Check out this early manifestation of the Human League, showing how their sound (so different on record) came out of the mid-70s proto-Industrial sound of Cabaret Voltaire, Throbbing Gristle and later Krautrock as much as out of the cleaner electronica of Kraftwerk.
Martyn Ware still had a moustache and wore a shiny glam-shirt! They didn't have sequencers yet and playing one-handed synth-lines in time with a taped rhythm-track could be tricky! Phil Oakey looks a bit like Javier Bardem's psychotic killer in No Country for Old Men and furrows his brow singing one of the least sensical lyrics ever penned- Buddha protesting against the death of silkworms ("blameless victims") to make silk?
Granada TV's photo-inserts are also baffling - is the old lady whose face looms up an arch-sericulturalist or merely Oakey's nan? Is the mushroom-cloud image a suggestion that the "slaughter" of silkworms is an atrocity on a level with the bombing of Hiroshima or that nuclear destruction is what any nation that approves sericulture deserves?
But somehow a brilliant track even so.
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