The Human League's 1981 album Dare really was one of the things that dreams are made of, begetting a canon of perfect synth pop that would provide a backdrop for the lives of a generation. On the way to the Electric Picnic in Laois for a bit more love action, lead singer Phil Oakey tells Brian Boyd how the league are going to rock you again and again and again

BACK in 2003, the UK public declared that of all television advertisements for small cars, their favourite was easily the one for the Fiat Punto. What do you mean you don't remember it? It was the one with the young couple having an argument in the forecourt of a petrol station. The one where said couple had comically strong Birmingham accents.

Phil Oakey remembers it well: "We're always getting requests for our songs to be used in ads and this time they came to us and said Ford wanted to do a jokey advert about Don't You Want Me. We told them, as usual, to get stuffed. Then they came back to us and said: 'We've had a look at the contract and we can do it against your wishes. We're only telling you this out of politeness'. I was going to try and stop them but couldn't. What they did is they re-recorded the song with a different singer - it was note-perfect, they even had the 'Whoa, whoa, whoa' bits at the end. I was really annoyed when the ad came out. I thought it was awful and it was making fun of the Birmingham accent. I'm a champion of Birmingham - I love its people and the accent."

It wasn't his pro-Birmingham/anti-comedy accent stance that prevented Oakey licensing the song to Ford, though. "We turned it down because we knew that particular song was worth four or five times the amount the ad agency was offering," he says.

Decades on from that moment when (in a ridiculous haircut) he sang that curiously affecting fable about waitresses in cocktail bars, Phil Oakey has no illusions about The Human League's current worth. "Our last album bombed," he says bluntly. "We make all our money from playing live - playing the hits. That's how I know how much Don't You Want Me is worth." It's always deeply troubling when a fondly remembered band dust off their shiny jackets and museum-like synths to take to the comeback trail and insist on boring the arse off everyone with their new material - merely throwing in the songs everyone had paid to hear during the encore. Oakey never wants to be one of those. "We don't mind playing Don't You Want Me. We like playing it," he says. "We want to play the songs that people love.They bought the records, the posters and turned up to the shows, so come Electric Picnic [ the band are one of the headliners] we will be playing the songs people want to hear. One million people bought Don't You Want Me in the first few weeks of its release. Of course we'll be playing it."

It might have been a different set-list if 2001's Secrets album had sold anywhere near as well as their still magnificent 1981 Dare album. "That was our last album and it was such a wake-up call and a real slap in the face when we didn't get a top 10 single off it. We had really sweated blood over the album but, after it didn't sell, we had to stand back and look at the whole idea of recording new stuff. It was never the case that we were trying to write something like Dare again. You'll see that in our music; after Don't You Want Me we released Mirrorman and Fascination as singles. It is strange, though, how we can listen to Kylie doing Can't Get You Out Of My Head and realise how our sound is still popular today.

"In there somewhere is a good bit of our song Love Action. It's not a sample, more of what I would call a 're-made sound'. It was that guy from Mud who wrote that for her, wasn't it? [ yes indeed, Mud's lead guitarist Rob Davis co-wrote the song with Cathy Dennis]. Huh, that explains a lot."

It's difficult to reconcile now, but there were two Human Leagues. The first incarnation of the band was formed by Martyn Ware and Ian Marsh, who went on to form Heaven 17. Back then, the band were pure and simple Krautrock with not a trace of pop to be found in their frigid sound.

"That's why I always find it funny when we're referred to as an '80s band. We were a '70s band," he says. "The album that influenced me most was the original soundtrack to Clockwork Orange [ Wendy Carlo's pioneering electronica collage]. And I was into progressive music. And stuff like Terry Riley as well. You know, one of our first-ever mangers actively tried to get us to be the Pink Floyd of the 1980s. But for me, everything I mentioned above was balanced out by my absolute love of glam rock. I still think The Sweet and Slade are two of the best bands ever. So when Martyn and Ian left - we had to pay them royalties for years afterwards just so we could keep the name Human League because it was their name - and when Susanne Sulley and Joanne Catherall joined, the pop side came through more.

"But even then we were still very much an alternative to rock music. Our slogan back then was 'Destroy All Guitars', which is kind of funny to hear now, but that's what it was like at the time."

In the early 1980s the Human League were one of the biggest bands in Europe and were having major success in the US also. "People think we're loaded from that time, but we're not," he says. "First of all, the standard contracts you signed back then are a lot different to the ones bands sign nowadays in that they're much fairer now. Also, we always insisted on not ripping off the punters: we were renowned for always insisting on doing things properly. There were always seven of us on stage and we really worked hard on getting the best lighting and stuff like that. And we still do - there's still seven of us on stage. When we first started doing these comeback tours, we were appalled by how many bands would really only be the original singer who would use the venue's house band."

Oakey is still annoyed about how the band were perceived at the height of their success. "I think we burnt a lot of our bridges back in 1981 because of having successful singles even though we were supposed to be a serious electronic, 'bleepy' band. Honestly, all the other bands used to laugh at us. We were called 'cheap synth crap'. I remember Gary Numan getting the same treatment." When Dare was followed up by Hysteria, the band lost crucial momentum, mainly because, as a singles band, the first single off the new album, The Lebanon, didn't perform. The group slowly wound down, with Oakey enjoying a short-lived solo career. Although the band continued to have sporadic hit singles, by the early 1990s they were seen as an irrelevancy, particularly when grunge became the dominant musical force.

"I remember Susan and I were seeing psychiatrists. It was a terrible time. But, then again, it was terrible sometimes when we were at our strongest," he says. "We'd be doing these tours of Australia and everyone would be really miserable. The '90s weren't great for us. It was only in 1998, when Culture Club asked us to tour with them, that we dipped our toe into the water again. We loved doing those dates. And now we do our own headlining tours. Just last year we won Q magazine's 'Inspiration' award - our first award since winning something at The Brits in 1982!"

Commendably, Oakey realises what it is people want from the Human League and doesn't even attempt to put himself over as competition to today's chart acts. "I'm glad we grew up at that particular musical time. In Sheffield, where we're from, there was us, ABC and Heaven 17 all going at the same time. Look around now and it's bloody Girls Aloud. I'm not here to knock them, but the fact is that they are a bunch of Page 3 girls who release songs, not for musical reasons, but as souvenirs - as another form of merchandise. It's more important for them to stay in the gossip pages of the tabloids than produce music. Whatever you think about Pink Floyd, the fact is one of them could be sitting beside you in the pub and you wouldn't know. I don't know if we would stand a chance now. Look at Pop Idol. I guarantee you that Jimi Hendrix and Marc Bolan would be seen as too weird to get on that show."

Oakey, a refreshingly candid and intelligent person who has seen many different sides of the music industry over the past 25 years or so, says he has no plans (despite plenty of interest) to write a book about his experiences. "If I told the truth, too many people would have to die. I know too much. Ha ha ha. Far too much."

The Human League play the NEC, Killarney on Saturday, September 3rd and The Electric Picnic on Sunday, September 4th