already being labeled as something of a One Hit Wonder. Jackson had just put out her Control album, which was produced by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. So with a little nudging (and undoubtedly backed with a lot of money) from Virgin Records, the Human League went off to Minnesota to record with that duo. Phil Oakey had always been the leader of the band, the primary writer, only male voice and captain of the ship. He quickly found that if you were in Jam & Lewis’ territory, they wanted to have…well, “control.” They tossed out some of his songs (Oakey ended up with credits on six of ten songs), came up with some of their own, then quickly grew tired of what they saw as some laziness and more lack of talent with a couple of the keyboardists, Philip Wright and Ian Burden. They were essentially told to step aside, while the producers brought in extra session players. Both would soon quit the group. Adding to tensions, at least according to Jimmy Jam, was that Oakey and singer Joanne Catherall were a couple and Catherall was getting jealous of the other female in the group, Susan Sulley. Eventually tensions grew so high, the group packed up and flew back home, leaving the producers with the tapes and the task of completing it. “We like to be in control in the studio,” Oakey admitted, “it just got to the point of who had the power and in that instant, they were the men behind the mixing console so they had the ultimate control.” He added it was “interesting to pick yourself out of the industrial north of England and dump yourself in Minneapolis. Great experience, but it just wasn’t our record!”

Even the less-than-memorable cover ended up borne out of frustration. They’d hired a well-known French fashion photographer for it. “I daren’t tell you how much money was spent,” Oakey says, but they found him to be acting inappropriately. When Sulley refused his request to do a handstand while wearing a miniskirt for him, he stormed off, leaving them to find a last-minute replacement picture to use.

For all that, it was a decent, if different album. Oakey says “it’s a disco album with lots of cymbals,” but the R&B stylings of the Minnesota duo are also clear. As allmusic would note, they “maintained their dance appeal while eschewing the overtly synthesized sounds of previous albums.” Canada’s Windsor Star called it “an infectious collection of love songs…listenable right the way through.” Smash Hits gave it 7.5 out of 10, Rolling Stone 3.5-stars. The one thing most agreed on was that the lead-off single, “Human”, one of the Jam and Lewis tracks, was a good one. Billboard picked it as hit-to-be, calling it “lush, plush, even soulful.”

Indeed, that song -even if it is in the words of Spin “schmaltzy” and “an unbearably weak defense of infidelity” was a worldwide hit, becoming their second #1 song in both the U.S. and Canada (becoming their third single to go gold in the latter) and hitting the top 10 in most other English-speaking markets including the UK and even Germany as well. However, subsequent singles , the almost Janet Jackson-like  “I Need Your Loving” and “Are You Ever Coming Back?” failed to find much of an audience and even another Jam & Lewis track that won critical praise – “Love is All that Matters” – failed to click commercially. Overall the album did go to #7 in Britain and earn them their fifth gold album there; elsewhere it fared not quite so well – #32 in Australia, #25 in Canada and #35 in the U.S., for example.

The Human League would wait four years before recording another album…and when they did, stayed in the north of England to do so.