‘I Love The 80s’. That’s the usual battle cry of the nostalgic forty-something rifling through their drawer of leg warmers and fingerless gloves. But hang on a minute. What if you didn’t love the eighties? What if, like me, you managed to sleep through it like the superficial and embarrassing seventies hangover that it was? It wasn’t all bad, of course, we had Chernobyl, Tiananmen Square, even AIDs was a more credible option to Spandau Ballet and Cyndy Lauper, making the likes of Joe Dolce and ‘Shaddap You Face’ seem positively vital by comparison. And then there was Heaven 17. They weren’t as catchy as Human League, they weren’t as dressy as Duran and they weren’t as monstrously inadvisable as Hugh and Cry. They came somewhere in between all that, filling their own comfortable funky – and inexcusably intellectual – niche. Glen Gregory wore suits but he sounded butch and he sang about industry and the stock market as if walked straight off the building site and into Paternsoster Square. Of course, one look at him scowling around on Top of The Pops in his shoulder-pads and bleached-blonde (suspiciously thinning) hair assured us he was as suave and as beefcake as a Findus Pancake with most of its breadcrumbs flaking off. Not even the voice fooled us any. It was the voice we’d all used at 14 trying to buy a can of Tennants Super from the shop on the corner of the street. Like his balls had just dropped and he was really, really angry with a puncture on his BMX Bike or something.
But this is besides the point. When the A-Team had finished and the was still a twenty-minute wait before you could get your rocks off at Noel’s Late, Late Breakfast Show, occasionally you’d switch on the radio and Glenn, Martin and the other fella were showcasing their latest studio masterpiece, complete with full Gospel-Choir, 105 piece synth-orchestra, a new sound on the Yamaha D-X7 and just maybe, if you were lucky, a Pino Palladio bass-pattern (that not even Mark King was capable of replicating). For a band that had taken their name from a fictional band in ‘A Clockwork Orange’ (which everyone and no one had actually seen) there was something peculiarly ordinary yet tantalisingly wealthy about them. Like they were power-dressing studio wizards or something with every multi-tracking device known to man at their disposal. And thus came tracks like ‘Temptation’, ‘Come Live With Me’, (We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang’, ‘Crushed By The Wheels of Industry’, ‘Sunset Now’ and ‘This Is Mine’ – moving from the minimal to the grandiose in less time than it took to say Giorgio Armani.
Released as a now standard-issue ‘Sight and Sound’ collection featuring videos previously unavailable on DVD and a never previously released demo version of Temptation – recorded at their home studio in 1983 ‘Heaven 17, Greatest Hits’ should go someway toward completing a picture you thought you’d managed to erase for good.