FEATURE:
Many Happy Returns
ABC’s The Lexicon of Love at Forty
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ONE of the all-time classics…
ABC’s debut, The Lexicon of Love, turns forty on 21st June. It is a few weeks off, but I wanted to come in a bit early and pay tribute to a remarkable album that came at a time when Pop was transforming and shifting. Led by the incredible Martin Fry, the songwriting is so sophisticated, catchy and timeless. Aside from the biggest songs, Poison Arrow and The Look of Love, Pt. 1, there are so many wonderful songs. Leading with the remarkable Show Me, The Lexicon of Love does not have a weak moment. Last year, ABC announced that they were taking The Lexicon of Love on the road to celebrate its fortieth anniversary:
“To celebrate 40 years since the release of their debut album, ABC have announced they will perform The Lexicon Of Love in its entirety across 10 dates in June 2022, including a pit stop back to where it all began.
Sheffield’s finest ABC will return to their hometown, the steel city, for a special anniversary show which will mark exactly 40 years to the day since the album was released on the 21 June 1982.
Tickets are available now via www.gigsandtours.com and www.ticketmaster.co.uk. VIP Packages are also available from https://sjm-vip.com/.
The Lexicon Of Love went straight to No.1 upon release, spawning tracks such Poison Arrow, The Look Of Love, Tears Are Not Enough, and All Of My Heart.
ABC were formed in Sheffield in the 1980s and released The Lexicon Of Love in 1982. To date they’ve have released nine studio albums, following The Lexicon Of Love with Beauty Stab (’83), How To Be A Zillionaire (’85), Alphabet City (’87), Up (’89), Abracadabra (’91), Skyscraping (’97) and Traffic (’08). Thirty-six years since the release of their debut album ABC returned with The Lexicon Of Love II”.
The Lexicon of Love seemed to arrive at a turbulent time for Britain. Offering some relief and sense of uplift, the album went to number one. With amazing production from Trevor Horn and Steve Brown, ABC’s debut still has a freshness that many albums from 1982 do not. Classic Pop Mag told the story of The Lexicon of Love in 2015. I have selected a few parts that provide detail and background of a genius album:
“The summer of 1982 was a difficult time for Britain, with war raging in the Falklands and NHS workers striking for better pay at home. Released against this backdrop, ABC’s debut long-player, The Lexicon Of Love, provided the perfect antidote. Slick, suave and stuffed full of singalong tunes, it was music to let your hair down to.
The album – with the help of its three classic singles, the band’s über-cool image (think futuristic Rat Pack) and a world tour that boasted all the glitz and glamour of a West End show – catapulted ABC to global superstardom. For those four lads with immaculate hair and sharp, shiny suits, it all seemed so effortless – however, in truth, it wasn’t all plain sailing.
Surprisingly for an album so full of life and lustre, The Lexicon Of Love’s roots can be traced back to the dismal, post-industrial landscape of late-1970s Sheffield. As Eve Wood would chronicle in her 2001 documentary, Made In Sheffield, dole and desperation were rife among young people in the city, prompting many to consider a career in music to enhance their prospects.
The “do it yourself” nature of the punk movement had taught kids that anyone could pick up an instrument and dig themselves out of the doldrums. One of the leading lights of Sheffield’s music scene at that time was Stephen Singleton. In 1978, he and his friend Mark White formed a synth-pop group called Vice Versa.
And to get their music heard, Singleton also set up his own label, Neutron Records. As synth-pop goes, Vice Versa were more Throbbing Gristle than Soft Cell, creating an hypnotic groove that somehow gelled with their on-stage kaleidoscope of film and TV projections.
It wasn’t long before the band attracted the attention of Martin Fry, a Manchester-born Sheffield University student who’d set up his own music fanzine, Modern Drugs. Fry arranged an interview with Vice Versa, during which he was invited to join the group. A few gigs (including a supporting slot for fellow Sheffield outfit The Human League) and modestly circulated singles later, Singleton, White and Fry took the decision to head off in an unashamedly melodic and melodramatic new direction.
By now, a new movement was blossoming. Labelled New Romanticism by the media, it was characterised by flamboyant costumes, carefully coiffeured hairstyles and an attitude that could best be described as hedonistic. The soundtrack to this movement was funky, synthetic pop inspired by the disco sound that had emerged from the States a few years earlier.
Vice Versa, now renamed ABC, embraced the movement with open arms. To tie in with their more mainstream direction, Fry took on full-time frontman duties, quickly revealing a talent for lyric-writing that combined dry wit with heart-tugging romance.
In 1981, the new-look band released their debut single, Tears Are Not Enough, on their own label, reaching number 19 in the UK charts. The B-side was Alphabet Soup, which saw Fry introducing one band member in each verse. By this time, White had switched from keyboards to guitar: “Am I right or am I wrong? You’ll find this Mark where the beat goes on. Six strings at his disposal, Sixties soul in his holdall.” And Singleton had moved from keyboards to saxophone: “Now, sax equals sex equal sax. Which makes Stephen pornographic.”
While Poison Arrow had been a huge hit, the band enjoyed even greater success with the follow-up single, The Look Of Love. Matching its predecessor’s UK chart position (number four), it also soared to number one on the US Billboard dance chart, as well as hitting the top spot in Canada and France. Horn and his team pioneered scratching and sampling with a US Dance Mix, while Fry developed his Sinatra-meets-007 style further with a lounge-core B-side, The Theme From Mantrap (Mantrap being the espionage-inspired film vehicle for the band).
Less memorable was The Look Of Love‘s video, an unwatchable mish-mash of vaudeville and Mary Poppins imagery. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Horn chose to be blindfolded for his two-second cameo. While hindsight has elevated The Lexicon Of Love to classic status – and rightly so – upon its release, the music press was by no means unanimous in its praise. Rolling Stone was unimpressed by Fry’s “sordid B-movie romantic manoeuvres and smug sexual wordplay”, while Smash Hits felt that “songs like Valentine’s Day get entangled in their own smartness and sound studied”.
By the time the album’s third and final single was released – the UK number-five hit All Of My Heart – Fry and his band had perfected their formula. The video was cinematic, the band posed as a string quartet on the front cover, Dudley fused the entire album into a three-minute orchestral overture for the B-side and the group took the show on the road – string section and all – for a world tour. But was this formula contrived? “Well, it is and it isn’t,” Fry said at the time of Poison Arrow’s release.
“It’s not like going up to a vending machine and saying, ‘I’ll have a bit of Billy Fury, a bit of Elvis ‘58 and some Stranded-era Roxy Music.’ It’s just utilising ideas that come from yourself and operating with them. I like the idea of being malleable. It’s not treating yourself as a product, it’s just pushing yourself to a limit and finding out how far you can go”.
I want to finish off this fortieth anniversary feature with a couple of reviews of The Lexicon of Love. Whether you were around when the album was released or have come to it ion the years since, it is something that has something for anyone. Such instantly memorable songs, wonderful production and this concept of Martin Fry reflecting on relationship troubles and the search of love, so many people can identify with The Lexicon of Love. This is what AllMusic wrote in their review:
“ABC's debut album combined the talents of the Sheffield, U.K.-based band, particularly lead singer Martin Fry, a fashion plate of a frontman with a Bryan Ferry fixation, and the inventive production style of former Buggles member Trevor Horn and his team of musicians, several of whom would go on to form the Art of Noise. Horn created dense tracks that merged synthesizer sounds, prominent beats, and swaths of strings and horns, their orchestrations courtesy of Anne Dudley, who would follow her work with the Art of Noise by becoming a prominent film composer, and who here underscored Fry's stylized romantic lyrics and dramatic, if affected, singing. The production style was dense and noisy, but frequently beautiful, and the group's emotional songs gave it a depth and coherence later Horn works, such as those of Yes ("Owner of a Lonely Heart") and Frankie Goes to Hollywood, would lack. (You can hear Horn trying out the latter band's style in "Date Stamp.") Fry and company used the sound to create moving dancefloor epics like "Many Happy Returns," which, like most of the album's tracks, deserved to be a hit single. (In the U.K., four were: "Tears Are Not Enough," "Poison Arrow," "The Look of Love," and "All of My Heart," the last three making the Top Ten; in the U.S., "The Look of Love" and "Poison Arrow" charted Top 40.) ABC, which began fragmenting almost immediately, never equaled its gold-selling first LP commercially or artistically, despite some worthy later songs”.
The final piece I want to source is the BBC’s take on the flawless The Lexicon of Love. I think that it is an album that you can give to anyone and they will bond with it and find something to enjoy:
“ABC appeared at a turning point in pop, as the rough and tumble of post-punk gave way to a more sophisticated, lithesome Brit-funk, expounded by bands like Pigbag and Funkapolitan. Decked out in tailored suits and gold lame, the Sheffield quartet - fronted by the elegant Martin Fry - pounced onto dance floors in October 1981 with the splendid "Tears are Not Enough". "Poison Arrow" kept the blood circulating during the bitter winter of early 1982, before third single "The Look of Love" became their biggest hit. Then came the much-anticipated album, The Lexicon of Love. Now, over two decades later, their definitive statement gets the deluxe reissue treatment.
What a joy to hear this album again. It underpins just what a sharp band ABC were: witty, lyrical and very, very funky. Only Elvis Costello's Imperial Bedroom rivals this album for the smartest lyrics of 1982. And you can't dance to Elvis. Each track is a love affair in miniature: some are touching ("All of My Heart", "Show Me"), others a bitter invective at misplaced passion ("Many Happy Returns"). There is more going on in "2 Gether 4 Ever" than many bands squeeze into an entire album.
Band and producer Trevor Horn gelled immediately when they met to record : Horn described Fry's songs as "like disco, but in a Bob Dylan way". Dance music had rarely been as literate.
The extra tracks on disc 1 don't add a lot to the 1996 reissue, which expanded the original album with various jazz remixes and B-sides: notably their calling card, the James Brown-inspired "Alphabet Soup", and "Theme from Mantrap", their lounge version of "Poison Arrow". Disc 2 features some early demos and a previously unreleased live run-through of virtually the entire album, recorded during the band's heyday in 1982.
The Lexicon of Love stands as a landmark album in British pop. The synthetic Eighties' drum-thwaks and Chic-esque bass lines sound better now than ever. It gave disco a whole new vocabulary and helped pave the way for the dance movements of the late Eighties and Nineties. "I hold in my hand three letters," announces Fry on "Alphabet Soup". "Vitamin A, vitamin B and vitamin C". No prescription needed; no supplements required. This album replenishes mind, body and soul”.
On 21st June, The Lexicon of Love turns forty. An album ABC clearly hold dear to their hearts, I feel everyone can identify with the songs and what they are saying. There is a universality to the lyrics that resonates and stays with you. A magisterial work that will continue to amaze and fascinate for decades more, The Lexicon of Love is a musical language that we can…
ALL understand.