HEAVEN 17 - THE FUTURE NEVER WENT AWAY AT O2 RITZ MANCHESTER
O2 Ritz Manchester – 14TH October 2026
WORDS HARRY K / IMAGES ANDI CALLEN
Some bands age gracefully. Others get wheeled out every few years like an old photograph, dusted off, held up to the light and sold back to the people who remember when the future looked different. Heaven 17 have always been too strange, too sharp and too politically switched-on to fit comfortably into that second category.
At the O2 Ritz in Manchester, Martyn Ware and Glenn Gregory brought Penthouse and Pavement back into the room, reminding everyone that the early eighties weren't just about dodgy haircuts, shoulder pads and synthesizers that sounded like a microwave having an existential crisis. There was something far more interesting going on: a collision between electronic experimentation, dance-floor funk and a distinctly British suspicion of the people running the show.
And Heaven 17 were never particularly interested in keeping their opinions to themselves.
Opening with (We Don't Need This) Fascist Groove Thang, they went straight for the jugular. Forty-five years on, its title remains a provocation, its groove still has teeth, and its political anger hasn't exactly become redundant. If anything, the world has spent the intervening decades providing the song with an endless supply of new material.
This is the thing about Heaven 17. Beneath those synthesizers lies a band that understands the relationship between politics and the dance floor. You can make people move their feet while giving their brains something to chew on. It's a trick plenty of contemporary acts could stand to learn.
The anniversary tour puts Penthouse and Pavement centre stage, revisiting the record that established Heaven 17 as one of the more adventurous outfits to emerge from Britain's post-punk underground. Tracks including The Height of the Fighting, Let's All Make a Bomb, Soul Warfare and Play to Win demonstrate just how much muscular rhythm and restless invention they packed into their electronic machinery.
This was never music interested in disappearing politely into the wallpaper. The beats have purpose, the arrangements have attitude, and the lyrics refuse to surrender to the idea that pop music should simply make everything feel better.
Then there's Geisha Boys and Temple Girls, a reminder that Heaven 17 could make something danceable without sanding away its oddities. The electronics aren't merely decorative; they're the architecture. Ware builds the machinery, and Gregory brings the human element, turning these carefully constructed songs into something more than an exercise in musical archaeology.
The title track, Penthouse and Pavement, sits at the heart of the evening's concept. The phrase itself captures the band's fascination with class, aspiration and the distance between the people looking down from the penthouse and those trying to get by on the pavement below. It remains an uncomfortably familiar picture of Britain.
And that's why this music still matters. These songs belong to a particular moment, but they aren't imprisoned by it.
The material from The Luxury Gap provides another reminder of Heaven 17's ability to make intelligent pop music without draining the life out of it. Come Live With Me and Crushed by the Wheels of Industry broaden the picture, while Let Me Go leads towards the band's most irresistible territory: the point where a clever arrangement becomes an undeniable physical experience.
Then comes Temptation.
There are songs that belong to their era, and there are songs that somehow escape it. Heaven 17's signature hit is the latter. Its mixture of desire, danger and immaculate pop construction remains a formidable combination. The trick isn't simply reproducing a familiar chorus; it's remembering that the song was always a little bit decadent, a little bit unsettling and considerably smarter than its reputation as an eighties dance-floor favourite might suggest.
The wider set also draws on the band's connections to the electronic revolution that preceded them, with Being Boiled, the early Human League classic, underlining the musical lineage that helped shape Heaven 17's sound. A version of David Bowie's Let's Dance adds another layer to a set built around the meeting point between art-school experimentation and pop's great appetite for a groove.
The danger with an anniversary tour is that the past becomes a museum exhibit. Everything is preserved, labelled and presented for inspection. But the best of Heaven 17's music was never about preservation. It was about possibility: the belief that electronics could open up new territory, that pop could carry political ideas, and that a record could make you dance while quietly rearranging the furniture in your head.
The world that produced Penthouse and Pavement has changed beyond recognition in some ways and barely changed at all in others. The machines are different, the technology has become ubiquitous, and the future has arrived carrying an extraordinary amount of expensive nonsense. But the questions underneath these songs remain stubbornly alive.
Heaven 17 didn't need to pretend they were young men again. They needed to remind us why these songs mattered in the first place.
On that score, the music makes a compelling argument.
The future never went away. It just got a lot more expensive.
Verdict: An anniversary tour with something more substantial to offer than nostalgia: a reminder that electronic pop can have a brain, a backbone and a bloody good groove.
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