Travelogue

Travelogue is the second full-length studio album released by British synthpop group The Human League, released in May 1980. It was the last album with founding members Ian Craig Marsh and Martyn Ware, as they would leave to form Heaven 17 later that year. Background For Travelogue, the band worked with a new coproducer, Richard Manwaring, who went on to produce OMD's platinum-selling Architecture & Morality the following year. "Tracks like 'The Black Hit of Space' are way ahead of their time," observed Martyn Ware. "Pumping the synths through massive distortion and overloading the desk. How prescient is that? The ethos of what we were doing was to kind of future-proof it all. We were envisaging people playing this music in ten or twenty years' time." Travelogue entered the UK album chart at #16, which was also its peak, and remained on the chart for nine weeks in 1980 – a vast improvement on their debut album, Reproduction, which failed to chart at all the year before. However, that did not prevent the departure of founding members Ware and Ian Craig Marsh, who went on to form Heaven 17. Remaining members Phil Oakey and Adrian Wright moved The Human League in a new direction with a new lineup. When they began to make a commercial impact the following year, Travelogue re-entered the chart in August 1981 for a further 33 weeks, and was certified Gold by the BPI in May 1982.