Like this one:

Of course, in the Heathen homeland, we didn’t have MTV in 1983; we had to watch Friday Night Videos, which was a weak sister at the time (oh! what we’d give for FNV reruns now!).

This video was one of the ones excitedly discussed in junior high cafeterias that year; Phil Oakey’s gender-bending presentation combined with the baritone was pretty transgressive and weird, and then there were those girls. Their names, like Oakey’s, we didn’t know until today: Susan Ann Gayle and Joanne Catherall, both of whom were apparently underage when they joined the band in 1980. The zoom-in-the-map trick at the head end reminds us now of Google, but back then it was pretty jarring and cool (note how the sidestep some of the special effects — the boy and the ball take on the pinkish red hue when they’re inside the circle, but you never actually see the transition).

In retrospect, we figure the Human League was one of the first examples of what we now know as 80s synth pop that we heard down in Mississippi. (Captain Telescope may have other ideas, which we encourage him to share; certainly we’d probably heard Flock of Seagulls by then, and Devo, but they’re all of a piece.) The whole look is there in the video: very 80s clothing, hair, makeup, and sounds, all of which served to remind us that well, we lived in a backwater, since there was essentially zero local music there at the time. (Not counting these guys, since they came later.)

The earlier iconic Human League video is also on YouTube, of course. Amusingly, collateral Googling for this post revealed that the band is actually still active and touring, 30 years on. Neat.