Quality and Distinction: Heaven 17 and British Electric Foundation

The first release from Heaven 17 was a full-blown protest song, "(We Don't Need This) Fascist Groove Thang", written in the gap between Reagan's election in November and his inauguration early in 1981. "Fascist Groove Thang" received a huge amount of press attention, and its catchy-as-hell electronic ersatz of disco-funk looked set to chart big. But the BBC grew nervous that lines like 'Reagan's President Elect/Fascist guard in motion' were slanderous and an unofficial Radio One ban effectively halted the single's rise just short of the Top 40.

Heaven 17 - (We Don't Need This) Fascist Groove Thang 1981


To differentiate themselves from The Human League and put distance between Heaven 17 and the overdone synthpop sound, the duo of Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh developed for the debut album Penthouse and Pavement a pop-funk that merged state-of-the-art electronics with real bass and guitar. For "Fascist Groove Thang" they wanted a jazzy, sincopated bassline similar to the bass break in Chic's "I Want Your Love".

Chic - I Want Your Love 1978

Heaven 17's next single, the brilliant "I'm Your Money", was also something of a consciousness-raiser, transposing the language of business on to love and marriage ('I'm offering you the post of wife') à la Gang of Four's "Contract".

Heaven 17 - I'm Your Money 1981

Songs like "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, towards those who move to London to become big shots.

Heaven 17 - Play to Win 1981

The album's title track concerns the paradoxes of middle-class people trying to be 'street-credible' and the working classes wanting to rose 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.

Heaven 17 - Penthouse and Pavement 1981

These ambiguities came to the fore with Penthouse's witty cover image - a painting, depicting the group as tie-wearing executives discussing business plans and negotiating deals, based on a corporate advertisement Marsh found in Newsweek. On the front, the logo of the production company BEF (British Electric Foundation) appeared 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 a 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 façade bare and have a look at what's underneath - handshakes, signing contracts, busy-ness'.

The next BEF's project, Music of Quality and Distinction, Volume One, consisted entirely of pop classics remade by BEF and most of the songs were collaborations with famous singers. It played some neat pop-critical games. Sandie Shaw covered "Anyone who Had a Heart", a tune generally associated with her sixties rival Cilla Black; Billy MacKenzie attempted to outdo his idol/prototype Bowie on a remake of "The Secret Life of Arabia" from 'Heroes'. But, apart from Tina Tuner's tour de force take on The Temptations' "Ball of Confusion", the new versions failed to surpass the originals.

BEF presents Billy MacKenzie - The Secret Life of Arabia 1982


BEF featuring Tina Turner - Ball of Confusion 1982

PiL's third: Flowers of Romance

A breakthrough of sorts occured several days into the sessions for recording of PiL's third album, Flowers of Romance. Instructing the engineer to keep the tape rolling no matter what, Levene tapped out some percussion patterns on a strange bamboo instrument that Virgin boss Richard Branson had brought back from Bali, then added synth sounds ('the animals' inside the percussive jungle, as he puts it). The result, entitled "Hymie's Him", was the weakest track on Flowers of Romance, but it broke the deadlock and gave the group a direction.

PiL - Hymie's Him 1981

Flowers is the PiL album on which Lydon the non-musician contributes most - he actually plays instruments, like the three-stringed banjo on "Phenagen" (a track named after a heavy-duty sleeping pill). On Flowers, Levene's guitar appeared only on "Go Back" (self-parodically) and "Phenagen" (psychedelically reversed).

PiL - Go Back 1981


PiL - Phenagen 1981

Summoned at the studio to lay down beats, Atkins found Lydon and Levene weren't there. So he worked closely with engineer Nick Launay to create striking rhythm tracks. 'I'd fallen asleep with my Mickey Mouse watch against my ear and then woken up to that sound. So we put the watch on a floor-tom skin so it would resonate, and then Nick harmonized, looped and delayed that sound, and I drummed to it, and that became "Four Enclosed Walls".

PiL - Four Enclosed Walls 1981

Atkins was also heavily involved in the album's stand-out track, "Under the House" - a stampeding herd of tribal tom-toms with string sounds shrieking across the stereo field. Lydon's processed vocals seem to emanate from his throat like malignant gas or ectoplasm. The lyrics allude to a supernatural experience - some accounts claim it's about a ghost that haunted the Manor studio, although Levene believes it refers more to an abstract sense of evil to which Lydon was unusually attuned.

PiL - Under the House 1981

The title track on the album lived up to [NME writer] Vivien Goldman's hype about PiL inventing 'a new kind of rhythm'.

PiL - Flowers of Romance 1981

Released as a single in March 1981, "Flowers of Romance" reached number 24 and resulted in another deranged Top of the Pops performance: Levene pounding the drums in a lab technician's white coat, PiL's videographer Jeanette Lee dwarfed by her double bass, and Lydon, dressed as a white-collared vicar, sawing dementedly on a fiddle.

PiL - Flowers of Romance (Top of the Pops) 1981

Such was PiL's eminence that when the album finally arrived the next month, it was automatically hailed as another paradigm-shattering masterwork. More sceptical commentators, though, noted the distinct lack of work involved - from the paltry length (thirty-two minutes) to its desultory packaging (a Polaroid of Jeanette Lee with a rose between her teeth).

Of the leave-me-alone whinge "Banging the Door", Lydon later said, 'It's horrible to listen back to that kind of paranoia'.

PiL - Banging the Door 1981

A creepy account of being seduced by a female journalist, "Track 8" is particularly repellent, its vindictive imagery of fleshy tunnels 'erupting in fat' and naked, bulbous bodies betraying Lydon's Catholic fear of the flesh.

PiL - Track 8 1981

PiL - Public Image (First Issue) - Side A

Lydon and his colleagues overhauled their image, purging anything redolent of punk clichés and instead wearing tailored suits. This anti-rock 'n' roll image culminated with Dennis Morris's artwork for PiL's debut album, fashion-magazine-style portraits of each member of the group, immaculately coutured and coiffed. Lydon appeared on the front under italian Vogue lettering, while the reverse saw Wobble sporting a debonair 1920s lounge lizard mustache.

The album was uncompromising, throwing the listener in at the deep end with the nine-minute death wish dirge "Theme", a near cacophony of suicidal despair and Catholic guilt, with Lydon howling about masturbation as mortal sin.
It was nothing if not an orgy of twisted guitar virtuosity, Levene generating an astonishing amount of sound from a single guitar.

Pil- Theme - 1978


Next up was the anticlerical doggerel of "Religion I"/"Religion II" (a blasphemous ditty written for the Pistols and originally titled "Sod in Heaven"), followed by the hacking thrash funk of "Annalisa", the true story of a German girl who starved to death because her parents believed she was possessed by the devil and turned to the church rather than psychiatrists for help.

PiL - Religion I - 1978


PiL - Religion II - 1978


PiL - Annalisa - 1978