Bands of Our Lives: Heaven 17

Have you heard it on the news / About this fascist groove thang / Evil men with racist views / Spreading all across the land

The first Heaven 17 song I heard was “Let Me Go,” the lead single from their second album, The Luxury Gap, released in the fall of 1982 when I was starting my freshman year in college. I was hooked. I’m a fiend for great synthesizer use in general and for a tasty synth bass line in particular, and that fat, rhythmic peddle tone that opens the track went straight to my veins.

Music Leads the Way

This means I heard the second album before the first, and so getting hipped to the band’s politics took a little longer. A full decade before American Pyscho was published (and six years before Oliver Stone’s film Wall Street was released), Heaven 17 debuted with their LP Penthouse and Pavement. The album cover has drawings of the band members in slick suits and hairdos, conducting important and lucrative business that seems to have something to do with music, and everything to do with capitalism. The A side was the “Pavement” side, the B the “Penthouse” one. The first track was “(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang.”

In the great dawning of the music video age, for a single that made it into the top 50 in the UK, there apparently was never an official video made for this song. The likely reason seems that the BBC banned it from radio play because they were afraid of libeling Ronald Reagan:

Reagan’s President Elect

Fascist God in motion

Generals tell him what to do

Stop your good time dancing

Train their guns on me and you

Fascist thang advancing

In the face of a possible second term from a doddering, demented, dangerous fascist buffoon, and the end of meaningful federal elections and democracy, this shit hits even harder than it did in 1981, and if you didn’t live through the context of that year, it included everyone listening to Sandinista!, “O Superman,” and “The Message.”

There’s more:

History will repeat itself

Crisis point we’re near the hour

Counterforce will do no good

Hot you as I feel your power

Hitler proves that funky stuff

It’s not for you and me girl

Europe’s an unhappy land

They’ve had their fascist groove thang

Footlose is Freedom

This is how you make political music: be blunt but have a sense of humor, be confident, and give the body something, make people dance and sing against fascism and rapacious capitalism. A crowd swarming Danceteria because they’ve been grabbed by this tremendous dance song:

I remember being out there, everyone singing loud to the chorus. This is the power of people. And it’s people who save societies, especially when governments and institutions abdicate their responsibilities to the world around them and timorously try to save themselves. In the early ‘80s, there was at least the morale-building illusion that this was possible—with the apexes of the People Power Revolution in 1986 and individual citizens bringing down the Berlin Wall. Again, if you don’t have memories of this, it might be hard to see through how today synth-pop and dance music have been manufactured down to a fine grain and feel the thrill and power of popular musicians speaking directly to you about the world:

The fascists want to control your hips. We live in an era where credulous sycophants love to quote one line from 1984 because their only idea of freedom is to say the n-word without being criticized. They have’t actually read the book, of course, because the fundamental point is that the pleasures of life and living are freedom, and thus the enemy of fascism. Winston and Julia’s most profound revolutionary act is to have sex—Winston’s not even a revolutionary, he’s just wants a basic human thing. And O’Brien’s climactic message states it plainly:

“There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always…there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless.

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”

But to get to that you have to read through the book, and I can see that’s a challenge to some, including probably the billionaire owners of the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post who have lovingly presented their faces for boot-stamping.

The Politics is the Point

Martyn Ware, Ian Craig Marsh, and vocalist Glenn Gregory founded Heaven 17. Ware and Marsh had also started The Human League, but split from that and it seems explicit to me that making political music was the point. The Human League never had anything more than a mild effect on me, and the enduring pleasure and meaning of Heaven 17 is the opposite of the original group’s thin pop cheesiness.

And on the pure pop side Heaven 17 were just better. “Let Me Go” still kicks ass. They were also plain interesting. “Geisha Boys and Temple Girls” on Penthouse and Pavement starts with a synth intro that is fair to mistake for an experimental Buchla modular etude, and has a remarkable baroque synth obbligato-solo inside it.

Following a few years after Edsel Records’ release of their comprehensive Heaven 17 box set, this year they reissued the first two albums in fine deluxe packages. These are 2-CD sets that come in a facsimile 45rpm sleeve that folds open with album info and lyrics. The second CD is a collection of demos, B sides, and of course, because this is music meant for dancing, the extended dance remixes. That’s the best part for any Heaven 17 fan, and really for all us, dancing against fascists, because while those fuckers want to stamp on the human face forever, they can't dance in those boots.

Bonus Track

In 1983, Depeche Mode—another great and enduring band—came out with this all-time banger. This is what I mean by music leading the way: in just a few minutes and just a few words they capture everything and more that’s in Wall Street and American Pyscho, and rather than having you sit there viewing or reading, they give you something to do, which is dance. The medium is the message, and when you move your body to it, it becomes part of your politics. I love this live performance from the late ‘80s; it’s remarkable how much youth and joy they have, and those vocal harmonies …

These synthesizers kill fascists. Good listening to all.