Heaven 17

Yeah.

But these bands splinter, and Human League splinters, only three of them to begin with, and, uh, two of them form Heaven 17 and take it in one direction, and the other one, Phil Oakey, recruits two teenage girls off the dance floor in Sheffield.

And by the end of that year, within a year, they've released the biggest album, you know, and to me, like the, the signal post of the decade with, with Dare, which I still think is a superb album.

Uh, you've got people like Soft Cell and Depeche Mode coming through independently, which is...

This is a very important part of the process.

Heaven 17, Geisha Boys and Temple Girls.

Gary Newman, This Wreckage.

This Wreckage LCD Sound System, How Do You Sleep? Sharon Van Etten, Jupiter 4.

We end today on our 100th episode with one third of the Sheffield electronic pioneers.

We've recently had entries from ABC and last fortnight Heaven 17, but now we're back with The League, The Human League, who we last met in late 1981, episode 33.

They had just treated us all to the shimmering pop joy of Don't You Want Me, a massive global hit that secured the 1981 Christmas number one slot, propelled the album Dare into the stratosphere and sent Philip Oakey, Joanne Catherall, Susan Ann Sully, Ian Burden, Joe Callis and Philip Adrian Wright on a gruelling world tour.

When the tour buses finally stopped rolling in mid-1982, the pressure from Virgin Records to deliver an immediate follow-up masterpiece was immense.

There was much more depth to The Clash.

But once we en- enter the 1980s, we do have the likes of The Specials, um, the early singles of UB40, the early singles of Heaven 17.

And there is, you know, from those pe- from those places like Coventry and Birmingham where those bands came from, they were experiencing the first, um, signs of de-industrialization, mass unemployment that, that Thatcherism brought in.

So it was a very, um, cl- you know, very... 'Cause it must have been a very difficult period not to write about what was going on around you because when most bands are formed, the people in them are relatively young.

Um, so yeah, so you also talk about the, uh, quite a few other bands in this, this as well.

Yeah.

With like obviously the Housemartins is be- one, and then Easterhouse from, um, Manchester, and then from Sheffield we've got Heaven 17 as well.

So very, four very different bands.

they they sort of were yeah I mean I was I was probably actually 14 or 15 when they came out but um they um I think the epiphany moment wasn't necessarily hearing synths for the first time.

And of course, hearing the likes of the Human League or Depeche Mode or my personal favorite at the time, Heaven 17, wasn't necessarily the epiphany.

I bought all those records.

But the epiphany really was going into the Camden Palace aged 16 and being relatively tall, being like six foot two and just about getting away with being an 18 year old.

I bought Just Can't Get Enough.

I remember that when it came out, but...

but the other two human league and especially heaven 17, I was just mad on and a group called Bauhaus as well.

They were a bit darker and nastier.

in the best possible sense, right?

You had Richard Hawley, Joe Cocker, Self Esteem from up the road in Rotherham, Reverend and The Makers, Heaven 17, Pulp, The Human League, and finishing off, of course, with Arctic Monkeys.

So there's a band missing from that.

I'm staying in Sheffield for my link, Jeffrey, and I'm taking us to the 1980s.

But I mean, there's two other things I was going to say.

One is that, I mean, I don't know if you remember, it was about... nearly two years ago now, the guy from Heaven 17, which again, maybe not so big outside the UK, Martin Ware, he put a public thing out telling Rockstar Games to go fuck themselves.

I think after he said they offered him $7,500 to use one of his tracks with no other royalties.

And he was like, this game is full of money.

I mean, all the things you just mentioned could be just the worst thing in the world and really bad, but because of the way that they make these games, they are really, really, uh, funny.

And, um, they're, they're, It's social commentary, isn't it? And that's why the games are so good.

But of course, you go back to the Martin Ware thing, Heaven 17, they wanted to license their biggest and best song for the game.

And it was, I mean, I think the details that he gave were, when you sort of stretch it out, it worked out to sort of 7,000 per person after all the cuts and things go out.

Learn from the jam, right, in the 1980s.

You know, I'm sounding like an old guy now riffing on all this, right? Learn from heaven 17.

We were conscious in the 80s of what the chask was.

We were naive as hell, or at least I was naive as hell, but we still knew what the stakes were.

Today we complete October 1982, and what a show it promises to be.

Heaven 17 release the song they're most proud of as they release the album, The Luxury Gap.

We meet a favorite of my mum's, Supertramp, for one glorious weather-based track.

We then meet the Aussies, Men at Work, and set them up for a massive hit in early 1983.

The futuristic promise of the British electronic underground is officially currency.

Think back to where we left the next protagonists in March 1981, Episode 21.5.

Heaven 17, the splinter project born from Martin Ware and Ian Craig Marsh walking away from the original Human League.

They unleash their single.