Electric Dreams: Electric Reality
On Monday 8th December I went to Hammersmith Apollo to see Heaven 17, the Human League (aka the Human Leg) and ABC on the Steel City Tour.
Yes - I was in the same room and Martyn Ware! And Glenn Gregory. (Ian Craig Marsh was absent.)
I became transfixed by Heaven 17 in 1992 when the Temptation Remix hit the charts, and before too long I was listening to old tapes of The Luxury Gap and Penthouse and Pavement on my dusty cheap 1980s Walkman. I even had a couple of teenage dreams that I saw them in concert, back in the days when Heaven 17 didn't do gigs. In the dreams, they always looked different and older, so maybe they were premonitions of sorts. It was very exciting finally to see them perform, even though the sound mix was not always ideal - on some songs the synths were too quiet and there was occasional unintentional disortion / interference. It did feel rather as though the synths took backseat to the powerful vocals of the new backing singers. But they played all the perennial favourites - including "Let Me Go", which is one of my favourite songs EVER. I knew every song they played so well (except for the one from "Before After", the most recent album - it was one the tracks I always skip).
Sandwich between the Humans and the Heavens were ABC: I have long liked the small number of ABC songs I know well, and they played all four of them. "All Of My Heart" was the stand-out track. Martin Fry was not gold lamé suit-clad, but he was in good voice and during "The Look Of Love" he did say that all his friends would STILL say "Martin, maybe one day you will find true love..."
The Human League were mindblowing. They opened with "Seconds", complete with old-style giant clock radio timers in front of the stage counting up the seconds. I have listened to that track about twenty times on my ipod over the past week. The sound was excellent, and I was surprised how strong and excellent Phil Oakey's vocals were. They even played some of the earlier "Martyn Ware era" Human League tracks like Empire State Human and Being Boiled. There were visual displays to accompany all the tracks some powerful (A Clockwork Orange-style images - actually it was from A Clockwork Orange that Heaven 17 got their name); some tongue in cheek (the lyric bubbles during Love Action). As with the other bands, it was a greatest hits collection, which was exactly what I wanted - although it would have been the icing on th cake if they had played Heart Like A Wheel! Just when we were wondering what they could possibly play as their final encore, the familiar synth intro of the Giorgio Moroder-written Together In Electric Dreams rang out, and it made for an uplifting ending to the night of 1980s Sheffieldian synthpop.