What seemed like a good opportunity to document their preparation for the upcoming Penthouse and Pavement tour gave Heaven 17 far more than they bargained for in the recent documentary aired on BBC2.
Including answers to some long-held questions, and unforeseen reunions, Glenn Gregory tells EY in this candid interview all about making the documentary, his decision to get on with The Show after a couple of years hiatus, how they time-shared a studio to record Penthouse and Pavement whilst Phil Oakey slept upstairs, spending time with Elly from La Roux and much much more.
This two-part interview contains rare insights which have never been revealed before about the history of Heaven 17 and the Human League. Many thanks go to Glenn for giving EY an hour of his time to share his thoughts with Heaven 17 fans.
EY: When you listen back to P & P how do you feel about it as an album, as songs...
GG: I think it's probably the album that I'm most happy with, the one I feel most comfortable listening to. The one I feel most comfortable standing up and saying 'I did that', and I don't think it's so much because it's the first one.
I think it's because it is still raw, and it's produced in the way that we did it, no one else has really got a hand in that.
Pete Walsh was co-producer, but it was more a case of cleaning it up. It wasn't a case of putting more things in, so there was loads of space in each track and each sound is quite individual and raw.
Oddly enough, because we're picking them up to play live, I've gone into each track more deeply than I had done since 1980 when we were making them.
We had to reconstruct them so we could then deconstruct them to play live, because we didn't use the original backing tracks - only the rhythm sounds, but we recreated them all.
So I was listening to those tracks really carefully, much more carefully than I probably ever did at the time, I'm in the studio and I'm thinking 'OK what actually IS that sequencer in 'Let's All Make A Bomb', how does it go?'
Then you listen to it and think 'Jesus! I didn't know it did that!' - because you're just listening to it as a whole track. I've gone back and looked at these tracks really deeply, and I can really say that I love them, they're really good, I feel proud of them. They're funny, they're quirky, they are lyrically astute, they are experimental.
It was something new at the time for us personally, Martyn and Ian coming from the Human League and taking all of that electronic baggage with them and furthering it by saying 'OK, take this' but then let's add some other elements that we liked and were listening to like funk and dance music. Let's put that in there as well.
To be honest, we thought we were writing songs like The Jacksons! We weren't at all, but what came out of that was a kind of good vibe really.
EY: The Jacksons were a major influence?
GG: Yeah, that kind of thing. Just well-produced dance music. As well as listening to Kraftwerk, Can and electronic music like Faust, Fripp, Eno and all those kind of things, we were also going out to clubs and dancing to dance music and funk.
So we put all those elements together and it was nice - we enjoyed it.
EY: What is your most satisfying memory of making 'Penthouse & Pavement'?
GG: I think really what always amazes me is how quickly we did it all.
Martyn and Ian had just left the Human League, and I spoke to Martyn four days before, so I packed my bags and went to Sheffield.
Within probably a week and a half, we'd recorded 'Fascist Groove Thang'!
We were in the same studio as the Human League: they were writing 'Dare' and we were writing 'Penthouse and Pavement'!
They were working nights and we were working days - or they were working days and we were working nights.
It was just electric, you could just feel the creativity in that place.
It was fantastic, and that's what I'm most pleased with: just being involved and being there, and just working, twelve, sometimes fourteen hours in the studio, writing and mixing a track, finishing it sometimes within two days from start to finish, and that's it. That's the track you can hear on the album!
I guess that's why I love the tracks so much. They so captured that moment of when we did it , and the excitement, and the anger of Martyn wanting desperately to prove himself right and make sure we were better than the Human League, or better than anybody.
It was a fantastic electric time and because we made it and finished it all so quickly - they are the tracks that you hear, they didn't go anywhere else and get reworked, and that's what I love about it the most.
I think that's why I like that album the most, because it's just so absolutely 'of that time' for me, which was such a fucking brilliant time.
EY: Is there anything you wish you could have changed about the album, and have you changed anything for the live show?
GG: I don't think so. I always think Play To Win could have had a better chorus. I wouldn't bother changing it now, because it is a piece of time in history.
But if I could fly back in time now I'd think, 'the part 'and then he said have no secrets hear no lies, Play to Win' (Glenn goes on to give EY a pitch perfect rendition) - that's a kind of B chorus, a bridge, now let's have a chorus.
I think that's maybe the one thing. Other than that I wouldn't change it now, but if I could go back and have another 20 minutes in the studio in 1980 I might just have said 'look let's try and write a better chorus for this'.
EY: What are its greatest innovations?
GG: I think lyrically it was quite important that we reflected the times, and especially the times in Sheffield and the things that were going on. Sheffield was being taken apart brick by brick by the Tory Government and Margaret Thatcher at the time.
I think that influenced quite a lot of our tracks. We managed to put dance music and politicised lyrics together in such a way that didn't harm each other, and they could sit quite happily together.
It was great dance music but it was also great music to have a conversation - or an argument about, lyrically.
That's probably the best thing about it, really.
EY: Did you have a lot of fans or media question your lyrics?
GG: Constantly! That's all we talked about for years (laughs).
The BBC banned 'Fascist Groove Thang' and that was quite a body blow, because the press and everybody loved it.
It was hailed as such a fantastic breakthrough track and that it was what people had been waiting for.
All the reviews in the papers were fantastic, and then suddenly the BBC weren't playing it and it was like, oh, what a kick in the teeth!
But, you know, it still remained a great track and people still talk about it today. In fact, it's just as relevant today, in fact more relevant that it has been for a while with the current political situation here, so our lyrics are always important.
The three of us always wrote the lyrics together, in a room, and we'd batter them out. We would all have our individual notes and lyric sheets, and we'd be working stuff out together.
Sometimes it wasn't until the last third of the song that you realised that you'd (all) been thinking of slightly different things, but eventually you'd have hammered out the lyric, and the story wasn't particularly the one that you started telling or the one that Martyn or Ian started telling, but what came out really worked really well.
EY: The BEF, whilst being a criticism of the music business, looked like a business.
How did you feel about the music business at the time, and how do you feel about it now?
GG: Yeah the BEF was completely ironic: what we were trying to say was that it was a business. There was a slight hangover from the Human League split when Martyn felt very aggrieved that he had been thrown out of his own band and he believed it was the record company that kind of facilitated this to happen.
EY: On the documentary, both Martyn and Phil agreed that the record company did facilitate it?
GG: Yes, exactly, but at that time we didn't know for sure - but we've now since gotten to the bottom of it.
The BEF's almost like an expose of the music business which is supposed to be all love and peace and Woodstock: it's the suits, money and backstabbing - and that's kind of the business side of it.
The irony of that went into the cover of 'Penthouse and Pavement'.
Unfortunately what happened was that at the same point, the 'yuppieness' of England was taking over, and the money grabbing banking world almost took it as a kind of icon and became the 'Penthouse and Pavement' sleeve with the suits and pony tails.
People have said to us in the past 'Yeah, I love your album, 'Let's All Make A Bomb', yeah let's make loads of money, yeah come on'.
That's not actually what we meant! But, you know, that's the problem with irony sometimes, people don't get it.
It was supposed to be duplicitous, really, but we hoped people would see the fact that it was ironic and that that's not really how we were, we were trying to point something out.
EY: Heaven 17 are currently free in terms of obligations to a record company?
GG: We're completely free, and have no ties to any large business organisations.If we were going to put something out, we'd make sure that we didn't get into bed with such a large organisation, and that we'd try to retain some of our own destiny.
EY: Have you thought of starting your own label again?
GG: It's just such an enormous task. I've got friends who do these sorts of things, and it's just a really big uphill struggle. It's so difficult.
The music business is very messy at the moment. Even the big companies are trying to claw money back because they're not making any.
Huge business are tottering on the edge of extinction - which would probably be a good thing because it would let a wave of smaller labels come to the fore, but at the moment it's teetering, it's about to implode on us.
EY: With Penthouse and Pavement, were you trying to make it as different from the Human League as possible to reject the past?
GG: I don't think we tried to reject or get rid of anything, what we did was add. We wanted it to be different, not to differ from the Human League but to be different from what Martyn was within the Human League.
So we were definitely looking at ways of doing new things...obviously it was going to be different anyway because it had different personel and we had a different dynamic.
I'm a different person to Phil so the whole thing worked in a different way, and musically it just 'happened'.
I don't think we sat down and thought 'we need to differentiate ourselves from the Human League'.
We all knew we wanted to, that was unspoken, and luckily it all just kind of fell together, basically, from 'Fascist Groove Thang'.
In the first five days we'd written lyrics and gotten the backing track together. It was very electronic - totally electronic but a dance track that was 150 bpm, it was exciting!
Then we thought 'what are we going to do in the middle eight?' and Martyn said 'how about we have a bass guitar solo' and we were like, 'wow, we don't even know any bass guitar players!'.
We found John (Wilson) and he came in and played guitar and the bass, and he kind of looked at us and we kind of looked at each other and thought 'fuck, we've done it!'
That's the hybrid, that's the point: within the first week we'd found that change, we'd unlocked that door to how Heaven 17 would be different.
EY: It was the bass guitar?
GG: It was the bass guitar! Really it was, I don't mean that's all it was, but that was the key.
EY: How was it using the same studio as the Human League?
Were things moved around the next time you went in?
GG: Oh constantly. We'd find bits of things that they did that they left behind and thought ' ooh what's that?'. I think we'd heard a bit of 'Sound of the Crowd' on something they'd left and thought 'yeah I like that, that's quite good'.
All it did was to inspire you to move forward and to make something better. I think Phil has admitted that he heard stuff as well, he liked 'Fascist Groove Thang'. At some points Phil was sleeping in the bloody room above in this very derelict building, of which there were really only two rooms that you could go in out of a 6 floor building.
It gets back to what I was saying, it was SO exciting and it pushed both bands on so much. It was such a creative melting pot, of not only ideas but anger as well, and we just wanted to be pushing forward.
EY: Are you using the original synthesisers on stage for the Penthouse and Pavement anniversary shows? And what are you using now in your own studios?
GG: For Penthouse and Pavement live we did use a lot of the original synthesisers on stage.
Certainly all the drum sounds that Joel plays on the electronic drum kit are the same sounds, not from tape but they're Linn drum samples.
We sampled the Linn drums, we've got the right bass drum and literally went through the sounds with a sonic fine toothed comb trying to get it to sound as much as we could like the real sounds.
It took a long time and a lot of work from Joel to play all of those parts.
A lot of the synth sounds are running off the system 100 - the original sequencer. I think Martyn has got my JP4 in there, and some other stuff on stage. He was using a modern Roland synth, I've forgotten which one it was, a kind of big old thing which, again, you can put samples into - which he did.
So even though it is a modern synth, he's playing old sounds. The bass is the bass, the drums are the drums, the guitar is the guitar...honestly, if we could have done it then, it would have sounded like this, it's pretty much the same.
As for now in the studio, I use almost always exclusively soft synths. I've got one old synth and one old bass synth that I use but other than that I'm completely in the computer.
Martyn does use both, he varies. He's got a bit of a museum of a studio and occasionally he will use the System 100 if he needs to get that sound or whatever, but I'm pretty much exclusively inside the computer these days.
EY: Any particular reason?
GG: It is convenient, you don't have to have your studio full of wires. I'm a bit of a neatness fascist in the studio, I like it to look wireless, but don't look behind anything though... but you can manipulate the sounds a lot more as well.
You've got a lot more control and I like that.
EY: Do you ever feel regret that you didn't tour this album when it came out?
GG: It's hard to say, really, because we really had a great time, and just talking on a personal front I don't think we could have had much more fun. We really, thoroughly, had a good time.
They were modern times in the way that MTV had just started that year, and videos were being made all over the place and there were millions of TV shows all around the world to go and do.
We were always in America doing TV shows, we were constantly in Italy, we were in Germany probably more than we were in England, Spain; it was really good fun.
I think, had we gone out and toured, it might well have altered that dynamic in a detrimental way. On a personal level, I would quite like to have gone out there as a front man and strutted my stuff when I was 21 years old, just for a showing off thing.
I knew I could do it, and so on a just purely personal level I would like perhaps to have done it, but that's that's without taking anyone else into consideration.
So I think all in all I wouldn't have changed anything, I'd have left it as it was.
I love it now! I'm getting that joy of running around on stage and being a kind of pop star now, so everything comes to he who waits.
EY: What is happening with the new edition of Penthouse and Pavement? What extras are there going to be with it?
GG: We're still talking about that, really. What we might do is put some of the early BEF stuff on there, like Music for Listening To which has never really properly been mastered, some real rarities, and we might put some stuff on from the DVD.
There's so much stuff that has not been seen, we shot tonnes of stuff, so there'll be lots of little DVD extras.
We're talking about putting a photo gallery on there, because I found so many archived shots of the Human League, which featured in the League section of the documentary.
They're my shots that I took of the Human League back in 1978, which I just had as negatives in the back of a drawer somewhere.
Our director James Strong said we need some shots of the Human League for this section and I said I've got some negatives that have never seen the light of day.
It was really bizarre! I took them in to the processors and as I as explaining to the girl that I wanted 400 DPI and wanted .tiff not .jpeg etc and as I was talking, 'Being Boiled' came on the radio.
I was like, 'that is spooky!''. She said 'what, what?' and I said 'these negs are of that band, at that time'. It was really weird, it all coming together.
So I've got all those shots, so I might put extras like that on there, just some really personal stuff.
EY: Was anything recorded in the Penthouse and Pavement sessions that never made it to the album?
GG: There's nothing, we used every single bit. We were on fire, and we were literally writing things, singing them, that's track one, writing things, singing them, and so on.
It's possible that there might be some electronic twiddling that didn't get anywhere, and oddly enough we now have the original one inch eight tracks.
We found them in storage at Virgin, we've baked them and we're yet to listen to them. So until we've listened to those I'd have to say no. I can't remember exactly what's on there, so when we do get to listen to them - which will be within the next couple of weeks - then you may find a hidden gem.
Glenn Grefory interview - Part 2
(Editing and presention by Orac to the 2006 remastered 'Penthouse & Pavement')
Heaven 17 will be performing Penthouse and Pavement live across the UK in November 2010. Tickets are available through www.seetickets.com .
Edinburgh HMV Picture House (Nov 22), Glasgow O2 ABC (Nov 23), Manchester Ritz (Nov 25), Birmingham HMV Institute (Nov 26), London HMV Forum (Nov 28), Oxford O2 Academy (Nov 29), Brighton Corn Exchange (Nov 30), Bristol O2 Academy (Dec 1)
Ticket Hotline - 08700 603 777
With Thanks to Glenn and Peter Noble
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