Glenn Gregory

Sheffield to the Human League's Wreckage

Glenn Gregory was born on 16 May 1958 in Sheffield, the son of a steelworker, Howard Gregory. He wanted to act before he settled on photography, and was working behind a camera in London rather than in front of a microphone when his career turned. Music had already been part of his life since 1973, when, still a teenager, he sang and played bass alongside a Sheffield friend, Ian Craig Marsh; a tape of one of their earliest shows, made in 1977 under the name VDK and the Studs, resurfaced decades later after a fan found it in Frankfurt.

Marsh went on to form the Human League with Martyn Ware. When Ware and Marsh split from that group in 1980 to build a new project under their own production company, British Electric Foundation, they called on their old friend Gregory to sing. He joined as lead vocalist in 1981, at which point Heaven 17 had begun life as a studio-only outfit with no plans to play any of it live.

The Records That Mattered

The gamble worked quickly. Penthouse and Pavement, the debut album released in 1981, reached number 14 on the UK chart and went gold. Two years later, The Luxury Gap became the group's commercial peak: it reached number 4 and was certified platinum, driven by "Temptation," which climbed to number 2 on the singles chart, and "Come Live with Me," which reached number 5. How Men Are followed in 1984, reaching number 12 and going silver, though Gregory said in a 2025 interview that the album's £300,000 production budget wasn't recouped until the early 2000s.

Gregory's voice also turned up outside the group that year: he was among the singers on the original Band Aid single, "Do They Know It's Christmas?," released in November 1984. The run of hits didn't last, though. Pleasure One (1986) and Teddy Bear, Duke & Psycho (1988) sold poorly and were reviewed harshly, and Heaven 17 effectively stopped operating as an active band by the end of the decade.

Seventeen Years Before the First Gig

For all its chart success, Heaven 17 didn't perform live at all until 1997 — sixteen years after Gregory joined — when the reunited group took a support slot with Erasure. Before that, their only appearance in front of an audience had been a mimed performance on the television programme The Tube in 1982. The 1997 reunion also produced the album Bigger Than America, followed in 2005 by Before After, the group's most recent album of new songs until now; in total, Heaven 17 released eight studio albums between 1981 and 2008.

The lineup changed along the way. Ian Craig Marsh, the founding member alongside Ware, went missing from the group in 2006. He resurfaced early the following year to say he no longer wanted to perform, sat out every gig in 2007, and was absent again from Heaven 17's Steel City Tour in 2008 — after which Ware acknowledged that Marsh was no longer an active member. Gregory and Ware have carried on as a duo ever since.

Where Things Stand in September 2026

On 10 April 2025, at his flat in north London, Gregory made a public promise: a new Heaven 17 album — the group's first collection of original songs since Before After — would be finished within a year. Ware's reaction, in the same conversation, was pointed scepticism, noting that Gregory had said as much before. The single that came with the pledge, "Something About You," kept the group's synthesiser identity while working in newer production; whether the finished album met Gregory's self-imposed deadline hasn't been confirmed publicly.

Touring carried on regardless. In November 2025, Gregory and Ware went out on a UK tour billed as Sound With Vision, built deliberately as the spine of a feature documentary directed by James Strong. Rather than a conventional band film, it is being shaped around the fans who follow the group from show to show, some of them to dozens of gigs a year; the film is aimed at release by the end of 2026.

This September, Gregory is also touring in a second capacity. He is the vocalist for Holy Holy, the David Bowie live show fronted by Bowie's longtime producer Tony Visconti and Spiders from Mars drummer Woody Woodmansey, which announced on 10 April 2026 what it is calling its final run of dates, "The Final Tour – A Celebration of Bowie." Confirmed dates include Belfast on 29 September 2026, with further European shows either side of it.

Behind both of those, Heaven 17's own diary points to October: a twelve-date UK tour marking the 45th anniversary of Penthouse and Pavement opens in Wolverhampton on 8 October 2026 and closes at Leeds Beckett Students' Union on 23 October, taking in Cardiff, Bexhill, London's Shepherd's Bush Empire, Manchester, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Sheffield, Norwich, Northampton and Liverpool. Tickets went on sale on 1 May 2026 through Absolute Radio Tickets. Announcing the tour, Gregory called the record "the best album they ever made."

The Show Today

The same production had already crossed Europe earlier in 2025, with shows in Munich, Berlin and Bochum that January before UK dates followed in May. A gig at Chalk in Brighton on 25 May 2025 gives a fair picture of the current show: there was no support act, the set ran for just under two hours, and it opened with "Crushed by the Wheels of Industry" before moving through "(We Don't Need This) Fascist Groove Thang," "Play to Win," "Come Live with Me" and "Temptation," with covers of Bowie's "Let's Dance" and the Human League's "Being Boiled" worked into the running order. On stage, Gregory was backed by Ware on synths and vocals, Florence Sabeva on keys and laptop, and Rachel Meadows and Hayley Williams on backing vocals.

The visual side leans theatrical rather than nostalgic: Ware appeared in a silver jacket and matching trousers with a sparkling silver-topped hat, while Gregory wore black with a white jacket he shed after the opening number. Between-song banter between the two of them is a fixture of the show, and the crowd frequently answers back. That loyalty became part of the performance itself at the Brighton gig, when Gregory singled out a fan known as Sumo, marking his 250th Heaven 17 concert, and had him presented with a T-shirt to a chant of his name from the room.