 IF YOU'RE talking to the Human League there's one word that's strictly taboo. Fiat. The Italian car company performed the ultimate insult by taking the League's classic number one single Don't You Want Me - one of the definitive and enduring three minutes of classic British pop music - and turned it into a joke. Who could forget its 2002 British TV advertising campaign for the Punto featuring the spurned boyfriend pleading in a very broad Brummie spoken accent: "Down't yow want me bybay, Downt yow want me wo! wo! wo! wo!" ((as in wo! horsey! wo!) while his girlfriend understandably attempts to drive off leaving him behind. To add injury to the insult, the band never received any of the potentially lucrative performing rights giving artists royalties for every time a song is broadcast. "They took the song and then completely re-recorded it behind our backs which meant we didn't get a penny," fumes Susan Ann Sulley the blonde one as opposed to the "dark" one Joanne Catherall, the League's other distinctive female singer. "Now even if we wanted we can't ever use the song again for advertising purposes because it is identified with one particular brand." The touchy subject of the Punto comes up when it's suggested that she and Jo must be "rolling in it" given the world wide success of Don't You Want Me and other singles such as Human - a US number one in 1990 - and the multi-million selling album Dare! "Rich? I'm not in the slightest!" says a laughing Susan Ann in her rich Yorkshire vowels. "I've still got a mortgage to pay on my little flat in Sheffield." The other myth that's quickly exploded is that Don't You Want Me is semi autobiographical in that the first line "You were working a waitress in a cocktail bar when I met you" relates to where and how the girls were chosen by Human League uberlieutenant Phil Oakey to join the group. The truth had an even more impressive fairy tale twist to it. It was 1980 and Oakey, then of the long, lop-sided fringe and pierced nipples had split from his fellow original League players Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh, who on went to form Heaven 17. The original League had produced a synthetically cold sound, but Oakey had a vision of pure pop in his head. And that's why he was in the Craisy Daisy disco in his own home town of Sheffield to make Susan Ann and Jo, the two teenage school friends, who had never sung professionally or played an instrument an offer they could not refuse. | 
