Heaven 17: how we made Temptation

Martyn Ware, composer, songwriter and keyboardist

In 1981, the BBC banned (We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang, fearing it libelled Ronald Reagan, the US president. It ended up a minor hit, stalling just outside the Top 40. So with Temptation, we went for the jugular.

I’ve always been fascinated by the mixture of real instruments and electronica. It sounds commonplace and banal now, but in the early 80s this was new. Temptation was our fullest expression of this, even though it started as a very simple idea on an organ, using escalating chords to create a feeling of rising sexual tension.

Virgin, our label, gave us a blank cheque. We had the best studio the best engineers and the best producers. When I rang them up and said, “Can we have a 60-piece orchestra?” they just said, “Yeah, go on then.” It wasn’t even questioned. There was more optimism then about the money records could make. You couldn’t imagine that happening now.

John Wesley Barker did the orchestration because I don’t read music. I do everything by ear. I told him I wanted something sweeping and expressionistic, a bit like the theme of that epic 1950s western The Big Country. We wanted it to have the rhythm of a Motown record, but with the twist that it was programmed. It still works great live. Things always kick off when Temptation comes on. We could go to an old people’s home and have them out of their chairs.

Glenn Gregory, singer and songwriter

Temptation was written in a grotty little basement flat I had in Ladbroke Grove, west London. We dubbed it the South Yorkshire embassy. I remember sitting on the sofa howling with laughter when Martyn walked in and said he had this great idea for a song based on the Lord’s Prayer with a never-ending chord structure. He already knew it was going to be called Temptation, and the line “Lead us not into temptation” was in there from the start. But the rest of lyrics, as always with Heaven 17, resulted from us sitting there debating every line.

We wanted to contrast my futuristic, humanoid-sounding vocal with a more emotional female one. While I was in the recording booth working on the line “I’ve never been closer / I’ve tried to understand”, Martyn was urging me: “Push it harder – make it really strident.” We tried several people for the female part, include Jodi James, Stevie Wonder’s backing vocalist, but we wanted something grittier.

When Carol Kenyon came in and tried it we just went: “Yes!” Stratospheric is the only word for her style. Unfortunately, there was a bit of a disagreement over appearance money, so when it came to making the video we had to replace her with another girl, who happened to be a Page Three model and couldn’t sing a note. Everyone thought it was Carol, but it’s not. When we perform it today, Billie Godfrey sings her part. When she hits that high C, I just look at Martyn and think: “How do they do it?”

The Motownish tambourines were programmed by Martyn using a LinnDrum. And the backing chorals were just me and Martyn multitracking ourselves. We’d do five takes of seven-part harmonies. Perhaps it was unnecessary, but I think it made a difference.

Oddly, Virgin weren’t sure if it would be a hit, and did several remixes of it in New York. We just said: “Absolutely not, no way, trust us, this is the one.” We performed it with La Roux at Glastonbury a few years ago, before a 30,000-strong audience of mainly 20-year-olds, and it was like they were all Heaven 17 fans. It never fails to blow the roof off.