If Gene Hunt and ‘Ashes To Ashes’ proved one thing (with the exception of redefining pilot show, ‘Life On Mars’ as a prodigious one-off) it’s that history repeats itself. You might not ‘need that fascist groove thang’ but that ‘fascist groove thang’ nevertheless has a habit of coming screaming back at you like a fired-up Audi Quattro all the same.
So where do Heaven 17 fit in this time-travelling sequence of events? Well somewhere between the loopy, industrial bleep-scape of Human League circa 1979 (fizzy, static synth noises, and solarized, robotic beats) and Level 42 circa ‘The Chinese Way’ 1983 (ridiculously busy slap and pull bass, big brassy synth stabs and solarized, robotic beats). As firm and as frothy as Hugh and Cry and effortlessly more poncey than Depeche Mode. And that about sums it up. A thinking man’s ‘Flock of Seagulls’ only with more starch in their shirts and less flexibility in the hair stakes. Glen Gregory did his best to lord his handsome baritone over an over-assertive collection of songs about penthouses and pavements with variously highbrow, socio-political themes. Listening them was much like getting a kick in the crotch off an off-duty accountant in some lurid, executive winebar. In fact it would be fair to say there was upward-mobility in Glen Gregory and Martin Ware’s underpants than there was in all the lifts and escalators on Walls Street – such was the well-heeled flamboyancy of the pair.
Anyway, on August 18th 2008, you can have all this again (and more, sadly) when Cooking Vinyl releases, ‘Live At Last’ – a robustly completist set performed at the SECC in Glasgow, 1999 and featuring hits as bravely familiar as ‘(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thing’, ‘Crushed By The Wheels of Industry’, ‘Come Live With Me’, ‘Let’s All Make A Bomb’, ‘Penthouse and Pavement’, ‘Temptation’ and ‘Being Bolied’ in addition to a handful of songs from the band’s less auspicious period (anywhere in the twenty-three year period between 1985 and 2008).
From Sheffield with a name taken from ‘A Clockwork Orange’. But then you knew all that already.