Martin Fry of ABC takes one look at the steel girders, rusty stairwells and
derelict warehouses that can be seen from the roof of the building in east
London where he’s having his photo taken, and his prehistory as a pioneer
of rumbling proto-electronica comes flooding back. “It’s like Sheffield up
here,” he laughs, remembering a time when Britain’s fifth city was
synonymous with terms such as “bleak” and “industrial”.
Another rangy singer from an early-1980s South Yorkshire funk-pop crew, Glenn
Gregory, arrives with his Heaven 17 colleague Martyn Ware, while a fourth
man in a suit, also being photographed, stands a few yards away.
He is flanked by two women — one blonde, in a little black cocktail dress, the
other brunette, with a hint of goth — and his head, which once sported
the nation’s most famous haircut (notable for its asymmetric fringe),
is now shaved. When Gregory catches sight of the trio, he wants to burst
into song. “Every time I see Phil [Oakey] and the girls, I start singing
Don’t You Want Me,” he says, humming the synthesized bass refrain to the
Human League’s 1981 hit.
There was a time when the whole country, indeed much of the planet, was
singing the songs of the Human League, Heaven 17 and ABC. Between 1981 and
1984, hits such as Don’t You Want Me, Love Action, Temptation, Come Live
with Me, Poison Arrow, The Look of Love and All of My Heart provided the
perfect soundtrack to love and dancing. They put Sheffield on the map; it
became the thriving centre of melodic synth-pop and smart white funk.
Two decades ahead of Franz Ferdinand, Bloc Party et al, these were records
designed by musicians from the alternative sector, destined for high-street
clubs. They helped effect the shift from dark, dolorous post-punk to the
bright new pop world of Smash Hits and MTV. Little did those Smash Hits
readers know that all three groups, before becoming exponents of escapist
fantasies, were making an extreme electronic racket, using ideas gleaned
from art-house movies and underground comics, and sounds that followed
punk’s “noise annoys” dictum, but with synthesizers, not guitars.
Gregory was doing time with Musical Vomit (described by Poly Styrene of X-Ray
Spex as the first punk band); Oakey, Ware and fellow studio boffin Ian Craig
Marsh were still all together in the Human League; while Fry joined the
League acolytes Vice Versa. Ware had a motto, “Destroy all guitars”, to go
with the League’s menacing synth mantras and dystopian world-view. They
oozed future dread even as they proposed a way forward for rock’n’roll.
Suddenly, Sheffield’s seven hills were alive with the clatter and hum of
this rudimentary computer pop. It was a quite different response to life in
a northern town from the one you get these days from purveyors of trad indie
rock such as Sheffield’s Arctic Monkeys. “Well, we’re not professional
northerners,” Ware says. “That’s a bit disrespectful to Arctic Monkeys,
because they’re really good, but it’s a bit like being a professional
cockney.” The League didn’t use local colloquialisms to sing about “riot
vans” and “mardy bums”, not because they were removed from that milieu, but
because, as Ware says: “It was too depressing to sing about.”
No less working-class than today’s guitar-toting poet ruffians, Ware got
a job as a trainee manager with the Co-op, then as a computer operator.
Gregory, part of the multimedia arts and theatre company Meatwhistle, would
turn up with the other Human League members during Ware’s night shifts and
throw parties while he operated his computer. “That,” he explains, “is where
we got the idea of us as these technological beings.”
It is also where they got the notion that, musically speaking, the future
would be synthesized — harsh, cold sounds, created on keyboards, reflecting
a harsh, cold environment. “Sheffield has always been infused with
industrial sounds,” Ware says. “I remember lying in bed with the windows
open and hearing the steel forges going all night. That continual industrial
soundscape must have bled into our psyche.”
Being in Sheffield as it experienced a catastrophic decline in the steel
industry proved advantageous for the League. “There were lots of these
small, grubby industrial units dotted all around the city,” Ware recalls.
“You could get rehearsal space for a fiver a week.”
Like the punks in London and elsewhere, they were being resourceful, finding
ways out of the poverty trap — but there the similarities end. “We
were never really punk,” says Susan Ann Sulley, who, along with Joanne
Catherall, joined the League after Ware and Craig Marsh left to form Heaven
17. “Punk was too aggressive.” It was also, for Ware, deeply old-fashioned,
with its guitars, bass, drums and predictable chord structures. Yet punk’s
DIY ethos did appeal to Sheffield’s synth-futurists. “We were what punk set
out to be,” Sulley says. “It was a load of people who didn’t have much
musical talent getting together and DIY-ing it all the way through. We
didn’t go to music school or art school; we just said, ‘We believe in this.
We can do this.’ ” According to Oakey, the League’s lack of musical prowess
was a blessing. “We didn’t play any instruments,” he says, “so we
constructed our records using synthesizers and computers. We were the first
programmed group.”
They were programmed to destruct: in late 1980, they split in two after it was
decided that no single act could accommodate Ware and Oakey’s warring egos,
so Ware and Craig Marsh pursued an electronic-funk direction with Heaven 17,
while Oakey recruited his director of visuals, Adrian Wright, and the girls,
and created the synth-pop Abba. As for Fry, he left behind the burbling
synths of Vice Versa to form ABC, casting himself as a sort of post-punk,
post-disco Sinatra, employing the producer Trevor Horn to realise his
impossibly grand schemes for a new-romantic pop. While Heaven 17, with their
parent company, British Electric Foundation, reimagined the pop group as
corporation, presenting themselves as ponytailed businessmen on the sleeve
of their debut album, Penthouse and Pavement, and the Human League were
being subversively glamorous on the cover of their third LP, Dare, ABC
offered an ironic take on luxury with their lavish first album, The Lexicon
of Love.
“It was a different age,” says Fry of ABC’s slick, sophisticated dance sound,
which aspired to the polish and grandeur of Michael Jackson’s recordings
with Quincy Jones. Compared to today’s gritty guitar bands and their musical
vérité, ABC were “much more aspirational. There was a lot to escape from in
the late 1970s and early 1980s. It was grim”.
It was Sheffield’s grimness that made ABC, the League and Heaven 17 so
desperate to escape, via their rich fantasy pop, both their home town and
the rock tradition. “We were influenced by krautrock, Giorgio Moroder’s
sequenced dance music, disco, glam — anything but rock,” Oakey says. “We saw
it as our mission to get away from that.”
Ware has similar thoughts. “Our thrusting futurism was all about our
desperation to get out of Sheffield,” he says. “We were providing an
optimistic example for our peers, saying, ‘You can get out of this mire.’
And that fitted with our anti-hippie idea. It was part of our mission to
destroy rock’n’roll.”
ABC, too, were about escapism and extravagant ambition, but their aesthetic
was misconstrued as materialist indulgence, especially after they made their
commercial breakthrough at the dawn of the yuppie era. Really, though, it
was about self-reinvention: lopsided haircuts, gold lamé suits, ponytails
and all. “It was big choruses, big hair, big shoulder pads, big everything,”
Fry says. “But that’s because our generation lacked self-esteem. We thought
we were invisible. That’s why it was so peacock and loud. But it was all
home-made — it was all from jumble sales.”
Now, 30 years on, a new generation of synth renegades is forming in Sheffield,
distressed by the luddite conventions of Arctic Monkeys and their ilk, and
inspired by the futurist spirit of the early League. Bands such as Pygmy
Globetrotters, Darlings of the Splitscreen, Hiem and Kings Have Long Arms
are using junk-shop keyboards and cheap laptops to offer a digital update of
budget analogue pop. “There’s a great DIY vibe up here in
Sheffield,” says Ian Turley, of Pygmy Globetrotters. “We’re not about having
hits; we’re about not having much money, it’s raining most of the
time, someone’s got a studio, so let’s have a party.”
It’s a party, Turley says, with a capital A-R-T. “It’s not geared towards
filling a dancefloor, it’s about making electronic music that we like in our
bedrooms.” And it wouldn’t have been possible without synth-pop’s crucial
three, who tour together this winter in a bid to reaffirm their electro-terrorist
roots. “Heaven 17, ABC and the Human League are the founders,” he says.
“People say punk was the big change, but to people in Sheffield, they are
the pioneers. They’re as important to us as the Sex Pistols.”
The Steel City Tour begins in November
