Track of the Week: Heaven 17: Crushed By The Wheels Of Industry (1983)

Heaven 17 - Crushed By The Wheels of Industry


Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh left The Human League in 1980, shortly before the League conquered the world with the pop smash 'Dare', ironically because they were frustrated with their former group's lack of commercial success. Ware and Marsh formed the British Electronic Foundation (B.E.F.) in order to ironically masquerade as a company manufacturing commercially successful pop products - both men being socialists angered by Thatcher's rise. And the B.E.F.'s major concern was Ware and Marsh's new group, Heaven 17 formed with vocalist Glenn Gregory. Heaven 17 made smart, groovy electronic pop that dealt with issues of the day - their debut single, '(We Don't Need This) Fascist Groove Thing' was banned by the BBC for fear that lines like 'Reagan's president elect / Fascist guard in motion' would be construed as slander. 'Crushed By The Wheels Of Industry' is the single and stand-out track off their second album, 'The Luxury Gap'. The song is driven along by crunching electronic dance beats and the chorus' irrepressible 'Whoo! Whoo!' hook which, when allied to lines like 'It's time for a party / Liberation for the nation now!', make it sound like a care-free party anthem. The rest of the lyrics, however, deal ironically with the selfish and career-driven materialism of the Yuppie lifestyle. The song ironically celebrates the ability to 'Have what you desire if and when you see the fact / They will lead us to the land of milk and honey' before reminding us that, if you want the money, you have to 'Work all day or work all night, it's all the same'. The character in the song is trapped as a cog in a machine, but doesn't fully realise it - the song's outwardly positive demeanour and upbeat tune hides the blandness of a life where 'Before we go to work we'll have planned the day ahead / We'll while away the working day together.' He is too focused on furthering his career to see his true position, but the nagging doubt - represented by the song's frenetically funky and insistent beat, and the desperate, repetitive chorus - is always somewhere in the back of his mind. This is further brought out by the fantastic, if somewhat dated music video, which you can watch above, in which the band play confident looking business executive types who, by the end of the song, are showing the strain of exhaustion and overwork despite desperately trying to maintain a cool facade ('So play it cool and don't get excited' indeed). It's also coupled by images of the band's faces superimposed onto machines to hammer the point home. Heaven 17 were a great, innovational band, but they would never again sound as good after this single, and their tendency to criticise that which they ere fighting against by dressing up as the enemy would irritate a lot of people who shared their political beliefs and thought that the boys should be more sincere. As the hit singles dried up and the Great British Record Buying Public lost interest, Heaven 17 and B.E.F. were increasingly unable to compete in a competitive market place, and so Marsh and Ware's vision of B.E.F. as a hit factory selling superior pop product collapsed. In fact, one could almost say that the band was crushed by the wheels of the music industry. That's irony for you.