Felix NEill

Quoted from the excellent Human League site Blind Youth, a complete guide to The Human League 1977-1980.

This album, credited to The Future + The Human League, compiles recordings the two groups made between 1977 and the moment The Human League signed to Virgin Records in 1979. The project began soon after producer and recording artist Richard X contacted this site in early 2001 after noticing it features the sleeve of his first Girls On Top single, Being Scrubbed, which mixes Being Boiled with TLC's No Scrubs. After he expressed an interest in releasing the early works of The Future and The Human League on his Black Melody label, I contacted Martyn and Philip to find out how they felt about the idea, and both seemed interested.

Richard and I then began gathering unreleased recordings from our collection of bootlegs, and following my visit to The Human League's Sheffield studio in October 2001, I was kindly given copies of further unreleased material by the League's long-standing engineer, David Beevers, including a copy of The Future Tapes, some of which had never been bootlegged.

As the project began to gather momentum, David volunteered to explore the many master tapes stored in the League's studio and found many more unreleased recordings, some of which had probably not been played since the 1970s. While David was busy restoring and cleaning up these tapes, many of which were in bad condition, Richard and I met with Martyn and Ian, who also looked through their collections for other recordings and photographs which could be used for the artwork.

After much deliberation, Richard arrived at the tracklisting above, though the album contains some additional snippets of material not listed above or on the sleeve.

Unfortunately, the sound quality is uneven throughout the album; this is due to the variable quality of the tapes available. Of the tracks listed on the sleeve, Philip's The Circus Of Dr Lao is probably the most lo-fi, as the only good quality recording of this track which could be located was missing Philip's vocals. The only available vocal version was actually taken from a bootleg cassette, and this appears on the album. Thankfully, the other recordings were taken, if not directly from the original master tapes, then from good quality DAT backups of those masters.

While many more unreleased recordings remain in the League's archives, this album does provide the listener with a good overall introduction to both The Future and the League's early recordings which led to their publishing and recording contracts with Virgin companies.