The other day I pulled out my copy of Human League’s classic 1981 album Dare and played it all the way through twice. I haven’t heard it in a while, and it sounded really good to me. 

Then I listened to a bootleg of Dare demos that I’d downloaded a long time ago, but had never actually played before that. The legend of that album, of course, is that after Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh (the musical ones) left Human League to form Heaven 17, this led frontman Phil Oakey and Philip Adrian Wright (who been doing the band’s lighting and projecting slides while they played) to recruit two teenage backing vocalists named Joanne Catherall and Susan Ann Sulley and to hire Ian Burden (who had toured with Human League Mk 1). Later Jo Callis, the former guitarist for Scottish new wavers, the Rezillos—who had to learn how to play a synthesizer sharpish—was brought in. Virgin insisted that Oakey’s new League needed a professional hand in the studio and paired them with producer Martin Rushent, who’d previously worked with the Stranglers, Buzzocks and on Pete Shelley’s “Homosapian” single, which is undoubtedly what sealed the deal. It was an inspired partnership, obviously, but I will say that I was surprised at just how far along—quite far indeed—most of the songs were before Martin Rushent became involved.

Continuing down that same rabbit hole, I read a (really great) article about the making of Dare on Electronic Sound magazine’s website and as a sort of coda at the end of the piece, mention is made of an obscure single that was recorded during Dare‘s downtime by the album’s engineer, Dave Allen and Jo Callis:

“We’d often finish sessions late and everyone would go home – apart from Jo,” recalls Dave Allen. “Jo was staying at the studio because he didn’t have anywhere else to go and after a while we had this idea to make a heavy metal ‘Stars On 45’ record. The beat isn’t difficult, is it? That took 10 minutes. And then it was, ‘OK, what songs have we got to do?’. ‘Smoke On The Water’, ‘Alright Now’, ‘Silver Machine’, ‘School’s Out’… It was a joy to get a guitar out and do a really terrible version of ‘Purple Haze’ over a ‘Stars On 45’ beat. It was relaxation.

“Martin came home very drunk one night when we were trying to do the middle eight of ‘Whole Lotta Love’ and we said,’C’mon Martin, we need a mad toms solo like that Led Zeppelin song’, and so he played this brilliant freestyle Linn Drum tom tom solo. In the end, the medley was called ‘Bang Your Head’ and released as a single on Island. The band was called Terrible Lizard. We had a meeting with a guy who said, ‘How are we going to do the promo for this?’. Andy Peebles called it the worst record ever made when he played it on his lunchtime [Radio 1] show. I was very proud.”

Now obviously as soon as I read that, I searched to see if it was on YouTube and naturally it was, but other than a Discogs listing, just about the only information to be found about this zany heavy metal medley—which includes Hawkwind’s “Silver Machine,” Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water” and other headbanging classics—is what’s in the Electronic Sounds article.