Have you heard it on the news?/ About this fascist groove thang/ Evil men with racist views/ Spreading all across the land.

It is 1981 and in pop everything is in play. The hair shirt of punk has been cast off and young men are playing with new sounds, new instruments. Electronics are in, being avant garde is cool, but wanting hits is OK too. The music press has started to describe the post-punk desire to be on Top of the Pops as “entryism” .

Reagan is in the White House, Thatcher is in Downing Street. You can write political songs on synths now. You can write love songs too. And you can be the son of a miner, believe in socialism and still call yourself a corporation (the British Electric Foundation, or BEF, if you want to put a name on it), put on suits, put your hair in a ponytail and go to work.

History will repeat itself/ Crisis point we’re near the hour

It is 2016 and Martyn Ware, miner’s son, artist, and Heaven 17 member past and present, is depressed that a song he wrote way back then is still depressingly relevant. Theresa May is in Downing Street, there’s a Republican presidential candidate straight out of dystopian fiction aiming for the White House. Racism suddenly seems to be part of mainstream political conversation. Same as it ever was, you might say.

“Well, there is hope,” Ware suggests, searching for something to hold onto. “I’m a Corbyn supporter, so I’m happy he got re-elected.”

But yes, he says, when Heaven 17 play Fascist Groove Thang in Glasgow later this month – part of a double header that also sees the band retool their BEF synths-meet-classics concept Music of Quality and Distinction – it might make sense to insert the name of Trump instead of Reagan.

It is 35 years now since Ware, Ian Craig Marsh and singer Glenn Gregory released their debut album Penthouse and Pavement. Five years ago the band played the album live for its anniversary. They’re doing so again five years on but with a subtle difference.

“Five years ago we wanted to play it as though we were playing it in 1981 because we never did it back in the day. But this new version we’re doing now is new electronic arrangements, so it’s a different thing entirely; not doing it as if it was then. This is if we’d written the songs now. What would they sound like?”

These days Ware is a man who’s arrived at the start of his seventh decade on this planet. His son is just off to university. He spends his time making art (he’s working on curating a Picasso night for the National Portrait Gallery in London for the start of next year) and now and again he teams up with Gregory (Ian Craig Marsh having opted out a few years back) and plays live the songs he wrote three decades ago.

You wonder does he ever get tired of Penthouse and Pavement? Not really, it seems. “It sounds a bit arrogant but it was designed to be timeless. It was designed not to be just of its time. The themes really are universal and I think actually it didn’t sound like many other people. There’s something about that album that’s unique.”

He mentions the band’s follow-up album The Luxury Gap, the one that contains Heaven 17’s biggest hits. “I’m very proud of it. It is the classic no-holds-barred-no-limits-on-the-budget, whereas Penthouse and Pavement is much more experimental.”

He approves of that impulse. You still wanted hits though, Martyn? “Oh yeah. Completely. But we also didn’t want to compromise on the creative sides of things. We thought we could have it all.”

The truth is in 1981 Ware was in not the best of places. He and Marsh had divorced (not their choice) from their previous band The Human League at the behest of their record company and manager Bob Last and now they were in a hurry to get their own back.

“We moved down to London in ‘81 and at the time I was very motivated to create something new. We’d formed the British Electric Foundation. Heaven 17 was the first project and we were super-motivated to get the album out before The Human League got theirs out. It was … not revenge, but we wanted to prove a point.”

Anger is an energy? “Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. I can’t deny that. It was a very hurtful split.”

It was liberating as well, he adds. They had the chance to play in the studio, using synths and Linn Drums to create something new. “At the back of my mind I was thinking ‘I like our production sound and I think we’re great in the studio.’ We spent a lot of time touring with Iggy Pop and Siouxsie and the Banshees with the early Human League but it wasn’t really getting us anywhere. We thought it would be better if we spent our time and energy and resources on creating a production side, a bit like a mini Motown was meant to be.”

Ware was a soul boy at heart, he says, regularly going to Wigan Pier all-nighters and listening to Funkadelic. “Soul boys but with a love of futurism,” he says.

On Penthouse and Pavement they combined the two. In doing so, you could argue that they helped prime much of the sound of eighties pop. Or maybe that comes from their next BEF project, Music of Quality and Distinction.

That album, combined familiar voices and songs with cutting-edge sounds. Sandie Shaw singing Anyone Who Had a Heart, Tina Turner essaying Ball of Confusion and Dundee’s own Billy McKenzie offering a version of the Big O’s It’s Over (Gary Glitter too, but let’s draw a veil over that). You could argue that it provided a secret blueprint for pop over the next decade, or maybe two. It was a trope that became big in dance culture in the 1990s too.

The Music of Quality and Distinction side of the BEF output will also be represented in Glasgow by Heaven 17 being joined onstage by guests including Glen Matlock, the Farm’s Peter Hooton and Mari Wilson to sing their hits and old favourites. “Mari’s voice is better than ever, by the way,” Ware suggests.

It’s sounding a bit throaty the day I speak to Wilson herself. But then she’s not long off a plane from Portugal after a show on a cruise ship of all things. In a few days she’s off to Madrid. She’s still singing for her supper.

At her pop height, of course, back in 1981 and 1982, when her song Just What I Always Wanted went Top 10, she was touring with a 12-piece band and telling the music press she didn’t like synths, I remind her. “Yeah … And have you heard my new album?” she asks laughing.

“I’m still a fan of real instruments. If I could afford it I would still have a big band with Hammond organ and brass.”

Anyway, she adds, “If I did say that, that was kind of silly because I loved the Human League. Their records were absolutely brilliant. Great songs though. You’ve got to have a great song to begin with.”

She first worked with Ware and Gregory on this summer’s Rewind gigs, which was also her first experience of that eighties revival whirl. She’d avoided the Rewind phenomenon before. “I did, to be honest, because I suppose a lot of the songs I did back then I don’t feel any connection to anymore. I just thought I’m a bit old to be singing I Love Everything About My Boyfriend.”

But the experience with Heaven 17 turned out to be hugely entertaining. “Rewind was so great. It was so lovely because no one’s being competitive or anything like that.”

Are you suggesting it was different back in the day, Mari? “I remember a certain singer when we were on the Old Grey Whistle Test. I was coming on next and when she finished she said ‘you can all go to the pub now.’ I knew she didn’t like me or what I did. It was a million miles away from what she did.”

Who can that have been? Siouxsie? Toyah? One of the girls from Bucks Fizz? “Your first guess was right.”

Having spent much of the time between then and now singing with jazz bands it’s possible that her vocal abilities will come as something of a surprise to many in the Heaven 17 audience who only remember her as she was.

“They’ve probably got an idea of me from back then. I have been singing for most of the last 25 years and you can only get better. Especially with all the material I’ve sung and the musicians I’ve worked with. Of course I’ve got better.”

Same as it ever was? The same but better perhaps. That’s what Ware hopes too. “We love meeting people who will appreciate the music,” he says. “That’s great. But the creative heart is in keeping pushing things forward really. So that’s why we keep changing the arrangements. Just to keep ourselves interested and we have to keep changing the format of the shows just for our own excitement.”

In the end, it seems, it’s only the politics that doesn’t change.

Heaven 17/British Electric Foundation Penthouse and Pavement 25th Anniversary Tour visits the O2ABC, Glasgow, tomorrow.