[1] Ian Craig Marsh and Martyn Ware were the founding members of pioneering Sheffield synthpop group the Human League; Glenn Gregory (who had previously been in a punk band called Musical Vomit with Marsh) had been their original choice when seeking a lead singer for the band but as he had moved to London to work as a photographer at the time, they chose Ware's school friend Philip Oakey instead.

[2] When personal and creative tensions within the group reached a breaking point in late 1980, Marsh and Ware left the band, ceding the Human League name to Oakey.

Whereas the band's former colleagues the Human League had gone on to major chart success in 1981, Heaven 17 struggled to make an impact.

Their debut single "(We Don't Need This) Fascist Groove Thang" attracted some attention and was banned by the BBC due to concerns by Radio 1's legal department that it libelled Ronald Reagan, who had recently been elected President of the United States.

[5] Neither "Fascist Groove Thang" nor any of the three other singles taken from the band's debut album Penthouse and Pavement reached the UK Top 40.

Around this time, Ware and Marsh produced two further albums as B.E.F., the first being Music of Quality & Distinction Volume One featuring Glenn Gregory, Tina Turner, Paula Yates, Billy Mackenzie, Hank Marvin, Paul Jones, Bernie Nolan, and Gary Glitter.

The second album was Geisha Boys and Temple Girls for the dance troupe Hot Gossip, which used songs formerly recorded by the Human League and Heaven 17, and a track each from Sting and Talking Heads.

In the United States, their self-titled Heaven 17 album was a re-working of Penthouse and Pavement with three songs deleted and replaced by "Let Me Go", "Who'll Stop the Rain", and "I'm Your Money" (along with a different mix of "The Height of the Fighting").

American and Canadian new wave audiences were most familiar with "Let Me Go", which received high rotation airplay on alternative rock and new wave format radio stations such as Los Angeles, California's KROQ-FM, and Long Island, New York's WLIR, an CKOI-FM (Montreal), a regular Top Ten station, and additionally, frequent MTV exposure.

guise and assisted by Greg Walsh) helped relaunch Tina Turner's career, producing, and providing backing vocals on her hit "Let's Stay Together", a cover of the Al Green song.

Gregory, meanwhile, went on to form the band Honeyroot[14] with Keith Lowndes, then Ugly with John Uriel and Ian Wright .

A CD composed entirely of remixes of the song "Hands Up to Heaven" from the album reached number six on the US Billboard Hot Dance Club Play chart in May 2006.

In October of the same year, Virgin Records issued a greatest hits compilation album entitled Sight and Sound, which included a previously-unheard version of "Temptation" with spoken vocals by an unknown student from Germany whom the band met in 1982.

She performed as part of the band on 21 November 2008 for their highest profile TV appearance of recent years on Now That's What I Call 1983 on ITV1.

[21][22] In the run up to their 30th anniversary, the band announced several dates in which they would perform their 1981 debut album Penthouse and Pavement live in its entirety for the first time.

The band performed a couple of dates of the Penthouse and Pavement tour in March 2010, one of which was in Sheffield and was filmed and shown on BBC Two on 16 May 2010.

The dates included venues in Liverpool, Birmingham, Glasgow, Gateshead, Manchester, Bury St Edmunds, Basingstoke and London.

enlisted Mari Wilson, Glen Matlock (Sex Pistols), and Peter Hooton (The Farm) to present new arrangements of songs from the B.E.F.

[28] In late 2018 Heaven 17 gigs in Liverpool, London, Bristol, Glasgow, Manchester and Sheffield celebrated the 35th anniversary of The Luxury Gap album.

[30] In September 2021 the group performed the first two Human League albums Reproduction (1979) and Travelogue (1980) in Sheffield and London with long-standing collaborator Malcolm Garrett providing live visuals on stage.

Ware responded "Go fuck yourself", citing the estimated US$8.6 billion revenue earned by the game's predecessor, Grand Theft Auto V.[32][33][34] Naomi Pohl, the general secretary of the Musicians' Union, felt Ware's reaction was unsurprising and said the game's high profile would not necessarily translate to higher exposure for the song, noting that "streaming doesn't sustain careers".