The first B.E.F. art-i-fact was a cassette-only minialbum of instrumental music called Music for Stowaways, peppy synth music designed for Sony’s portable cassette player (then called Stowaway, later renamed Walkman), which had recently come on the market. Stowaways bore the clear imprint of Last, as it was essentially an electronic remake of the Fire Engines’ Lubricate Your Living Room. According to Marsh, the idea was also inspired by “moving around London on the tube, going to meetings, working all over the place, and listening to music on these Stowaways. It made you feel like you were in a film all the time. Everyone takes that for granted now, but you can’t imagine how big an impact it had, almost on the level of something like virtual reality. So our concept for Stowaways was ‘a soundtrack for your life.’ We mixed it on headphones, not speakers, so that it would sound good on portable players. And it was a limited edition, ten thousand copies, cassette only.”
Styling themselves as a corporation was just part of B.E.F.’s antirockist polemic. They talked of abandoning the idea of music as a world-changing force and accepting it as “just a medium for enjoyment,” as Ware put it, something that enhanced your everyday life, like Stowaways. “That’s one of the biggest myths ever, that pop music changes the world,” Ware declared. “It’s just a confection.” Ironic, then, that the first release from Heaven 17 was the full-blown protest song “(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang,” written in the gap between Ronald Reagan’s election in November 1980 and his inauguration early in 1981. “Fascist Groove Thang” received a huge amount of press attention in the U.K. and its catchy-as-hell electronic ersatz of disco funk looked set to chart big, but the BBC grew nervous that the lines “Reagan’s president elect/Fascist guard in motion” were actually libelous and an unofficial Radio One ban effectively halted the single’s rise just short of the Top 40. Heaven 17’s next single, the brilliant “I’m Your Money,” was also something of a consciousness raiser, transposing the language of business onto love and marriage (“I’m offering you the post of wife”) à la Gang of Four’s “Contract.” The group may have seen music as “just entertainment,” but they seemed unable to refrain from slyly slipping some Entertainment!-like elements of subversion into their glossy-surfaced pop.
Heaven 17’s pop was superlatively shiny, almost intimidating in its precision-tooled panache. To differentiate themselves from the Human League, Ware and Marsh developed a pop funk that merged state-of-the-art electronics with real bass and guitar. For “Fascist Groove Thang” they wanted a jazzy, syncopated bassline similar to the bass break in Chic’s “I Want Your Love.” “We found this local Sheffield musician, John Wilson, a black guy who was only seventeen,” recalls Marsh. “We told him what we were after and he did it on the spot, almost first take.” Wilson’s bass and rhythm guitar ended up all over the “funky” side one of Penthouse and Pavement, Heaven 17’s debut album.
Penthouse’s other secret weapon was the Linn Drum Computer, the same rhythm machine used by Martin Rushent to make the Human League competitive. “Literally within a fortnight of that technology coming into the country, it was all over our album,” says Ware, who did the rhythm programming. “I didn’t know how to play conventional drums, so I did whatever I liked the sound of.” What resulted were amazingly funky beats that didn’t resemble an acoustic drum kit at all. Also crucial to Penthouse’s crisp, in-your-face sound was the “dry” (meaning reverb-free) production. Without the “wetness” of sound reflections, the listener doesn’t get an aural picture of a band playing in a real acoustic space. But Marsh and Ware didn’t believe in rock’s pseudonaturalism. They preferred the pop artifice of constructing records in the studio. So they mixed Penthouse to sound good through the single mono speaker of a cheap transistor radio. The first, “funky” side of Penthouse “sounded fantastic on the radio,” says Ware. “It just punched out amongst everything else.”
Behind Penthouse’s sonic attack lay genuine aggression. After being kicked out of the Human League by his old friend Phil Oakey, Martyn Ware was hopping mad. He was also hopped up on creative energy. Stowaways and the bulk of Penthouse were recorded in a single burst in the weeks immediately following the split. The second side of Penthouse—which was more electronic, an extension of the original Human League—was done in just one week. “I was incandescent with anger,” says Ware. “And sometimes it just pours out of you, the ideas.” Along with competitive sparring with Oakey’s League to see which group would get on the charts first, Penthouse songs such as “Play to Win” were also driven by an urge to throw off the shackles of Northern working-class inverted snobbery, Sheffield’s traditional “begrudgery,” as Ware puts it, toward those who move down south to London to become big shots.
“Aspiration is the thread running through the entire album,” says Ware. “At its deepest psychological level, Penthouse is about breaking free from home, breaking free from the constrictions of a society and going out into the big wide world. Coming from the background that Ian, Glenn, and I did, it wasn’t a given that we’d ever get the opportunity. We could all have ended up working in a steelworks or some grim office job.” The title track, “Penthouse and Pavement,” concerns the paradoxes of middle-class people trying to be “street credible” and working-class people wanting to rise to the top. “That song is about social inequality, but also about the excitement of actually trying to make it. Not necessarily becoming rich, which is how it was interpreted wrongly by many people. I still get these ex–City of London finance traders telling me, ‘Oh yeah that song really inspired me when I was in the city.’” For these sons of socialist Sheffield (Ware even believed in nationalizing the banks), the ambivalence of their aspirational imagery was obvious. But to others, the distinction between Thatcherite values and what Heaven 17 were celebrating was not clear at all.
These ambiguities came to the fore with Penthouse’s witty cover image: a painting, based on a corporate advertisement Marsh found in Newsweek, depicting Heaven 17 as pin-striped executives discussing business plans and negotiating deals. On the front, the B.E.F. logo appears above the slogan “The New Partnership—That’s opening doors all over the world,” while the words “Sheffield. Edinburgh. London” were placed directly under the Heaven 17 brand name.
Posing as a multinational was simultaneously send-up, wish fulfillment, and an act of rock criticism. “We were debunking the mythology of the musician as this wandering minstrel who gets ripped off by the record company and gets paid to take drugs all the time,” says Ware. “A reality check. Bob Dylan may think he’s a rebel, but he’s actually a multinational asset. Anybody who signs to a major label is part of a huge business machine. The idea was, Let’s get rid of all this hypocrisy of ‘we’re artists, we don’t care about the money.’ Let’s strip the facade bare and have a look at what’s underneath: handshakes, signing contracts, busy-ness.” B.E.F. aimed to demolish other rock myths, too. They had no interest in performing live and limited the promotion of Penthouse to appearances in discotheques where they lip-synched to tapes. Says Marsh, “That whole set of ideas to do with expressivity, contact with the audience, community, I was against that right off the bat.”
Penthouse and Pavement “sold over a hundred thousand copies, roughly ten times more than either Reproduction or Travelogue,” says Marsh. There were no hit singles, which pained Ware and Marsh as they watched the Human League’s runaway success. Still, earning their 1 percent off Dare’s sales of five million salved that wound a little. Besides, in the critical and hipster sense, Penthouse was a monstrous success. “That record was absolutely ubiquitous in a way that went far beyond its actual chart profile,” recalls Last.
Still rolling off their initial burst of momentum, Ware and Marsh launched straight into the next B.E.F. project, Music of Quality and Distinction Volume One. Like Penthouse, it continued Ware’s mission to show that it was possible to make “synthetic music with soul.” This time around B.E.F. put themselves in the role of producers and arrangers. The Quality and Distinct
ion concept was twofold. It consisted entirely of pop classics remade by B.E.F., and most of the songs were collaborations with different famous singers. One could see the whole project as an essay about pop, celebrating the Tin Pan Alley/Brill Building/Nashville tendency to maintain strict separation between songwriter, singer, and producer. Ware and Marsh rejected rock’s raw expression and aligned themselves with pop classicism. “We were fans of the genius producer, people like Phil Spector,” says Ware. “We loved the idea of assembling something of great beauty, almost like sonic architecture.” But beneath Quality and Distinction lurked a deeper psychological subtext. By elevating the producer’s role as auteur, Marsh and Ware slyly implied that Martin Rushent had everything to do with the success of Oakey’s new League.
Quality and Distinction played some neat pop-crit games. Sandie Shaw covered “Anyone Who Had a Heart,” a tune originally associated with her rival, Cilla Black. Billy Mackenzie attempted to out-sing his idol/prototype David Bowie on a remake of “The Secret Life of Arabia” from Heroes. But apart from Tina Turner’s tour de force take on the Temptations’ “Ball of Confusion,” the new versions failed to surpass the originals. As a unified listening experience, Quality and Distinction felt flat and motley, and the original plan to release the entire album as a series of double-A-sided singles was cut short when the first few failed to get anywhere near the charts.
B.E.F. celebrated dry, radio-ready production, but another kind of aridity seemed to fatally permeate B.E.F.’s work, at least as far as their pop prospects were concerned. The lingering antimystique postpunk spirit kept them from being a group that everyday fans took to heart. “We don’t think it’s healthy for people to hold up fairly ordinary people as some kind of demi-god,” Marsh told NME, rejecting the very forces of identification and projection that animate pop culture. At the end of 1982, B.E.F. found themselves faced with an embarrassing quandary. Having styled themselves as a corporation, a hit factory churning out perfect consumer product, what were they to do when hardly anyone was consuming their products?
Despite its defects as a listening experience, Quality and Distinction could claim to be a seminal exercise in postmodern pop. At the end of the seventies, postmodernist concepts started filtering down from academia to the music press. In rock, the opposition between modernism and postmodernism corresponded neatly to the after-punk vanguard of PiL, the Pop Group et al. striving strenuously for total innovation versus the retro-eclectic approach shared by 2-Tone, Postcard, and Adam Ant. As a sensibility, postmodernism also eroded the certainties and knee-jerk reflexes of a certain kind of rockthink rooted in binary oppositions like depth versus surface and authentic versus inauthentic.
Postpunk’s struggle to avoid escapism and superficiality had led to either hair shirt propaganda (the Pop Group) or the existential abyss (Joy Division). Giddy with relief at jettisoning these twin burdens of guilt and despair, journalists such as Morley celebrated “the transient thrill” of disposable pop. They trashed well-meaning and meaningfulness in favor of hedonistic paeans to consumption and polished product. And they challenged the implicitly masculine critical hierarchies that despised the synthetic and mass produced.
This gender-coded shift from “rock” to “pop” sensibility was in many ways a flashback to glam. In the early seventies, David Bowie and Roxy Music had managed to bridge the ever widening gap between singles-focused dance pop and album-oriented art rock. They made “serious” music that was also playful and image conscious. Roxy Music, especially, wove together futuristic elements and period evocations, while Bowie (with Pin-Ups) and Bryan Ferry’s solo albums explored the creative possibilities of the cover version to the hilt. Glam, in fact, had been postmodernist long before the term had currency outside art theory circles.
New Pop involved a renaissance of glam’s interest in artifice, androgyny, and all the delicious games you could play with pop idolatry. Perhaps the climax of all these tendencies was the bizarre critical apotheosis of Dollar, a schlocky male/female duo that had already garnered a smidgen of campy love from hipsters for their sheer plasticness even before they teamed up with producer Trevor Horn.
Horn started 1981 as a has-been, despite having scored a number one hit in sixteen countries with the Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star” two years earlier. After two unsuccessful Buggles albums, he and partner Geoff Downes joined Yes for one album and a tour. Dollar were Horn’s ticket back from the brink of irrelevance. An accomplished musician who’d been in a youth orchestra and could sight-read from a score, the producer hated punk rock. For him, the true sonic revolutionaries of the late seventies were Kraftwerk, Donna Summer, and Abba. Accordingly, Horn’s concept for Dollar was to Moroderize the group’s M.O.R. Taking the duo’s fabricated fakeness to an almost conceptual extremity as if they were a work of pop art, “Hand Held in Black and White” and “Mirror Mirror”—the first two singles he cowrote and produced for them—dazzled the ears with their futuristic hypergloss. Dollar became hugely hip. And so did Horn.
ABC loved the Dollar singles and they were looking for a producer to help realize their sonic dream of fusing symphonic disco, nouveau Roxy, and piercingly intelligent lyrics. By the end of 1981, a year after Morley’s New Pop feature introduced them to the world, the Sheffield group had managed to get a major-label record deal, but their music fell short of their aspirations. Their October 1981 debut single, “Tears Are Not Enough,” sounded scrawny, a mere demo for the spectacular sound they wanted. On Top of the Pops, singer Martin Fry wore a gold lamé suit, but it didn’t sit right on his hulking frame. His dancing was awkward, his presence lacked authority. From sound to visuals, ABC were not yet walking it like they talked it. So they turned to Horn.
“Steve Singleton from ABC said to me, ‘If you produce us you’ll be the most fashionable producer in the world,’” laughs Horn. “I was really taken with that, the arrogance of it.” ABC told him they wanted to make “superhuman” records. Horn agreed to produce the band’s second single, “Poison Arrow.” It took him a while to grasp what the band wanted to achieve, a collision between the orchestral disco splendor of a Gloria Gaynor and the word-twisting lyrical depths of an Elvis Costello. “It dawned on me as I was working on the record—and this is what I’d tell people at the time—‘It’s like Dylan, except it’s disco music instead of an acoustic guitar.’ The guy’s writing about what he really feels, but it’s gonna be played in a dance club so it’s gotta have the functional quality of disco.”
A lavish tempest of melodramatic grand-piano chords, thunderous drums, and synth parts simulating string sweeps and horn fanfares, “Poison Arrow” sounded like a million bucks had been spent on it, and yes, it sounded superhuman. At its core, though, lay the DIY principle—not so much “anyone can do it” but “anyone can be a star.” And ABC did it. “Poison Arrow” went Top 10 in Britain. The next single, the even more magnificently appointed “The Look of Love,” which had real strings, angelic backing vocals, tympani, and trumpets, did even better, making the U.K. Top 5 in June 1982 and the Billboard Top 20 not long after. Both “Look of Love” and “Poison Arrow” (which was actually released after “Look” in America, where it was also a Top 30 hit) garnered lots of play on the fledgling MTV channel, thanks to ABC’s witty, glitzy videos.
To help him create the majestic sound ABC desired—James Brown meets Nelson Riddle’s Sinatra—Horn assembled a crack squad that included Anne Dudley, a classically trained keyboard player and arranger, and engineer Gary Langan, both of whom had worked on his Dollar records. ABC were actually capable musicians, and the tunes they’d written remained at the core of it all, but Horn and Dudley were given carte blanche by the group to embellish and expand upon these kernels. “ABC weren’t the least bit precious about their songs,” recalls Dudley. “They were eager to embrace everything, totally open to making it as exciting and epic as possible. Another big reason why the album sounds so lush and bright is Gary Langan’s engineering and mixing.”
The album
was named The Lexicon of Love, and with good reason. Fry reveled in wordplay like a Cole Porter chronically addicted to puns and alliteration, mixed metaphors and perilously extended tropes. But what, underneath Fry’s fizzy wordplay, were ABC actually about? “Tears Are Not Enough” sounded almost like a New Pop manifesto (no time for wallowing or whining, strive and take pride) disguised as a song about heartbreak. Other ABC songs were more like metapop, playing games with pop’s cliché-encrusted lore of love. “The Look of Love” echoed Bacharach and David, “Many Happy Returns” quoted the Zombies’ “She’s Not There,” and “Valentine’s Day” harked back even further to 1930s Hollywood with its climactic lines, “If you gave me a pound for all the moments I missed and I got dancing lessons for all the lips I shoulda kissed/I’d be a millionaire/I’d be a Fred Astaire.”
The echoes of prerock showbiz carried through to the whole look of ABC’s records. Each single featured a sleeve note penned by Fry, an homage to the period (roughly pre-1967) when all long-playing records had them. To complete the atmosphere of bygone elegance, ABC added cute period touches, such as the little box informing the purchaser how to get the best out of the record (“Don’t use a faulty or worn stylus…. Keep it clean by wiping it with an antistatic cloth”) and the slogan “Purveyors of Fine Product,” located next to the logo for Neutron Records, ABC’s imprint through Phonogram.
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