HEAVEN 17 will forever be called a Sheffield band, but Martyn Ware and Glenn Gregory both live in Primrose Hill and the rest of their band are in London too.

“But I come up to Sheffield quite a lot because I’m a Wednesday fan” says Martin, still glowing at Sheffield Wednesday pipping steel city rivals United for promotion to the Championship this year.

Sheffield unquestionably shaped the electronic band’s seminal first two albums, Penthouse & Pavement and The Luxury Gap, records from the combustible Thatcher years that addressed politics, fashion, war and industrial decline as well as that old staple, sex.

“It’s been well documented; I believe growing up in an industrial environment, where the sounds associated with the steelworks – the drop forge and heavy industry – were part of the everyday sounds we lived with and had an impact on us,” says keyboard player Martyn, now 56.

“I am sure they influenced the found sounds and weird industrial noises we were drawn to; sonically they were the sounds we fell in love with as we looked up at the stars from the gutter and thought of escape when we had very little to rub together.”

He recalls entertainment in Sheffield in those early Eighties’ days being “very passive”.

“Whereas in London, there was so much to see and experience, and the temptation in London would be to experience that, but in Sheffield you had to do it for yourself,” he says. “We’d pay a fiver a week for a warehouse to rehearse in and we could set up our studio in there!

“And Sheffield was a bolshy place, a place with an attitude that ‘we’re going to do it anyway’. In Sheffield, people were more doers than thinkers, though I like to think we were thinkers too, but the prevailing factor was that it was a place of less strategy, more action.”

Later this year, Heaven 17 are to play The Luxury Gap in its entirety – Temptation, Crushed By The Wheels Of Industry, Come Live With Me, Let Me Go et al – on an autumn tour that will include one Yorkshire show, a home-city date at the Sheffield 02 Academy on October 27.

“It was like we had one shot at getting into the big time, and luckily that album was successful all over the world,” says Martyn. “And if you’re lucky enough to have one song that’s as successful as Temptation was, then great! You can go into a pub and everyone knows it!”

So much so that Plusnet Broadband commandeered Temptation for an advert featuring Heaven 17 and some reet Yorkshire brass. “They asked us to do it; we thought it was funny, and they gave us lots of money!” says Martyn. “There’s nothing more profound to doing it than that!”

Charles Hutchinson • Heaven 17 play The Duchess, York, tonight, and MFest, Harewood House, Harewood, near Leeds, on Sunday.