The I Monster production team had a big hand in creating the snarling beast of a come back single as the Human League once again aims to dominate the dancefloors of the world with new smash hit Night People. So I caught up with knob twiddler supreme Dean Honer to learn a bit more about the process of making this electro stomper.

Interview by Niels Kolling, picture by Mark Jones

First of congratulations on a job well done with the production of Night People. What an amazing track to release after so many years. Love the snarling bass, the synths bleeps, the vocal treatment and the way it changes halfway through. Simply awesome.
 
Thank you for the kind words about Night People.
 

Can you go into details about how the track evolved from the demo to the final version that is currently taking the music world by storm as it was officially released this week?

We received the files of the demo in February. At this time it already had the fast gnarly bassline in place, the main Night People repeated vocal and also the crazy verse vocals, which were originally Philip only but with a different bass line underneath.

The girls Gentle Lighting part was also in place but was more of a drop down middle 8 section.

After trying out some ideas on the track we stripped down the rhythm and tried to hang the track around the great bass line. We put a new bass line under the verse vocals and a more uplifting bass and synth part under the girls middle 8.
 

We also threw in a new synth riff at the end over which Philip then wrote the "Get Away" section.

It was a case of us doing a bit of fiddling at our studio then sending it to the

band to either say "thats rubbish"or "thats great", then they would do a bit more

fiddling and send it back to us and so on......

Night People probably involved the most fiddling and sending back and forth out of all the tracks on the album.

I think the band did a lot of the demos on Ableton and Logic Audio. We use Cubase so they would just prepere us separate audio stems for each track.
 

What kind of gear was used to create the track?

Not sure which synths the band used on all the sounds on this track but I know they used a Studio Electronics SE-1 for the main bass line. I think we put it through a distortion pedal.

We did try to use all analogue synths in the production of the album but sometimes we would use a few plug-ins, mainly GMedia stuff like the Odditty and Minimonsta.

On Night People the intro noise is my EMS Synthi AKS. The SE1 bass line is doubled up with a Minimoog sub bass. There are some quiet MS20 parts on the verses and a Minimoog lead line. Some fruity Pro One sweeps on the drop down.

The fat end section Bassline is a Pro One doubled with a Minimoog. The end rave chords are actually a Korg MS20 plug in. Drums are a mixture of our own samples, Linn LM1 samples and Philips Pearl Syncussion drum pads.

I think thats about it!

Watch out for full Dean Honer interview. In the meantime, why not check out the wacky I Monster website for latest info;

www.imonstermusic.com