After a week of teasing over on their official website, Sheffield synth legends Heaven 17 have this week unveiled plans for an amazing weekend of live electro at London's The Roundhouse on Friday 14th October.
'Music of Quality and Distinction Live' is a two day festival that will kick off with the world premier live performance of Heaven 17's sublime 1983 album 'The Luxury Gap' that spawned perennial electronic chart hits such as 'Come Live With Me' and 'Temptation' .
Originally recorded with an unlimited production budget that helped pay for John Wilson's elaborate 60 piece string sections, the album's recording costs were only recently paid off despite shifting over 300,000 copies in 1983.
'The Luxury Gap' is also one of EY's top ten albums of all time and it will be interesting to see how Heaven 17 approach the complicated horn and orchestra sections of the album that helped to give it that lush and epic Trevor Horn/ZTT level of production brilliance. Many of these tracks will be performed for the very first time including gems such as 'Who'll Stop The Rain' and that track that really should have been the fourth single way back in 1983 - 'We Live So Fast' - one of the greatest electro anthems ever to be recorded.
The BEF side projects will be given the main stage on the following day of the event with an astonishingly impressive list of genre faves & legends that includes EY fave La Roux, Green of Scritti Politti, Kim Wilde, Boy George, Midge Ure, Erasure's Andy Bell and one of the projects original guest singers and a hero to Morrissey...Miss Sandie Shaw! This is a fantastic line-up and one that may even lure the EY Crew away from Ascot for a weekend in London if we can blag a couple of free tickets.
For more info on this event and ticket details, please jump to the official Heaven 17 site here.
It took us a while to decide whether to add this new vid to EY featuring the Stargate Remix which in itself is rather good. The video though is all rather gloomy and it appears that Depeche have given up on appearing in their own promo vids which is a bit of a shame as the three of them are more interesting.
This
black & white effort that is rather predictable and not what one was expecting for such a classic track. Oh well...have a play anyway and see what you think or catch it at 4am on MTV.
Martin Gore and Andy Fletcher will both be spinning tunes this weekend for Mute's Short Circuit festival that also takes place at London's Roundhouse. The Mighty Yazoo will be performing live for what could be the very last time according to Alison Moyet in a recent interview for The Quietus which means that Erasure will probably be continuing. Sorry to end on such a gloomy note......
Behind the scenes we've been working away at producing some high quality EY T-shirts to mark the 10th anniversary of the world's longest running electronic music site (shouldn't we be in the Guinness Book of Records or something?). We have a black and silver t-shirt with the EY logo that looks totally gorgeous and very futuristic. We hope to have a piccy or two and a top EY girl for you all to look at very, very soon :)
(With huge thanks to Alan Bryant)
Keep it completely and utterly electro and enjoy Dr Who tomorrow - it's going to be a good one by Neil Gaiman who wrote an eppy for one of the greatest sci-fi shows ever (apart from 'Blake's 7' of course) - Babylon 5.
