Ad for the album Penthouse and Pavement by Heaven 17
Artwork by Ray Smith (Virgin Records 1981)
I.
It's interesting to ask why some musicians who might have strapped themselves into a pair of bondage trousers in 1977, suddenly started wearing formal business suits in the early 1980s and subscribing to an entirely different sartorial code ...
One possible answer, put forward by punk stalwarts The Clash, is that new groups were not particularly worried about récupération, i.e., the process whereby the radical ideas, images, and practices of punk were absorbed into mainstream culture and commodified for the market place.
Dressed for success, these new groups embraced the idea of transforming rebellion into money and laughed all the way to the bank [1].
II.
However, if that's true of many new groups who preferred to be thought of as post-punk, it wasn't true, argues Ian Trowell, of Heaven 17 ... An English band, from Sheffield, who combined "Yorkshire awkwardness, conceptualist pranking [...] and an attention to visual detail" [2] with a commercial electronic dance sound [3].
Not wanting to be pigeonholed and hoping to subvert clichéd ideas of what a band in 1981 should look like, these socialist synth-popsters wore expensive-looking suits "designed to confuse the expectations of anti-conformity-conformity ushered in by a 'cookie-cutter' punk uniform" [4].
By deliberately styling themselves as businessmen - albeit with a certain youthful swagger - they emphasised that the music business is a business and that recording artists are simply cogs in a money-making machine.
This idea is further reinforced, as Trowell reminds us, by the cover design for Heaven 17's debut album, Penthouse and Pavement (1981), shown above, which amusingly hijacks the visual language of the corporate world [5].
III.
So: Heaven 17 were not real yuppies - and, in fact, Trowell convincingly argues the case that they were not even parodying the yuppie look and ideology; that this is a contemporary misremembering.
For although the word yuppie first appeared in print in 1980 [6], it was then just a neutral demographic descriptor for a class of young urban professionals.
It wasn't until the middle of the decade that the term became fully conceptualised in the sense we understand it today and its use became widespread in the media to refer (almost always negatively) to a "fashionable go-getter who fetishises a luxury business suit and lifestyle" [7].
As Trowell also amusingly notes at the end of his piece, in a Melody Maker feature on the band from October 1981, lead singer Glenn Gregory is compared to Michael Heseltine, not Bud Fox [8].
Notes
[1] Récupération is a core concept in Situationist thought, particularly as developed by
Guy Debord, and it is seen as one of the main methods by which dominant powers maintain control.
I'm referring here to lyrics (written by Joe Strummer) from the 1978 single by The Clash '(White Man) in Hammersmith Palais' (CBS Records): The new groups are not concerned / With what there is to be learned / They got Burton suits, ha! you think it's funny / Turnin' rebellion into money.
There's an irony, of course, in being lectured on the perils of selling out by a band who signed the previous year to a major American label for $100,000.
[2] Ian Trowell, 'Let's All Make a Bomb: Heaven 17 and the Yuppie 1980s', in SIG News, Issue 4 (UAL, September 2025), p. 4.
Ian Trowell is an independent writer and researcher who has published in the fields of punk and post-punk, fairground culture, fashion, photography and art. He recently published Throbbing Gristle: An Endless Discontent (Intellect Books, 2023). He also regularly publishes work on Substack: click here.
[3] Heaven 17 were a trio consisting of Martyn Ware (keyboards, drum machine, supporting vocals), Ian Craig Marsh (keyboards), and Glenn Gregory (lead vocals). Ware and Marsh had originally been founding members of the Human League and Gregory had
previously sung in a punk band with Marsh called Musical Vomit.
The groups's name was taken from a fictional pop
band mentioned in Anthony Burgess's dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange (1962). Whereas Phil Oakey's Human League went on to achieve major chart success, Heaven 17 struggled to make a similar impact. Their debut single '(We Don't Need This) Fascist Groove Thang' - taken from the album Penthouse and Pavement (Virgin Records, 1981) - was banned by the BBC but became a minor hit (reaching 45 in the UK singles chart). A remastered version from 2006 can be played on YouTube by clicking here.
The funny thing is, this was one of the few songs I remember taping off the radio at the time and I used to play it endlessly (even though synth-pop was never really my cup of tea and I wouldn't have considered for one moment actually buying the record).
[4] Ian Trowell, op. cit., p. 5.
[5] Essentially, to employ another term drawn from the Situationist handbook, this is an act of détournement; i.e., one involving the appropriation, reimagining, and recontextualising of existing cultural elements in order to subvert their original meaning and expose their inherent ideology.
[6] The
first time the word yuppie appeared in print was in a May 1980 Chicago magazine
article by Dan Rottenberg. He would later admit, however, that he had heard other people use the term and hadn't coined it himself. [7] Ian Trowell, op. cit. p. 5.
[8] Michael Heseltine was then Secretary of State for the Environment in the Thatcher government; a somewhat flamboyant figure - always well-dressed with coiffed blonde hair - he had earlier enjoyed a long and successful business career.
Bud Fox is a fictional character in Oliver Stone's Wall Street (1987); a young, ultra-ambitious stockbroker played by Charlie Sheen.
