Human after all
Ian Burden, The Human League‘s former keyboard player and occasional bassist, has landed back on planet pop with a new single, Let The Devil Drown.
The track, released last month, is a precursor to his new album, Hey Hey Ho Hum in April. Burden has kept a low musical profile since quitting The Human League in 1997, but he did appear on Parralox’s State Of Decay album in 2009. It was discovering old equipment that got him back into the synth-pop game again. “A collection of vintage synthesisers were shamefully gathering dust in an attic, and deserved a better fate”, he says. “Some of them had done service with The Human League and other projects, and might be of use to somebody. Their condition needed investigation to see if they were in working order. Being modular units they required connection to a keyboard, which then led to routing through computer software, which in turn gave rise to riffs and rhythms. Chords and singing easily fell alongside, so I started recording.”