I tried to absorb it for a couple of days, then I thought, Fuck ’em. Our success didn’t depend on Phil. We’ll just find another singer. Within 48 hours I’d approached Glenn Gregory. Had Glenn been in Sheffield at the time we were looking for vocalists when we sacked Adi Newton from the Future [Ware and Marsh’s pre–Human League incarnation], he would have been in. But he had just moved down to London with his little handkerchief on a stick, so it was impractical to ask him to move back to Sheffield. Glenn said yes and moved back up to Sheffield, and within a week, Heaven 17 was born.
I’d already got the name lined up. Bob’s strategy had been to say to me, “Your strongest suit is in the studio. You and Ian should form a production company.” Which was quite a forward-thinking thing. I immediately liked the idea and said, “If I’m going to form a company, I want it to sound like it’s always existed, like a grandiose entity that has just slipped under public notice but is, in fact, gigantic.” We tried a few names, and I quite liked the idea that it would have “British” in it, but it would be like some kind of brass plaque on the wall in the city of London. And I liked the word “electric,” so we thought British Electric Company. Couldn’t call it that, but we thought, How about something that sounded like a phil-anthropic corporation? So we settled on British Electric Foundation. Bob Last was a graphic designer, so I said, “Bob, as part of your role in this, you’ve got to come up with a logo that is like a 1930s recording company.” Hence the tape reel, even though tapes didn’t exist back then, and the font looked like it was carved out of metal. Within a week of that, we’d formed Heaven 17 and started work on the first music we recorded.
The manifesto we had with Heaven 17 was suddenly this freeing from the shackles of electronic music—the ability suddenly to use anything you wanted. When we were off duty from the Human League, the music we’d all been listening to at parties and loving and buying was American dance music. Heaven 17 emerged from that set of influences. Kevin Saunderson and Chicago and Detroit house credited Tubeway Army, Kraftwerk, and Heaven 17 as influences more than they credited the Human League. I thought that was an enormous compliment.
MIXTAPE: 5 More Songs from New Groups That Grew out of Old Groups 1. “Rush,” Big Audio Dynamite 2. “Rise,” Public Image Ltd. 3. “Oh L’Amour,” Erasure 4. “My Ever Changing Moods,” The Style Council 5. “Johnny Come Home,” Fine Young Cannibals
Penthouse and Pavement allowed us to incorporate our take on politics and socialist beliefs but keep it pop and shiny. The “Pavement” side, which was the electronic side, was largely tracks that we had already been writing for the Human League. Not the lead lines—we’d not written the lyrics or anything like that—but the actual backing tracks. Although we already knew Glenn could sing, the audition piece for Glenn to join Heaven 17 was “Wichita Lineman,” which was to be on the B.E.F. album [Music of Quality and Distinction, Vol. 1], which was something else we’d planned on doing with the Human League on the next album. The concept of “Penthouse” and “Pavement” sides happened because we thought, If we try and evenly distribute tracks amongst the album, it might sound a bit disjointed. Why don’t we use the electronics side almost as a goodbye to the purely electronic, easing our audience into a new era? The logical thing to do would have been to put the “Pavement” stuff on the A-side, which would have been the transitional thing, but then, in typical contrary manner, we loved the new direction so much that we decided to put the new stuff on the A-side.
“I tried to absorb it for a couple of days, then I thought, Fuck ’em. Our success didn’t depend on Phil. We’ll just find another singer.”
[While recording Penthouse and Pavement,] we’d actually take a sneaky listen [to the Human League, who were recording Dare at the same time and in the same studio]. The first thing we heard was “Sound of the Crowd,” and we thought, Mmm, this is a bit rubbish, isn’t it? I was demented, of course. I was so motivated by the disrespect I’d received from the opposite team that I was bitter and twisted for a while. And I still think “Sound of the Crowd” is a bit rubbish, but charmingly rubbish. And they had to get a single out quickly. “(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang” was about to come out. They were released at fairly similar times. We thought we’d got daring and sophistication while they were just sort of going through the motions. But then Dare came out and went stone-cold big time, and the rest is history. But to give the Human League the right to use the name and to disavow ourselves of the rights, myself and Ian each took 1 percent of the next album, which happened to be Dare. That enabled me to pay for my first flat in London. So, hurrah.
We didn’t really have any idea what huge commercial success was, so, to us, Penthouse and Pavement was a huge commercial success. Compared to the first two Human League albums, it was massive. It was an album that people coveted, and it was in the [U.K.] Top 75 for a year and a half. That meant that they gave us carte blanche in order to do The Luxury Gap album. If we were Rihanna, we wouldn’t get an unlimited budget. There was a contractual limit, but in reality, if we’d said we’d run out of money halfway through, they’d have fronted the rest. Penthouse and Pavement cost 40,000 pounds. The Luxury Gap cost 180,000 pounds, and How Men Are cost 300,000 pounds, because, by that time, we’d had massive hits. They thought we could do no wrong, which, of course, is always a fallacy.
“Penthouse and Pavement allowed us to incorporate our take on politics and socialist beliefs but keep it pop and shiny.”
Dare had been out and been a big hit, so the motivation for us was very much direct competition. As far as we were concerned, all bets were off the table. “Temptation” was very much an idea I had about an Escher staircase that continually seemed to be going upwards and upwards and creating a kind of structural tension. The motivation was to make something that was timeless and classic, and that’s what happens when you employ big orchestras. It’s not only a stamp of quality but a stamp of timelessness. I remember going into Virgin and saying, “Wouldn’t it be great if it sounded like one of these big sweeping Western soundtracks? An orchestra would be truly epic”—before “epic” was an overused word. It worked amazingly well. Virgin were open-minded. They didn’t go, “How much is it going to cost?” They said, “When do you want it?” Within the week, we were in the studio with a 50-piece orchestra. Once we’d written the lyrics, it was always the idea that it would be a duet, even though we didn’t have a girl member of the group. We’d always loved the delicacy of the female voice against Glenn’s. Virgin didn’t want to release it as a single because they didn’t have Carol Kenyon signed up. We said, “We beg of you, please just release it, and it will be a hit.” It was the only time in our entire career we didn’t see eye to eye with [Virgin managing director] Simon Draper, and we were right and he was wrong. It was a most expensive enterprise, but we got a lot of value out of it. It made a lot of money, that album. It used to be a high-risk, high-reward business, and now it’s a low-risk, low-reward business.
Carol Kenyon was a bit arrogant. Even though she knew what the deal was when we brought her into the studio—we paid her, and she signed a release form—she approached us after the fact and said, “I think I deserve some royalties on this.” No: We wrote the song, we paid you to do a performance, you were happy with those terms—see ya. Fast-forward a few years. The Ibiza version of “Temptation,” the Brothers in Rhythm remix, is a big hit. The day before we’re due to go on Top of the Pops, she attempts to blackmail us: “I’m not going on Top of the Pops unless you pay me a percentage of the record.” And again we went, “See ya,” and got the woman who’d been in the video, who couldn’t sing a note to save her life, but she looked hot.
We were not typical pop stars. We never courted that. We carried on with our lives and our friends. All that happened was we had more money. We weren’t trying to be celebs—in fact, we completely eschewed it because we viewed ourselves as valid artists and musicians. The flip side of that particular coin is we didn’t perform live except for TV shows and MTV.
We thought we could better spend our money making great videos. It enabled us to service different markets without having to tour the world for months on end. But it got to a point in the mid-eighties where we were using more session musicians, and we could easily have toured. That would have been the sensible time to move on to that, and we never did. It became a sort of dogma, which I regret because we had a shit-hot band. Around 1985, we were offered a million pounds to tour the West Coast of America with Coors sponsorship, and we turned them down because we said we don’t do that. It made it very difficult for us to break America, because all we had were videos. Plus, the relationship with us and Virgin started falling apart. We found out that, by stealthy means, they had licensed us to Arista in America for three-quarters of a million dollars, and we didn’t see a penny of it. It was added to our unrecouped account. We were so pissed off. We put out one more album, which, admittedly, wasn’t all that great, and it all fell apart from there.
THAT WAS THEN
BUT THIS IS NOW
Heaven 17 went on hiatus at the end of the eighties. Ware produced Terence Trent D’Arby’s multiplatinum debut album, Introducing the Hardline According to Terence Trent D’Arby. He turned down subsequent production work with Rod Stewart (“I didn’t like his politics”) and Bette Midler, but helmed records by Erasure and Marc Almond. He is also active in the hard-to-explain field of 3-D sound installation. A 1992 remix of “Temptation” returned the group to the U.K. Top 5. Ian Craig Marsh left the group in 2007. In 2008, Heaven 17 toured with the Human League. (“We’re mates now,” Ware says of him and Oakey, “but I wouldn’t say there’s been closure.”) The group collaborated in 2010 with squeaky-voiced beanpole new wave revivalist Ely Jackson of La Roux on a new version of “Temptation” recorded for the BBC. In 2013, the third British Electric Foundation album, Music of Quality and Distinction, Vol. 3: Dark, was released, featuring contributions by Boy George, Andy Bell, and Kim Wilde, among others.
WARE: After I produced Erasure’s I Say I Say I Say [in 1994], Vince Clarke said, “Would Heaven 17 consider supporting us on our [1997] arena tour?” We’d never performed live, but the next thing you know, we’re performing in front of 15,000 people at the NEC [National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham, England]—the first major gig we’d ever played. We’ve not looked back since.
I’m not surprised the material has lasted, to be honest. I’m flattered, but good songs are good songs. It makes no difference to me when they were made. We’re not nostalgists, so we don’t perform them in that sense. We’re always looking to refresh the way they sound, and we keep getting younger and younger players in the band to make us look even more old. People go, “It’s a nostalgia trip,” and the majority of our audience is people of our age, but there is a significant proportion who caught on via their parents or who go to eighties clubs. There’s an eighties club at least once a week in every town, village, everywhere in the U.K. The people who go to these clubs are 20-somethings; they’re not people my age. The collaboration with La Roux, for instance, was instigated by her, not us. She was talking about how her major influence was Heaven 17. To her, we were almost as relevant as Bowie. The thought that you were being accorded that kind of status is almost inconceivable. Looking back, we always believed that we had longevity, but 30 years? I could have seen 10, but not 30.
“COME ON EILEEN”
has a worse problem than a one-hit wonder? An unjustified one-hit wonder. A group with a history, a following, and a bulging back catalog in their home country who are known elsewhere only for a single song whose success they are frustratingly unable to repeat. Spandau Ballet suffered from this stigma. So did A-ha. But no one was less deserving of this fate than Dexys Midnight Runners. America knows them for one song: a fiddle-and-banjo-fueled, knees-up staple at weddings, wakes, and bar brawls. But there was so much more to Dexys than that. “Come On Eileen” caught them in the middle of a constant evolution. The Dexys of 1980 were an enraged, Stax-style soul revue with a bludgeoning horn section who dressed like New York dockworkers. By the time they’d reached their third album, the horns were gone and the band were clad in preppy attire. Every musical phase, every visual transformation, sprang from the feverish, churning imagination of Kevin Rowland. A lightning rod for controversy and, on occasion, a laughable figure, Rowland took himself and his band deadly seriously. When he was unhappy with the quality of the band’s debut album, Searching for the Young Soul Rebels, he made off with the master tapes, refusing to return them until the label acceded to his demands. Unhappy at how he was portrayed in the British music press, he stopped doing interviews and had his hapless label pay for advertising space for him to pen essays about his various philosophies. Ironic that such a driven, obsessive, humorless figure would end up being best known for a silly sing-along song, but such is the fate of the unjustified one-hit wonder.
JB: You know that Adam Ant lyric from “Goody Two Shoes,” the one he addresses to a guy who’s kneeling, crying words that he means, opening someone’s eyeballs and pretending that he’s Al Green? That’s about Kevin Rowland. The image conjured up is one seared into the memories of British Dexys fans: Rowland, wild-eyed and unsmiling, clad in black, haranguing the audience over an endlessly repeating brass riff about soul and passion and some revelation he was forever trying to explain to us but could never find a way to express. We hung on his every word, or more accurately, every yelp, because the music was so consistently brilliant and so consistently different. The debut album, 1980’s Searching for the Young Soul Rebels, was a blast of anger and contempt that crucified hipsters and anti-Irish jokes while lionizing sixties soul footnote Geno Washington, the subject of Dexys’ first U.K. number one. Too-Rye-Aye emphasized strings over brass and uplift over outrage. The contentious Don’t Stand Me Down is a six-song epic featuring more monologues than actual singing. The 27-years-late follow-up, 2013’s One Day I’ll Soar, is a stripped-down, affecting album that sounds like it was made by a man who’s lived a long, hard life. There comes a time when you’re happy not to hear any new music from your idols, no matter how much time, love, and money you’ve invested in them over the years. It’s not like that for Dexys fans: We’re in it for life.
LM: Rowland and my aunt Eileen are of Irish descent. So, I’d always believed, was Dexys and the knee-slapping, jig-inducing “Come On Eileen.” I was shocked when I learned that Rowland and Co. actually hail from Birmingham, England—the same hometown as my beloved Durans, who would never be caught dead in Dexys’ “Eileen”-era overalls. Decades and countless listens to “Come On Eileen” later, I still have no idea what the lyrics are beyond “Poor old Johnny Ray,” but I have to hand it to Rowland: He penned the most well-known song in this book.
KEVIN ROWLAND: I had nothing to lose. Nothing. I was going nowhere. I could have ended up in prison. That is not being dramatic. I miraculously escaped prison. I don’t think I would have survived. Music saved me. I was the kind of guy who would get into a lot of trouble, a lot of fights. I felt I was a fuckup, and there was no way I was going to take this music thing lightly.
We started with a blank canvas. I remember waking up in the summer of ’78, two or three weeks after [Rowland’s punk band] the Killjoys had broken up, and thinking, Hang on a minute, let’s start something completely fresh. Let’s dream it first. I literally did just that. I dreamed, “It’s going to sound great, it’s going to have a brass section, and we’ve got to look great.” I felt hemmed in by punk at the end, and I just thought, Everything had been leading me to this. This is going to be more than a band.
It wasn’t about aping soul. I know we said “soul” a lot. Searching for the Young Soul Rebels. We probably shouldn’t have done. I think that limited us slightly. It was more than soul; it was soulful, it was pop. I think we just thought it was really cool to say “soul” at that time because nobody was talking about soul in 1978, so we saw the potential to be a bit radical.
It happened a bit too fast. Christ, it happened really quick. We did a tour
in March–April [1980]. It was called the Straight from the Heart tour. It was fantastic. We really felt we were building something. You’d go on stage to about 400 people a night, and they didn’t know anything about it except for the first single, “Dance Stance.” We’d probably recorded “Geno” then, but it wasn’t out. We’d win the audiences over every night—by the end of the show, they were all on our side. Then we had the number-one single, which was great. But then we did shows, and the album hadn’t come out yet, so most people, all they knew was “Geno,” and they’d come along to the show wanting 10 “Geno”s. But we had some versatility, some variety, different moods. I found that tour a bit of hard work.
We didn’t really have much experience, we didn’t have experienced managers, and we were going out on these tours and no one was looking after the money. We signed two 50-page contracts: one publishing, one recording. I started to read the front page: Hereafter… thereby… whereby… wherefore. In the end, I just said, “Give us a pen.” That’s show business.
I was a bit uptight. I don’t think I was angry—I probably was. I was always trying to stop smoking. I was always two days on, two days off. I was forever withdrawing from cigarettes. I was probably angry about that. I probably wrote a lot of these songs when I was two days off the fags.
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