Heaven 17

Heaven 17, please remember, were not even intended to be a group.
In the beginning was the British Electric Foundation, or B.E.F., for
short. Born out of the collapse of the original Human League, and the
brainchild of Martyn Ware, that band’s leader, B.E.F. was less a record
label, as a portfolio of future musical projects of which Heaven 17
would be just one. Ian Craig Marsh, co-founder of the Human League,
would join Ware along with Glenn Gregory as lead vocalist the man who
would have been the original Human League singer had he not been
unavailable.
Their first album, Penthouse And Pavement, is, and remains, a modern classic.
Within
a week, they had written and demoed a new song, ‘(We Don’t Need That)
Fascist Groove Thang.’ Listening back to a song written in late 1980,
it’s astonishingly prescient. The purely electronic template, the
driving musical philosophy of the Human League, had been modified with
the addition of funky slap-bass guitar, and treated dance-floor piano.
Their
next album, The Luxury Gap, was their pop masterpiece, the moment when
everything just clicked into place to devastating effect. The bands
favourite-ever song, ‘Let Me Go’ so nearly broke them into the UK Top
40. There would be no such disappoint with its follow up. The band
convinced their sceptical record company that ‘Temptation’ had to be the
next single. A duet between Glenn Gregory and Carol Kenyon, this song
of lust, brilliantly framed by a musical structure which just kept
building and building, Escher-like to an electric orgasm that seems
never to come, it reached Number 2 in the UK charts in May 1983.
By
the late 2000’s, Heaven 17 were down to two of their original members,
Ian Craig Marsh having left the band to take a degree course in
Psychology. Yet demand for Heaven 17 live which had run dry a decade
earlier had now picked up dramatically. A whole new generation of
artists began to sight Heaven 17 as prime influences, not least La Roux
who would join Heaven 17 for a storming session for Six Music in 2010.

Heaven
17 then toured their classic album Penthouse and Pavement, with a power
and fidelity, yet a contemporaneity which made the music as alive today
as it was in 1981 with soul singer Billie Godfrey now an essential part
of the live dynamic. Heaven 17, who had largely refused to play live
during the Eighties had re-invented themselves as a powerful live act.
Glenn had never sung better in his life.
The Luxury Gap has never
been more relevant. Written during the height of Thatcherism by three
Left-leaning young men against a backdrop of over 3 million unemployed
the parallels with the Austerity Britain of today are obvious. 35 years
on, with a Millionaire cabinet, bankers’ bonuses and doom and
depression everywhere, Heaven 17’s sly, post-modern critique of modern
society has never sounded so resonant, nor been so necessary.