A founder member of The Human League, Martyn Ware went on to form Heaven 17, one of the most influential synth-pop acts of the 1980s.
Now Martyn Ware is sitting in the MusicRadar interviewee hot-seat, recalling how the early days of the band paved the way for a decade of innovation.
“We deliberately set out to make something timeless, that you couldn’t attach to a particular period,” Martyn told us of Heaven 17’s debut album, Penthouse and Pavement, in our wide-ranging new interview. “A lot of other eighties records have aged poorly because they were more throwaway, but we had a different mindset. Which sounds ambitious but that is what we told ourselves back then.”
First forming the band after splitting from The Human League’s Phil Oakey, the Sheffield-born Ware and fellow HL member Ian Craig Marsh created Heaven 17 with vocalist Glenn Gregory and immediately relished their newfound liberation.
“Starting Heaven 17 was like being set free from prison,” Ware tells us, “[First single] (We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang was the first track we did and it meant a lot as all three of us [including vocalist Glenn Gregory] were political. It was a forbidden subject during the early days of The Human League. They were great but much more sci-fi and metaphorical.”
On that blinding debut album, which is marking its 45th anniversary this year, Martyn remembers that the gear in play was cutting-edge at the time…
“We used the Linn LM-1 drum machine which had just come out,” he says. “You could create a rhythm which was so accurate, similar to the electronic regularity of a band like Kraftwerk.
“[(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang] has an important message which unfortunately still resonates today,” Martyn explained. “We were like the Nostradamuses of synth-pop. Looking back, I’m eternally grateful to Virgin for putting their faith in us. With Penthouse and Pavement, we were a slow-burning act even though we didn’t have any big hits on that first album, we were in the top 40 for 45 weeks. They took a gamble on us and it paid off.”
Read our full interview with Martyn Ware here. Heaven 17 continue to tour.
