Martyn Ware: Interview
Moving into the 1980s, he recalls how Heaven 17 created funk-influenced synth-pop hits while promoting socialist messages in their lyrics, how competition with their erstwhile Human League colleagues spurred them on to greater heights of achievement, and how a gig in the “insane lotus-eating environment” of Studio 54 was one of their wildest nights.
What was the initial attraction of electronic music for you?
It just sounded like the future, really. I grew up in the sixties in the middle of the space race, when there was only two channels on the telly. And you know, growing up in a two-up, two-down house in a poor part of Sheffield and then living in council houses, all that seemed very enticing. So I watched a lot of American TV series like Time Tunnel, Lost in Space and those kinds of things.
So I kind of grew up with a lot of fantasy stuff and also seeing things like the [1956] film Forbidden Planet with Louis and Bebe Barron’s soundtrack - I didn't know what they were at the time, it was just funny noises to me, but I was fascinated with anything that was connected to the future.
Our house was full of music, because my two older sisters had quite a big record collection, we only had four books in our house but we had about 300 records on vinyl and a Dansette player, so they were really my toys when I was growing up. A lot of pop, Motown and sixties Beatles and Stones, but also things like ‘Telstar’, ‘Sparky and his Magic Piano’, ‘Good Vibrations’…
‘Good Vibrations’ - a lot of people I’ve interviewed have mentioned that as a crucial point in the sixties where these kinds of spaced-out sounds started to affect them.
It's more nuanced than that, I think. It's more about records that evoked a sense of otherness. So it wasn't just about space and science fiction, although that was big thing. It wasn't just about futuristic-sounding records. I grew up in Sheffield, and I love Sheffield. I love the Sheffield people and I'm always back there. But there was not much happening, in terms of culture, you know. A museum, a big art gallery, there was the City Hall where the big bands used to play and the Students’ Union and that was it. There weren't a lot of music venues or a lot of culture to consume, apart from cinema of course. And so everything seemed to be glamorous – it’s like that classic phrase, you’re in the gutter looking at the stars, you know?
Sheffield was a big town for Roxy Music and David Bowie.
People in Sheffield loved glam and that whole thing about dressing up for the weekend and spending all your wages in two days, then starving for the rest of the week – being very proud of dressing up in the best clothes that you can afford. So you had Sheffield, Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool, Leeds, Newcastle, all massive towns for glam. What we saw in those bands was a kind of fantasy world that appealed massively to us, certainly in Sheffield - it was like a kind of signpost to a potential future that was much less grey than one we were living in.
For those who don't know, I met [future Heaven 17 members] Glenn [Gregory] and Ian [Craig Marsh] at a place called Meatwhistle, which was like a kind of council-run youth arts, drama and music, performing arts kind of place, nothing fancy. I mean, it was literally an old school near the City Hall in central Sheffield, that a couple of people, Chris and Veronica Wilkinson, who were actors, from that world, you know, went to the council and said, “Look, if you let us use this building, we can put it to good use for young people. And we can teach them - not how to act or anything, but just give them an outlet for their creativity.” A safe space to develop ideas, really.
I never acted or anything when I was there. It was all people pretending to be in bands and stuff, like our friend Adi Newton, who went on to form Clock DVA and was part of [pre-Human League electronic band The Future [with Ware and Marsh] and was absolutely in love with Alfred Jarry’s ‘Père Ubu’ and the Absurdists and Dadaism and Futurism, as we all were. But none of us went to art school - we were coming at it as people who were hungry for creative knowledge.
What was also comes through from The Future’s recordings is that you were also into disco, and disco at that time was often derided by the music press, wasn't it?
We didn’t fall for that stuff propagated by the music press about disco being this great, bland evil. Looking back on that now, it was massively racist. Seriously, massively.
Phil Oakey also brought in this almost crooner style of singing to The Future when he came into it.
Well, the exciting thing is, I think, and this has been pretty much true throughout my career, is that meniscus between the familiar and the absolutely alien – that is what makes things interesting. So there are many ways that you can approach that. One is to take something completely familiar, then approach it with a completely different kind of palette. And hence you get things like the B.E.F. [British Electronic Foundation] albums and stuff like that.
Or you can, between your tight group of creators, establish a kind of private manifesto, which is what we did with The Human League. So only synthesizers, all the sounds have to be created from scratch, there were no presets, never directly talk about love. You could address the issues involved with human relationships, but there always had to be a kind of twist. We had a list of words that we weren't allowed to use - I can't really remember what they were now but you couldn’t use the word ‘love’. Ever. In the lyrics, titles, nothing.
And before that, with The Future, which were pretty abstract lyrically, but it was really more about painting imagery in the listeners minds as though we were creating a soundtrack to an imaginary film, but usually with, with some kind of narrative element. Because we've always loved kind of narrative songs.
Phil Spector used to talk about this idea of a pocket symphony, you know, three minutes 20 seconds. So we set ourselves the challenge to create short-form songs, sometimes with straightforward structures, relatively straightforward, sometimes more abstract. And the closer we got to the pop songs that we loved, the happier we were.
It’s hard now to imagine the situation at the time in the 1970s, how low-tech and how ramshackle the set-ups often were. There's this great anecdote in your interview with Adi Newton [on Ware’s ‘Electronically Yours’ podcast] about a recording session [for The Future] in a suburban house in Sheffield with the tape recorder on the coffee table. Where was that?
This is a great story. There's actually a documentary coming out about this guy, Ken Patten, who is a legend, he recorded loads of an edgy outsider-type bands at that time in his studio [Studio Electrophonique].
What happened was we realised that we wanted to try recording with four tracks instead of just two. But we didn't know anyone with a four-track tape machine that we could borrow or use. So we've put an advert in the local paper the Sheffield Star saying “exciting young band needs four-track with recording facility to record demos”. And this guy came back and told us, “you can come up and do this and it's cheap”. It was something like ten quid an hour or something. We could afford that. And it's only one day we wanted. I was working at that time, both myself and Ian were working, so it wasn't a problem.
So we went to this house in a place called Handsworth which is in suburbia on the outside on the edge of Sheffield. Not a particularly big house, but like a detached house - new build. So we went in and said, “Where’s the studio?” He said, “Oh, this is the studio right here.” And so he brought out the four-track tape recorder and a little mixer, and we got the synthesizers, and it was like on a big coffee table.
Looking back on it now, it was the weirdest experience. It was like something out of a sitcom. We sat down in this front room and had a cup of tea and biscuits, and then started recording these abstract soundscapes with Adi mumbling over the top of them, reciting excerpts from J.G. Ballard and lyrics created by this lyric-generation system we’d invented called CARLOS, which meant Cyclic and Random Lyric Organisation System, which would generate these sentences from a list of prepositions, adjectives, nouns, verbs, et cetera – we were very influenced by William Burroughs’ cut-up technique, because we’d heard Bowie did that.
So we had it generating these lines and we just wrote down the ones that we liked, whatever they meant. And then maybe we would adjust them to fit the emerging theme. It was quite inventive.
Very do-it-yourself.
Sheffield is a making town. It sounds like a cliché, but it's a town full of makers, it's a craft-based town. It's in the atmosphere. And the other thing that's in the atmosphere of the town is to not overanalyse in advance, just get on with the fucking thing. Then you can analyse it afterwards. And that might sound specious. But it really was a driving force. It was like, be as free as possible with your ideas.
So this is the definition of Yorkshire futurism?
That's quite a good way of putting it. Pragmatic futurism.
Tell me about ‘Being Boiled’, how was it made?
We only had a stereo tape machine. So we had a sound-on-sound capability. So you could bounce from track to track and add as you went along. And that's how we made it. So it was in mono. But you can only do a certain number of bounces before the sound quality degraded. So you had to kind of do a little bit of planning in advance.
We got the rhythm going on the Roland System 100 and we were massively into Parliament, Funkadelic and Bernie Worrell and that kind of Black synthesis, so I said, “I can do a bassline on the Korg 700S that sounds a bit funky – only it’s going to be dead simple.” And those were the only instruments on the original version
So I did the bassline, which I thought it sounded like some kind of cop movie or something, and then there were the other kind of sequenced parts, which we had to record manually. There was no synchronisation. If it started drifting, we had to stop recording and start again.
It has one of the great introductions: “OK, ready? Let’s do it.”
A lot of Human League aficionados, I’d say the majority, would prefer the simple version [of ‘Being Boiled’], the first one [released as a single by independent label Fast Product in 1978]. But what was going on in our heads, my head in particular, was something much more epic and kind of impactful, which is why we remade it [in 1980].
You know, we were all listening to The Normal and ‘Warm Leatherette’, and I like all that minimalist stuff, but it does have severe limitations. So when we got the chance to redo it, we did, and that's more or less the version that we still perform live now.
What was your relationship to punk? You coexisted, but in different musical worlds.
I have to say that northern punk was different to southern punk, some people don't generally talk about this but it's very important to acknowledge the difference. Up north we regarded the Sex Pistols as, you know, a really exciting novelty act because we've been through glam, we've been through New York Dolls. I mean, we were enormous fans of Buzzcocks - much more creative as far as I was concerned. The Damned, I loved The Damned. ‘New Rose’, I wore it out.
We were punks for a while but the novelty quickly wore off. We just thought that, ultimately, it was just rock’n’roll. Then you had Eno essentially saying that rock’n’roll is dead and the future is DIY-style, all you need is a synthesizer, a two-track tape recorder and a microphone. So we took him at his word.
And also there's a motivating factor - before we formed The Human League, we performed on a bill with The Drones who were Manchester band, and god knows how we got on the bill - it was us and members of Cabaret Voltaire and Adi [Newton] and [Sheffield alternative band] 2.3.
We had one rehearsal, we had three songs. ‘Cock in My Pocket’ by The Stooges because we wanted to wind up the students basically, it was like a sport for us. So we did Cock in My Pocket’, the ‘Doctor Who’ theme and ‘Waiting for My Man’ or something. We've got the Cabs in the back with their VCS3 doing all the bleeps and bloops, I'm playing the fucking Stylophone, Glenn's playing a three-string bass and the drummer Haydn Boyes Weston from 2.3 was wearing a boiler suit with “Cut student grants” written on the back, just to wind them up. He had a bucket of pig's ears because he used to work in a butcher's and was throwing them out him into the audience.
The basic idea was we were going to show them what real punk was about. Anyway we were so bad that The Drones’ manager came on stage during the final song and whispered in Glenn's ear, because he was singing, saying “Excuse me, but The Drones want to come on now.” And the song turned into “The Drones wanna come on now”. And then we got kind of booed off and everything, half of the audience loved it as a kind of piece of conceptual art and half didn't.
And then we went off stage and we thought we might as well hang around and have a look what all the fuss is about with this Drones band. They were so terrible, if anything they were worse than us. And it was that kind of lightbulb moment – “We can't be any worse than these!” So we thought we might be able to put a record out in this environment. And also we were doing things like fanzines, there was this [Sheffield-based] fanzine called Gunrubber. So it was all this kind of creative maelstrom.
Expressing yourselves in any way that you could on limited resources.
Very limited resources, but actually that was part of the fun and the challenge.
Electronic punk, in a way, I suppose.
And then we got to tour with Siouxsie and the Banshees, which introduced us to a big punk audience, and that's where the record companies saw us placed, as kind of electro punks.
And did you see yourself like that?
Oh, yeah, definitely. Our good gigs were pretty punky. I mean, they were raucous. It wasn't all fine detail and elegant European sophistication - we were into distortion.
The first two Human League albums [‘Reproduction’ in 1979 and ‘Travelogue’ in 1980] range from the lyrically weird and dark with a dystopian sci-fi kind of feel to pop, but a really kind of twisted pop. Did you think at the time that you were making pop music or art music?
No, it wasn't meant to be art music. We're not trained musicians. Our basic idea was if we aim for a normal kind of pop song writing, but we use this ridiculously abstract palette, automatically it’s going to be interesting because you’re going to miss the target by a mile but where it lands might be somewhere unique. So that was really our MO really.
Access to more equipment and better studios, did that help you creatively?
Well, when we signed to Virgin Records, we bought our own studio equipment. And suddenly we had an eight-track and we had a mixing desk and proper monitors, you know, all that stuff; a few synths and outboard gear and all that. And if we'd have had free rein, we would have made the whole thing in our studio and presented it to the record label.
But they didn't trust us at that point. So what they said was, we want you to come down to our studio at The Townhouse, you know, Virgin Records' studio in Shepherd’s Bush, and record it all from scratch. And we said, ‘Well, if you want, yeah, why not?” We thought maybe this is how it's meant to be. So we did that. And they suggested Colin Thurston [as co-producer for ‘Reproduction’], who was producing some Duran Duran stuff at the time. And he seemed like a nice enough guy, so we thought, “Yeah, we'll have a crack at this.”
But he was more interested in refining the sound, which I was really not happy about. But we didn't have enough experience to deal with it. He was the co-producer, he was like the record company's man. And it all came out way too shiny for us. We wanted it more kind of rough-edged. He was good, but he was just not for us at that time. So when that didn't do as well as the record company had hoped, we said to them. “Look, we’ve got a lot more experience now. We want the records to sound much more edgy.” So ‘Travelogue’ is much more solid and less shiny.
And so basically, we recorded it all in our studio in Sheffield and then we still went down and mixed it in London. So it was definitely much closer to our vision of what we should sound like.
Did you consider these records artistically successful at the time?
Oh, yeah. We liked them. I think the songs are interesting. And you know, there's some very good performances and interesting textures. I’m much happier with ‘Travelogue’. I think we were heading in a very interesting direction. Then of course the split happened and the rest was history.
We wanted to be unique, you know? So we were willing to take a lot more risk because it was just built into the DNA of the group that if we didn't take risks, what were we doing it for? And that didn't really fit with the plans of the record company. They wanted to take Phil [Oakey] off and make him into a star and reconfigure The Human League so they can make loads of money.
There’s a great anecdote that I read somewhere about you wanting to do a tour without actually being on stage at all.
Yeah, it was advertised. It was all planned. We were going to support Talking Heads’ first national tour in the UK. And Kraftwerk at the time had just done a tour where they got robots on stage. And we said we can outdo that - we're not going be on stage at all. We had the slides and visuals, and our set was going to be an art installation - cinema you can dance to.
One of the things was we guaranteed to be in the audience every night and discuss with the audience what they thought about it and break down this fourth wall. And I think, as a piece of conceptual art, it's magnificent. And I'm surprised that they didn't go for it!
After the Human League split, you went on to do British Electric Foundation. When we you started it, was it was conceptualised in advance or did you just have the name and a vague idea of what you wanted to do?
Obviously when the split happened, it was very upsetting. I really don't want to go into that because it's well covered everywhere else. But the Bob Last [owner of independent label Fast Product] said, “Why don't you come up to Edinburgh [where Fast Product was based] and we'll discuss what to do next because I think I can get you a deal with Virgin with you and Ian as a production team in the studio. Because that's clearly where your best chance of success is, you've obviously got that thing going on.”
And I said OK, and he came up with this idea of being a production company, he said, “I think I can get you a deal with Virgin where you could be the songwriters and the producers for a bunch of different acts and you could sign with Virgin as a production company and that they would finance the making of multiple albums a year.”
That was actually the contract that we signed with the right to present them up to six acts a year, like a kind of mini-Motown thing. And we thought, “Wow this sounds amazing.” But then the kind of art bit in my head kicked in. I wanted it to be like a conceptual art project so I thought wouldn’t it be great if you could make it sound like this is an organisation that has existed forever and that you just never noticed it before. So we settled on British Electric Foundation.
And then a couple of days later I described what I wanted the logo to look like, I said I wanted it to look like a financial institution in Wall Street or in the City of London, where there's a brass plaque outside, I want the typeface to be like it's somehow carved into brass in a kind of Romanesque kind of typeface, bold, and then maybe something that indicates it has to do with music. So Bob and Hillary his wife went away and came up with the B.E.F. logo. And that's how it was done.
And the first B.E.F. record was quite an arty release really, wasn't it?
‘Music for Stowaways’. We were just completely going, “Right, we've signed to The Man, we've taken the money” - it wasn't a huge amount of money, but to our fans, it might have looked a bit like a commercial betrayal.
So because that still was a thing, we said, “Right, we're going to go steaming in, it’s going to be a cassette-only release, and it's just going to be instrumentals.” And so it's like putting a marker in the sand saying, “We're the bosses, creatively. We can do what we want.” Of course that's nonsense, but it felt like that anyway.
And we've designed the sleeve and everything with Bob, you know, the foldout sleeve. I took all the pictures, it was an art project. I really love ‘Music for Stowaways’ now, I think ‘Decline of the West’ is exceptional.
Then it was like an arms race to see who could get the first album out, us or The Human League.
You really felt that competition?
Massively! Yes! To say we were motivated is an understatement. One of the things we said to ourselves was that we are going to be the most directly pop thing you could imagine – all that stuff about, “Oh, we want to be cool outsiders,” went in the bin. So we were going to dress stylishly, do stylish videos, keep it electronically flavoured but with influences from Black American dance music, using things like funk bass guitar. We wanted to move away from the minimalist thing into a kind of a brave-sounding pop.
Obviously the motivation worked for you creatively.
Absolutely did!
I was just listening to ‘The Luxury Gap’ today. There’s a lot of funk influence going on there rhythmically.
The most direct influences at the time were Black American dance music, but also things like [jazz-funk band] the Brecker Brothers and their single ‘East River’, that was a massive influence on the sound that we were trying to achieve with this new version of what we were doing. If you listen to that song, that track is immense-sounding.
If you think about what is the sound of the eighties, ‘Temptation’ is one of those songs that is definitive of its time.
I know for a fact that as a producer, there was very little more we could have done. We were recording with the best co-producer we could find Greg Walsh, who had worked with people like people like Geoff Emerick, who worked with The Beatles at Abbey Road. He was trained on that he and recorded and produced Heatwave. So he was a massive expert on vocal arrangements, which we learned a lot from him on.
Greg was a massive influence on us because he basically opened up our perception to what was achievable within our kind of taste category. We'd always loved those records. But we'd literally got no idea we could achieve anything that sounded like it. Even though we were kind of amateurs, really self-taught, we had a good ear. And we always thought, if we aim for something and miss it, just using electronics, it is always going to sound interesting anyway. But now we were moving into a phase where the parameters have changed.
By this time we had the tools to make classic pop music and the budget to hire session players, orchestras and so on because the record company believed in our hit potential. We weren’t worried about our credibility, because we thought we’d pretty much established that with the early Human League and with B.E.F. So we had nothing to prove. It was time to take the brakes off.
At the time, some critics said that electro-pop was this kind of materialistic, even quasi-Tory music - artificial, meaningless entertainment.
Anybody who reads the lyrics must know that there’s a huge amount of socialist thought going into a lot of the subject matter. ‘This is Mine’ [from Heaven 17’s third album] is practically a socialist manifesto in disguise, about allying yourself with other people, and of course we had a song that was actually banned by the BBC for its politics [‘(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang’, which the BBC’s lawyers feared defamed US President Ronald Reagan by calling him a “fascist god”].
The eighties were a pretty tough time politically.
Margaret Thatcher was taking no prisoners. She had a very clear vision. It just happened to be completely dystopian and fucked-up.
But they were also peak years for electro-pop, and a lot of fantastic opportunities developed out of that for you – making a record with Tina Turner [‘Ball of Confusion’ on the 1982 B.E.F. album ‘Music of Quality and Distinction’], who would have thought it when you were recording in someone’s living room in suburban Sheffield?
Yeah. I always say to people that a large part of why this happened so quickly is because there was an appetite from the record companies to take a risk financially and creatively. There was there was an enormous amount of new money as well coming into the record companies, which they would have to pay a gigantic amount of tax on unless they recycled.
Then you had the start of the birth of CDs, and that was like North Sea oil for major record companies, they basically could resell all their back catalogue at a high price so they had all this money flooding in. So rather than pay tax on it, they just recycle it into signing up more and more acts. And so it was just like the Klondike. And we benefitted from that, it was very good time.
Tell me about the time when Heaven 17 played at Studio 54 in New York. Was it in the club’s peak period?
It was towards the end of it. Anyway, we were doing the ‘Penthouse and Pavement’ album. We’d wanted to do things differently in the UK to promote ‘Penthouse and Pavement’, so we did something that was really quite radical at the time, we said we want to do personal appearances, not with a live band, but to backing tracks in nightclubs in different cities around the UK. We did that and it was surprisingly well received.
I think we were just promoting some stuff in the US when the album came out, and we were asked, “Would you like to do a PA in Studio 54?” “Fucking A, yes, 100 per cent!” Well, that was our target market - you know, the kind of people who loved disco and wanted to know what the next stage was in the evolution of dance music.
Anyway, so we went there. And we were there in our suits and our fedoras and all that stuff, no idea how it was going to work. We just had a backing tape and some lights and stuff. We went on stage and everyone in the club was completely off their tits. Cocaine everywhere, everybody drunk. Lots of famous people in the audience.
We came on and it was madness. Madness. I've never seen anything like it. There were lasers, glitter cannons. It was just a completely insane lotus-eating environment. And we were the only people who weren't in an altered state in the entire club, because we thought, we can't fuck this up, so we've not had a drink and everybody else is completely gone. Yeah, it was good fun.
Interview in two parts by Matthew Collin for 'Dream Machines', November 8 and 9, 2021.
Photo: Cover of 'Electronically Yours Volume 1' by Martyn Ware.
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