Hands up to heaven…
These are some of the things we can surmise from the quarter-century-long career of Heaven 17:
They are freighted with terrible childhood secrets: namely, that each member probably danced the Watusi, alone, in front the TV, to Marvin Gaye on ‘Top of the Pops’ when his parents were out of the house;
They bought each Kraftwerk album the year (make that week) it was originally released;
They have more Duke Ellington records in their collections than they’re letting on about;
They would probably also dance the Watusi, alone, to Diana Ross’s ‘Love Hangover’ at the drop of a hankie;
They can tell you who composed ‘Gesang der Junglinge’ (Stockhausen) and ‘Fontana Mix’ (Cage);
They have more Miles Davis albums than they’re letting on about as well;
Their alternative career-of-choice is probably radio astronomer;
They went off Phil Glass after ‘Akhenaten’.
This is my psychogeographical map of the universe inhabited by Heaven 17, a universe where electronics is harnessed to the service of great dance music. They are rooted in the history of north American black music and European pop ballad, but with each song they mint something utterly new and frequently ravishing. Basslines that snap ankles. Brass charts that start fires. Vocals that can make a grown man swoon. And arrangements that compare with the best of Detroit or Düsseldorf.
From their very first statement, ‘(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang)’, this has always been art that is engaged, literate and clever without being cynically post-modern. Art with a heart and going at a toasty bpm lick. Glenn Gregory is the finest white crooner of his generation, with a voice that could handle the trickiest turns of a Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin or Cole Porter classic. Ian Craig Marsh and Martyn Ware were, we now know, the brains behind The Human League, and their work in Heaven 17 is, in my opinion, second only to Kraftwerk’s sublime mix of Mozart and Motown.
Welcome to Action Town … twinned with Mahagonny…
There’s just one coordinate missing from that map: Kurt Weill. From ‘Groove Thang’ to the later ‘BeforeAfter’, this has been class entertainment that wants to dress up and go dancing, but it isn’t scared to tell you how it votes, either. If Kurt Weill had a polyphonic synthesizer, his opera ‘The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny’, that caustic allegory of the ills of capitalism, might have ended with ‘Sunset Now’ or ‘The Big Dipper’.
Perhaps the most reliable marker of their achievement – beyond their own music, such as the motorik/dub masterpiece ‘I’m Your Money’, which will be one of my Desert Island Discs top ten in the unlikely circumstance of my ever being asked – is the calibre of people they have lured to work on their two classic if quirky covers albums, ‘Music of Quality and Distinction’, among them Chaka Khan, Tina Turner, Green Gartside and the late and very lamented Billy MacKenzie. The collaboration, respect and friendship of these and other artists is a measure of the talent that has taken these three scruffy Sheffield indie oiks from obscurity (I first interviewed two of them in one of their parents’ council house front room back in the 1970s…) to glamour and global fame.
And deservedly so. Uptown in the penthouse, downtown with the mob…
1980s
Taking their name from a fictional pop group mentioned in Anthony Burgess's novel, A Clockwork Orange, (where 'The Heaven Seventeen' are at number 4 in the charts with "Inside"), Heaven 17 formed when Ian Craig Marsh and Martyn Ware split from their earlier group, The Human League, and formed the production company British Electric Foundation (BEF). BEF’s first recording was a cassette-only album called Music for Stowaways and an LP called Music for Listening To. Shortly after, they completed their line-up when they recruited their friend, photographer Glenn Gregory, as vocalist. Like The Human League, Heaven 17 heavily used synthesizers and drum machines (the Linn LM-1 programmed by Ware). Session musicians were used for bass and guitar (John Wilson) and grand piano (Nick Plytas). Whereas the band's former colleagues The Human League had gone on to major chart success in 1981, Heaven 17 struggled to make an impact. Their debut single "(We Don't Need This) Fascist Groove Thang" attracted some attention and, due to its overtly left-wing political lyrics, was banned by BBC Radio 1 DJ Mike Read (who is a staunch Conservative), and neither this nor any other of the four singles taken from the band's debut album Penthouse and Pavement managed to reach the UK Top 40. The album itself proved to be a minor success and peaked at Number 14 on the UK album chart, and was later certified Gold by the BPI in 1982.
Around this time, Ware and Marsh produced two further LPs as BEF, the first being Music of Quality & Distinction (Vol 1) featuring Glenn Gregory, Tina Turner, Paula Yates, Billy Mackenzie, Hank Marvin, Paul Jones, Bernadette Nolan and Gary Glitter. The tracks were cover versions of songs that Ware, Marsh and Gregory had grown up listening to. The album peaked at Number 25.
The second album was Geisha Boys and Temple Girls for the dance troupe Hot Gossip, which used songs formerly recorded by The Human League and Heaven 17, and a track each from Sting and Talking Heads. BEF took over production duties when Richard Burgess of the group Landscape was unable to do so.
In October 1982, Heaven 17 released their new single "Let Me Go", but this too charted just outside the UK Top 40. However, in 1983, the band's fortunes changed. Their next single, "Temptation" (on which they were augmented by vocalist Carol Kenyon), reached Number 2 on the UK Singles Chart in Spring 1983 and became their biggest hit. The song was taken from their second album, The Luxury Gap, which featured further chart hits "Come Live With Me" (UK Number 5) and "Crushed By The Wheels of Industry" (UK Number 17). The album itself charted at Number 4 in the UK Albums Chart, their highest ever position, and was certified Platinum by the BPI in 1984.
In the United States, the self-titled Heaven 17 album was a re-working of Penthouse and Pavement with three songs deleted and replaced by "Let Me Go", "Who'll Stop the Rain" and "I'm Your Money". American new wave audiences were most familiar with "Let Me Go", which received high rotation airplay on 'Alternative/New Wave' format radio stations, such as Los Angeles, California's KROQ, and Long Island, New York's WLIR, plus frequent MTV exposure.
Towards the end of 1983, the band (under their BEF guise and assisted by Greg Walsh) helped relaunch Tina Turner's career, producing and providing backing vocals on her hit "Let's Stay Together", a cover of the Al Green song. 1984 saw the release of the third Heaven 17 album, How Men Are, which reached Number 12 in the UK chart and was certified Silver by the BPI. The album featured the Earth, Wind and Fire brass section, and two singles from the album ("Sunset Now" and "This Is Mine") both reached the UK top 40, but would the band's last singles to do so until various remixes were released in the 1990s.
The band also worked on the Band Aid single at the end of 1984, with Gregory supplying vocals alongside Midge Ure and Sting, after a personal request from Ure that he attend. However, they did not perform at Live Aid the following year. Heaven 17's first "live" performance was in 1986 on the UK television programme The Tube (though the band made use of backing tapes during this performance).
After the remix album Endless peaked at Number 70 in July 1986, the band's fourth studio album Pleasure One was released in November 1986 and featured the single "Trouble" (UK Number 51, GER Number 17). The album contained a number of songs that were originally intended for a French film project that never came to be. This was also the first Heaven 17 album to not mention production credits for BEF and the abbreviation would not appear again until Bigger Than America in 1996. It was followed up in 1988 with the album Teddy Bear, Duke & Psycho (featuring the singles "Train of Love in Motion" and "The Ballad of Go-Go Brown”).
1990s
The early 1990s was a quiet period for the band, though Ware produced a second BEF album in 1991, to follow 1982's original Music of Quality and Distinction (again featuring Tina Turner and Billy Mackenzie, but this time also featuring artists such as Scritti Politti's Green Gartside, Lalah Hathaway, Billy Preston, and Chaka Khan). Ware also became a producer for the likes of Terence Trent D'Arby, Marc Almond, and Erasure. Gregory, meanwhile, went on to form the band Ugly.
In late 1992, a remix of "Temptation" reached Number 4 and was followed by the compilation album Higher and Higher - The Best of Heaven 17 in 1993. Remixes of "(We Don't Need This) Fascist Groove Thing" and "Penthouse and Pavement" were also minor hits in 1993. However, the band would not release any new material as Heaven 17 until 1996's Bigger Than America album, though this failed to chart.
2000s
2005 saw the release of a new album, Before After, which had a much more contemporary dance sound compared to previous albums. A CD of remixes of "Hands Up To Heaven" from the album reached number 6 on the U.S. Billboard Hot Dance Club Play chart in May 2006. In October the same year Virgin Records issued a greatest hits compilation album entitled Sight and Sound, which included a previously-unheard version of "Temptation" with spoken vocals by an unknown student from Germany whom the band met in 1982. It had been discovered on 1-inch tape by Gregory's mother and was remastered by Simon Heyworth. In November 2005, Heaven 17 were filmed for a live DVD playing to a packed house at The Scala in London. The DVD contains an in-depth question-and-answer session with both Ware and Gregory, and fans' reactions to the gig.
In 2006, Marsh stopped making live appearances with the band. In an interview in late 2008, Ware admitted he had not spoken to Marsh for months. In 2008, prior to The Steel City Tour, it was declared in this article http://www.the-black-hit-of-space.dk/excl_interviews_ware.htm that Marsh no longer wanted to be part of the band and would no longer be appearing with them at concerts.
Since the mid 1990s, Billie Godfrey has worked with the band as a backing vocalist and appears with them at concerts. She appeared with them as part of the band on 21 November 2008 for their highest profile TV appearance of recent years on Now That's What I Call 1983 on ITV1.
In December 2008, Heaven 17 toured the UK as part of the Sheffield band based Steel City Tour alongside The Human League and ABC. Coinciding with this was the release of their new album, Naked as Advertised - Versions 08, issued through the Just Music record label. The album contained re-workings of tracks such as "Temptation" along with versions of Ware songs best known from his time with the Human League, including "Being Boiled" and "Empire State Human", as well as a cover of the Associates' hit "Party Fears Two".
In December 2009, Heaven 17 will be touring again with appearances at the "Nokia Night of the Proms" in Germany.
2010s
On 16 February 2010, they joined La Roux live on stage at the War Child Brit Awards aftershow.
In the run up to their 30th anniversary, the band announced several live dates in which they would perform their 1981 debut album Penthouse and Pavement live in its entirety for the first time. The dates are scheduled for November and December 2010, but the band performed a couple of dates in March 2010, one of which was in Sheffield and was filmed and shown on BBC Two on 16 May 2010. A documentary about the making of the album was shown on BBC Two the following night.