WHEN asked to describe The Human League, one-time manager Bob Last had the Last word.

"Pop music is a kind of lightning conductor for what’s going on, when it’s at its most exciting it beats everything else; it beats film, beats books and beats TV," he said. "These magical moments when it pulls something out of the ether, out of what’s going on in everyone’s head and everyone’s lives and focuses it. That’s what pop does at its best and that’s what The Human League did”.

And that's what The Human League still do, hence tonight's gig at York Barbican on the Sheffield synth band's A Very British Synthesizer Group Tour sold out so quickly.

The tour's title ties in with this autumn's release of Phil Oakey and co's box set of the same name: a four-disc sound and vision anthology parading all the hits, complemented by previously unreleased demos and edits. It covers the group's entire history from the earliest incarnation to the 1981 synth-pop gold standard of Dare and all that happened in its wake; the left turn of working with Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, the return to being a glorious live act and the glamorous robotic pop of 2011’s Credo album.

The closing thought belongs to Susan Ann Sulley, dancing queen of The Human League. "People think pop music is X Factor and we’re still hankering after a Roxy-Bowie-Donna Summer-Chic version of pop. We don’t fit in. There are three of us, two of whom have never written a song and are pretty average singers, plus we’ve got a lead singer who doesn’t consider himself a singer at all and can’t play any instruments very well," she says.

"And yet we still think of ourselves as a pop group. If a market research group got hold of us, they’d change absolutely everything. We shouldn’t have gone on as long as we have – we should have “gone rock” by now, like Depeche Mode, Simple Minds and U2 did. But we’re still a pop group."

Open your heart once more to The Human League tonight at York Barbican, where their special guests will be Ekkoes from 8pm.