Ahead of Heaven 17’s performance at this year’s Electric Summer festival in Somerset, frontman Glenn Gregory shares the influences that have shaped his life and career
SHEFFIELD STEELWORKS
“My dad worked at one of Sheffield’s big steelworks, and we would sometimes go there when I was little. It was just really exciting and kind of a fever dream, seeing all the fires and the splashing steel – so completely unreal, and a very dangerous job.
“You could constantly hear the power hammers steelworking, 24 hours a day. It was like Mordor in the background – like a massive battle going on, and you even got a glow actually. There was always a constant, almost fake sunset, ’cos of all the furnaces and the fires and the lights. Did that kind of industrial power ingrain in me a love of electronic industrial music? The heavy beat, and deep rhythm? I’d like to think it did.”
ART GALLERIES
“The more beautiful side of Sheffield is where the museums are. In the centre of town, there’s a place called Graves Art Gallery. I would go there and just have a look around. There was another one in Weston Park, a big park with a boating lake, the Mappin Art Gallery [now closed]. The Graves is more classic – big oils, masters and grandeur, and a kind of unreachable worldliness – but they would fascinate me, those paintings.
“In the Mappin, it was much more sculptural, much more modern art and a lot more accessible. When I was 14, I started to get to know some different kinds of people, and we would meet up in the art gallery thinking we were very Dada/Duchamp, and that we knew a lot more than we did. It began to open doors – to get a glimpse that perhaps there was something else out there.”
RECORD SHOPS
“Around the same time, Virgin Records opened a store on the edge of town. It was something completely new. Downstairs, there were records that you’d never heard of – bands like Gong. They’d just sell very interesting esoteric music, and you’d go in and listen. There was also a second-hand record and book store called Rare & Racy. They would always be playing things like John Coltrane or some weird old jazz record. I used to absolutely love it in there. It was such a cool, enigmatic shop.
“I remember buying an album by Faust, and when I took it home and put it on the record player, my mum and dad were like, ‘What the hell is this?’. It was one of those moments where you think, ‘I’m growing up. I’m getting my own taste’.”
SCHOOL
“School was more of an anti-influence. I went to a very rough comprehensive, and it wasn’t very useful. But there was an assembly one morning, and the teacher read out that a theatre arts workshop was starting up in Sheffield. He said, ‘It’s Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Is anybody interested?’. There was a little spark in my brain that just lit, and I said, ‘I’m interested, sir’.
“I went along, and it was called Meatwhistle. It was the changing of my life – the changing of many people’s lives. That’s where I met Martyn Ware, where I met Ian Craig Marsh, loads of friends who wanted to become actors, artists or writers… so many different things. So school gave me the push I needed to realise I had to go and do something else.”
FESTIVALS
“The very first festival I went to was in Weston Park. It was like Woodstock. I was 14 or 15 and I was probably smoking banana skins. There’s something about festivals that is just joyous and I love playing them.
“Heaven 17 are performing at Electric Summer in Taunton, which is a great place for it. It’s in August and it’s definitely going to be hot. I love a festival because you get to see lots of different bands, so it’s a good introduction to music as well.”
GLAM, FUNK, COUNTRY AND PUNK
“Glam was great fun. There was a lot more open-mindedness. In Sheffield, you’d get big, burly steelworkers dressing in silver Lycra and three-star tank tops going out on a Friday night and just being really camp. I still love glam, and now I realise that those songs were really well-written and produced.
“Roxy Music were very important to me. Funk has always been there too. I’ve always been interested in black dance music. That was very important, especially when we started Heaven 17. Country touches my heart sometimes. I guess I’m an old romantic in some ways. I just can’t help it, it’s a guilty love. There have been a couple of times in my life when I thought, ‘Shall I just do a country album?’. Maybe I should.
“Before Heaven 17, I was in a band called Musical Vomit. In her book, Poly Styrene said that she saw us live, and ours was the very first punk band she’d ever seen. I’d like to thank punk for opening up the playing field, and for making us realise that we could actually probably do this record business thing.”
PHOTOGRAPHY
“After art school, I was taking pictures of local bands but thought, ‘If I’m going to be anywhere, I’ve really got to go to London and do it there’. I went into the offices of NME and Sounds and said, ‘Hi, I’m Glenn from Sheffield. I’ve been taking some pictures of local bands there, but I’ve recently moved to London’. They said, ‘Come back in a week and show us what you’ve done’, so I did.
“They started giving me jobs. I went back to Sheffield to take some photos of Joe Jackson for the NME and coincidentally phoned Martyn Ware up and said, ‘I’m here for a couple of days, do you fancy meeting up and having a beer?’. He said, ‘Yeah, are you around tonight?’. And I said, ‘Let’s meet in the Red Lion’. Martyn came in and told me, ‘The Human League have just thrown me out of the band, and I’m fucking furious. Would you be interested in coming back to Sheffield and forming a new band with me and Ian?’. Five days later, we had written and recorded ‘(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang’.
“Photography made me leave that sphere, but it was photography that got me back into bands again.”
