THE romantic in me would like to say Joanne Catherall was working as a waitress in a cocktail bar when she first met Phil Oakey of The Human League.

The reality was very different - the man with the most distinctive hairstyle in 80s pop spotted Joanne and her best mate Susan Sulley dancing in a Sheffield nightclub.

Both girls were still in their late teens and still at school when Oakey, a former hospital porter, invited them to join the band as backing singers. Joanne was on her way to university to read psychology when this chance encounter turned her life upside down. As you might expect, it took her protective parents some time to warm to the idea of their daughter taking a very different career path.

“Initially they said no, I couldn’t go, because I was still very, very young. Philip came and met them and we had to have meetings woth the school and there was lots of negotiation before they said yes,” she recalls.

It certainly proved to be a wise move for both Joanne and Susan, as The Human League, in its second incarnation when the duo joined, would go on to dominate the charts throughout the 80s and produce a string of classic albums and singles. While the decade of Thatcherism, big hair and shoulder pads was the group’s heyday, one of Joanne’s favourite Human League tracks was released after the electro outfit had endured several years in the commercial wilderness.

“One of my favourites would be Tell Me When because we’d mot had a single out for about seven years and it did really well. I think it was a new stage in our career,” she says.

Bearing in mind she was only 18 when she swapped the classroom for the recording studio, did she find it difficult adjusting to her newly found fame?

“It was difficult in a way, but we’ve lived in Sheffield all the time so we’ve always had somewhere to escape to to avoid the attention. i also think it was easier because we were in a group. It’s more difficult to cope with that attention when you’re a solo artist - there were seven of us - so we could support each other. We were a very tight knit group,” she says.

The good news for fans of The Human League is that new material is being worked on at the moment and this could form the basis of a new studio album. I’ve been a fan of this group for 25 years and what always strikes me is how fresh these songs sound whenever I come back to them. This timeless quality is certainly reflected in the age of the fans who come to the gigs these days, with people of Joanne’s, Susan’s and Phil’s vintage mingling with people too young to remember Sheffield’s finest musical exports in their heyday.

“I don’t think people thought we’d necessarily be around what is coming up to 30 years later. What people say to us is that they are classic pop songs that you can listen to over and over again and they’re not necessarily stuck in one era,” she says.

These days I find myself talking about the 80s music witth the same fondness my parents use when talking about thw tunes of the 60s. Looking back, how does Joanne regard that turbulent decade?

“In the early 80s we were all coming out of punk so it was a bit of a change. There was still a bit of the punk ethic there in tthat you didn’t have to be a great musician to be in a band,” she says, adding that the new decade brought with it a more glamorous look for many pop bands and their followers. Rick Bowen *