THE PROFESSIONAL BIOGRAPHY OF SUSAN ANN SULLEY
1981: THE BUILD UP TO 'DARE'
 
Joanne and Susanne - 1981

FEBRUARY TO SEPTEMBER 1981 - THE EARLY SINGLES

Whilst Susan was still busy with school, Oakey and Wright recorded and released the single 'Boys and Girls'. Despite the obvious inference of the title and a bit of hype from 'the Crazy Daisy story' being repeated in the press; the girls were not used and their contribution consisted mainly of looking pretty for the cameras on publicity material and the record sleeve.

 
The Human League - February 1981
Philip, Adrian, Susan, Joanne

NME summarised it well in their review:  "and, er, minimal contribution by 'Those Girls' (ie none)…"  Behind the scenes Oakey, prompted by Virgin was bringing in more musical and production talent. Susan and Joanne fitted in recording their vocal contributions for the various demos and concepts when ever they could escape from school.

Virgin picked up on one such demo and the band's next single "Sound of the Crowd" was released in April 1981. Produced by Martin Rushent it would prove to be the bands keystone sound of sequenced synthesisers, Oakey's baritone lead and for the first time since 1978 (on  "I Don't Depend on You'" with Lisa Strike and Katie Kissoon) contrasting female interaction of  Susan and Joanne's full backing vocals. Released just after Susan's 18th birthday, the single became the band's first UK top 20 hit.

The instant success of the single took the band by surprise, and as the chart positions were announced the Human League were invited to perform on UK BBC TV's ‘Top of the Pops’ show.

The invitation to appear was at such short notice that Oakey had to round up the band  members in a matter of hours for the drive down to the London TV studios. Susan's mother was dispatched to Frecheville Comprehensive School to rescue her and Joanne mid lessons. Within days Susan would be seen performing on TV to the entire UK.  It would be the first of her many appearances on camera over the next quarter of a century. The girls personal dress and makeup style was unique and typically eclectic. Since they had absolutely no time to style themselves for TV it was probably very close to how they would looked on a night out in Sheffield just six months previously.  In contrast to the product placed, professionally styled performers of  today, Susan would claim that for that first TV appearance she wore clothes previously bought from a charity (second hand) shop and Joanne wore some of Susan's mother's cast offs.

An indication of how little regard the girls were held in by the media establishment at the time was demonstrated when for a later appearance on Top of the Pops it was suggested by the BBC, (prompted it has to be said by band manager Bob Last), that Susan and Joanne should be replaced by session singers.

The Girls were really hurt by the suggestion. Oakey apparently flew into a rage and refused to appear without the girls, the BBC (and Last)  immediately backed down. It was an attitude that Susan says she regularly encountered in those early years by music industry people who questioned the relevance of the girls in the band.

Although part of an outwardly successful pop group, everyone was still short of money and further success was by no means guaranteed.

 
BBC 'Top of the Pops' - 30th April 1981

Therefore Susan's main effort remained studying for her final exams and she had been provisionally accepted at a university to take a Business Studies degree.(something she now says "would have been awful").  With Joanne, she was still fitting in recording sessions when ever she could around school.

A matter of established policy between Susan and Joanne is that they have deliberately never concerned themselves with song writing or composition. The girls will now state this as the principal reason they are still with the band, as all the major  disagreements and splits within the band's history have been due to arguments over creative differences. While it is certainly true later in the band's career, in the early years it was probably due to them being busy with their studies, therefore simply unavailable and not included. While this decision has been vindicated by their longevity in the band, it has cost them considerable financial loss in royalty income, not to mention wasted talent.

The next single released by Virgin from the various recording sessions would prove to be a life choice turning point for Susan. Released just after she had taken her final exams, the single entitled "Love Action (I Believe In Love)"  peaked at Number 3 in the UK charts. After more appearances on Top Of the Pops, with more material to come and an album release on the horizon. It now looked like The Human League was going to really take off. Susan and Joanne jointly decided with parental approval to shelve their plans to attend university and dedicate all their time to the band to see how things turned out. It was a temporary postponement of their University plans and not "dropping out of school" as it has sometimes been incorrectly characterised.

Work in the band now revolved around finalising the first album for the new Human League, involving many tortuous hours recording, rerecording and remixing tracks at Martin Rushent's Genetic sound studio in Reading. By the end of September 1981 the album was finished and provisionally titled ‘Dare’.

By now the printed media was beginning to pick up on the girls' style and striking looks, with the girls participating in various photo shoots. As the obvious glamour aspect to the band, constant photo shoots would soon become Susan and Joanne’s stock in trade for the best part of the next decade. Initially they were photographed only for teenage and music magazines but within a year Susan would find herself all over the UK/US ‘glossies’ including Vogue and The Face, as well as every national newspaper. By early 1982 the girls unique style combined with the media spotlight would turn two pretty, but arguably ordinary young women from Sheffield into national sex symbols and style icons.  Joanne and Susan would quickly prove to be one of the Human League's unique selling points, something often underestimated when analysing the League's commercial success. The attraction was easy to work out,  guys simply fancied them and teenage girls everywhere wanted to be them, look & dress like them and to be whisked to stardom from a nightclub dance floor.

By mid 1981 Susan had adopted the name Susanne full time, a familiar amalgamation of her two first names and a name she had been known occasionally as at school. She would eventually return to Susan in 1986. 

 
Susanne -  late 1981

Some photography of Susan would two decades later be declared  as capturing the "Zeitgeist of the early 1980s."  By 2000 the "weren't the 1980s dreadful" attitude  would cease and 80s nostalgia would take its place. Something  the band had picked up on years before and expressed on the track "These Are The Days" in the mid 1990s. Even high brow magazines would start to look back on the decade with fondness.  A photograph of Susan's distinctive, exquisite eye makeup and hair from 1981 (with an admittedly slightly revealing strappy top) would be deemed as capturing the sprit of the early 1980s in the way photographs of Edie Sedgwick had captured the sprit of the late 1960s. A rarely known but highly prestigious accolade is that photographs of Susan, taken with Joanne and Philip in 1981 by Jill Furmanovsky are part of Britain's National Portrait Gallery collection for the same reason.

An indication of the high male esteem a young Susan was held in would be revealed later when she made a throwaway remark during an interview for UK national tabloid newspaper The Sun. 

During the interview, because as Joanne was known to be dating Oakey,  when asked Susan declared that she was single and because of her fame had problems finding a boyfriend. When the newspaper ran the story they jokingly suggested that anyone wishing to date Susan should write in. They were overwhelmed by several sack loads of mail. Understandably Susan didn't take up any of the offers!

 

OCTOBER 1981- THE RELEASE OF DARE 

In October immediately prior to the album release Virgin issued an advance single entitled "Open Your Heart". For this single the band again appeared on Top of the Pops, now complete with a ‘proto’ music video recorded relatively cheaply on videotape with analogue vision mixing and effects. Exciting for the time but now desperately dated, it  featured close ups of all band members interspersed with Oakey singing to camera. A now blonde Susan (she had been a brunette up to this point) enjoying some lingering solo shots. Generally, as with all pop bands everyone was only interested in the lead singer and people had quickly learned the name Philip Oakey, ignoring the musicians and backing girls.

 
Dare poster - October 1981

At this point the two eye-catching girls were simply known by the public, particularly in male workplaces and school yards, unimaginatively as 'The blonde one' and 'The dark haired one'. Nicknames still used affectionately today  in lieu of their names when differentiating between the pair.

The album 'Dare' was released in October 1981 (Exactly one year after the fateful night in the Crazy Daisy). With little need for promotion within a few weeks it was the Number One album in the UK. The Cover artwork was a pastiche of a Vogue cover (the album itself was named after a Vogue edition) with a gatefold of stylised photos of the band.

Explaining  the concept of the cover artwork and why she had her normally luxurious blonde hair scraped back for her photo. Susan states that the band wanted people to still be buying the album in 5 years time and as hairstyles are the first thing to date, they wanted a generic style that wouldn't put people off  five years down the line!

She says now: “We had no concept at that time people might still be buying it 25 years later”. 

It has now been called one the most influential albums ever, and its influences can be felt in many aspects of pop music today. Dare hitting the No1 position was expected to be the highlight of an extremely successful year for the band, but Virgin were not yet satisfied. Virgin executive Simon Draper believed they could lift a fourth single from the album before the end of 1981. It was to set in motion a dramatic chain of events:

DECEMBER 1981 - "DON'T YOU WANT ME"

"Joanne and I really came into the band for the glamour aspect and the back-up vocals. Lead vocals were never ever thought of. They were a distant possibility, something that might happen in a couple of years on the fourth or fifth album. But the song’s story required a girl’s voice. I was really shocked!" - Susan Sulley (speaking in 1982)

For the album, Oakey had written and recorded a conflicting duet track with Susan entitled "Don’t You Want Me". The lyrics of which are now universally famous for Susan’s line: "I was working as a waitress in a cocktail bar….that much is true”

 
Poster for "Don't You Want Me"
November 1981

It was a bitter little song about jealousy, obsession and relationship break down. Because of Jo Callis and Martin Rushent's 'poppy' remix it would be misinterpreted by the pubic as a love song. And because of its poppy style, It was Oakey’s least favourite track on the album which had been relegated the last track on the B side of the (vinyl) album. It simply didn’t fit with the style of the other tracks. Importantly it was also very different to the other tracks in that, now instead of just backing vocals one of the girls had a joint lead vocal role with Oakey.

When she was initially asked to sing joint lead on a song Susan was astounded, but rose immediately to the challenge.

Oakey didn’t want a fourth single to be released and certainly not "Don’t You Want Me" which he believed to be substandard and filler material. He believed that the band were now over exposed and another single which might flop would ruin the band's new found success. He was overruled by Virgin and the single was scheduled for release in December 1981.

The release of the album also coincided with the real start of music video and the recent launch of (then) cable station MTV in the US. Virgin realised that the video for "Open Your Heart" shown on Top of the Pops had increased record sales and exposure for the single, this combined with the 'snowballing' success of Dare emboldened them to commission a (then) very expensive and elaborate promotional music video. It was to be shot traditionally on 35mm film and not video tape, and was to be directed by a professional film maker Steve Barron.

A level of production unheard of at the time in music promos.

Loosely based on the theme of the 1976 film A Star Is Born;  In the video Susan plays a successful actress walking out on her bitter Svengali film director lover (played by Oakey) who bitterly laments her success and departure. Set on the scene of a "Murder mystery film shoot" it was filmed on a on a cold wet November's winter night in Slough, UK. Now strikingly blonde Susan is best remembered for the scene where she sings directly to the camera whilst walking through the atmospheric night mist, away from the brightly lit set into the darkness, immaculately made up wearing a distinctive trench coat. At the time for a music promo the cinematography was simply stunning.

It is now also the media by which most people remember first seeing Susan; and in that video she provided one of the most iconic media images of the early 1980s. An image which endures, is regularly reproduced and referred back to; to this day. The video was one of the first ever commercial music videos and is now justifiably called a modern classic.

Susan (in 2000) remarked on the completely unexpected dramatic impact of the video: “It was a film; a little three and a half minute film. People hadn’t seen that before and they really liked it”. It would also be remarkable that given her young age and total lack of acting experience that she would be likened to a professional actress in newspaper comment about the video.

The single, which was released in December 1981, aided by the powerful  now classic video was to prove an immediate and enormous commercial success for the group. Going to Number One in the charts in the UK and staying there for several weeks including over Christmas / New Year 1981.

 
Susan in the classic video for
"Dont You Want Me" - December 1981

Susan totally (and often with justifiable irritation) refutes the suggestion, regularly repeated, that the song is in any way an analogy about Joanne and her joining the group. In fact it was based on a story Oakey had read in a 'trashy' magazine. Another ludicrous falsehood regularly perpetuated in the media (even today on the VH1 website) is that she was once actually a real cocktail waitress. Forgetting the basic fact that this would have been  illegal under UK alcohol laws for a 17 year old , the truth is she has only ever had part time ‘Saturday’ job in a Sheffield hairdressers. Susan regularly jokes that she has “never had a proper job in her life” and once annoyed by replying to such a question answered "People keep writing that me and Joanne were working as waitresses in a cocktail bar - we were NOT, we were schoolgirls studying for our A Levels."

By New Years Eve 1981 The Human League had a Number One single and Number One album concurrently in the UK charts; with the spellbinding video for "Don’t You Want Me" being played seemingly around the clock on TV.

In the final days of 1981, as the UK froze under the coldest winter for a century,  the band would be invited to perform "Don't You Want Me" on a  BBC Top Of The Pops  Christmas Special , where at the end of the song, Susan would be doused in ‘silly string’, glitter and streamers for her efforts. The party mood of that program seemed a fitting end to the year and a allegory of the band's phenomenal success to that point.. 

For a single that Oakey didn't want to be released, "Don’t You Want Me" would go on to be The Human League’s greatest ever hit and would become the 25th highest selling single of all time in the UK, so far selling nearly 2 million copies with another million sold in the US.  Such is the song’s enduring popularity; even 27 years later fans of all ages expect the band to play it whenever they perform live. A task Susan still genuinely loves doing. When asked whether she was fed up with it now, after all these years, she replied immediately  “I never get tired of talking about or singing that song” 

By the end of 1981 the band were now pop superstars, household names throughout the UK and the darlings of the media.

 It was sadly to be a zenith that would never be repeated....

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