ABC

The sweetest melody is an unheard refrain

(Martin Fry, “Poison Arrow”)

“Love is a many-splendored thing,” sang Frank Sinatra and Nat “King” Cole in the song that in 1956 won an Oscar for Henry King’s film of the same name; and that’s not all — thanks to the musical “Carnival” five years later (and to the Everly Brothers), we also learned that it’s love that “makes the world go round.” Recent scientific discoveries show that there really is a chemistry of love: according to a team of researchers at the University of Pavia, there exists a molecule called “nerve growth factor,” found at high levels in people who have recently fallen in love and have been together for less than six months (and which apparently fades as couples become more established), while a study by Stony Brook University in New York claims it’s the dilation of the pupils that sparks the flame of infatuation — something Renaissance ladies were already well aware of. When the love of someone we care for suddenly disappears, we feel weak, we withdraw into ourselves, or else — if we have the necessary talent — we create works of art, novels, poems, songs: to this day, we mostly sing about love, or its absence, in the most varied ways imaginable — from the classic slow-dance “cheesy” ballad to the sarcasm of Burt Bacharach and Hal David, who mocked the sentiment by dissecting its pros and cons under a microscope: “What do you get when you kiss a girl? You get enough germs to catch pneumonia, and after you do, she'll never phone you” (“I’ll Never Fall In Love Again”). Years later, the devilish Stephin Merritt would join in too, with the mammoth “69 Love Songs” (not actually an album of love songs, but an album about love songs).

In 1982 there was a band that took the “lexicon of love” and turned it into nothing less than a glossy concept album, at a time when post-punk was all the rage and the radio was playing Clash and Adam Ant, when “raw” sounds, distorted guitars and a “first-take-is-best” approach were the order of the day. Success was anything but a given, yet it proved sensational, allowing both ABC – who wrote and performed the record – and the producer and musicians who joined them in the studio to forge a brand-new sound. It was built on bold choices that simultaneously rediscovered the authenticity of rhythm and blues and the grandeur so dear to Phil Spector, made of layered arrangements, reverb and orchestral scoring – all of it shaped by the Sheffield band with the crucial complicity of Trevor Horn, who would soon become the deus ex machina of the ZTT label (“Zang Tuum Tumb”, after Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's Futurist work) and an undisputed Midas of pop in hyper-technological dress.

ABC rose from the ashes of another band, Vice Versa, which counted Mark White and saxophonist Stephen Singleton among its members. Heavily influenced by Kraftwerk and by the early songs of fellow Sheffield residents Human League, they even ended up supporting Depeche Mode and Soft Cell; the turning point and the rebrand came when Martin Fry showed up to interview them for the fanzine Modern Drugs: he was initially supposed to join the line-up as a keyboardist, but he quickly became the singer, the author of all the lyrics and the face of the band.

Trevor Horn wasn't especially well known yet: he played bass in the band of his then-girlfriend Tina Charles (best remembered for "I Love To Love"), in 1979 he recorded with Geoff Downes (now a member of Asia) the album "The Age Of Plastic" – the one featuring "Video Killed The Radio Star" by Buggles, the very first video clip ever aired on MTV in 1981 – and immediately afterwards briefly took Jon Anderson's place during the recording of "Drama" by Yes. It was thanks to some singles he produced for Dollar that his name reached the pages of the New Musical Express: ABC had already recorded a hit single together with Steve Brown, "Tears Are Not Enough"/"Alphabet Soup", markedly influenced by funk, as much James Brown as Chic. It was thanks to Horn's ingenuity that the band found the magic formula that let them pull together all their influences into something unique, something that set them apart from others in Albion who were digging up the same flavours in those years (think of Haircut One Hundred's "Favourite Shirts" and "Lemon Firebrigades", Style Council's "Money Go Round", or Wham! themselves). Martin Fry listened to the Supremes and Smokey Robinson, but you were just as likely to spot him in the crowd at a Tangerine Dream gig: tall, blond and always ready with a quip, it was he who impressed Jill Sinclair, Trevor Horn's wife (and manager). There were already some demos to work on and plenty of ideas to develop, even though Horn wasn't entirely sure he wanted to step into their world – "it was like disco music, but with lyrics like Bob Dylan", he would later say. With the protagonists of the disco era slowly jumping ship (think of Donna Summer, who moved from being produced by Giorgio Moroder to Quincy Jones) and audiences seemingly fed up with it, there was a need to translate it all into a new vocabulary.

“When your world is full of strange arrangements…“.

The recording of "Lexicon" took place mainly at Sarm Studios, with the sessions bringing in at least a dozen additional musicians: ABC had no keyboardist of their own, so Anne Dudley and J. J. Jeczalik were brought in (who, shortly afterwards, together with Horn himself, Gary Langan and celebrated music critic Paul Morley, would form Art Of Noise): the technological jewel in their hands was the legendary Fairlight CMI, the first digital sampler and synthesizer, which became the number-one rival to the New England Digital Synclavier (programmed by Mike Thorne on Non Stop Erotic Cabaret by Soft Cell and on The Age Of Consent by Bronski Beat), but Martin Fry and co.'s music wouldn't have been the same without, alongside the silicon chips, a roughly thirty-piece orchestra conducted by Dudley herself. Even today the musician (an Oscar winner for the score of "The Full Monty" and arranger of hit records, from Phil Collins's "A Groovy Kind Of Love" to Electronic's "Getting Away With It") remains proud of what was achieved: in her view, the enduring charm of "The Lexicon Of Love" is precisely down to the use of real strings – not synthesised, as in, say, Vienna by Ultravox – which don't just provide a sonic backdrop or a simple flourish but often form the very backbone of the songs and hold them up.

Don't worry: this is not some romantic record ready for February 14th, made of mawkish melodies, syrupy billets doux and lines straight out of a chocolate-box card. "Lexicon" is a work about the absence of love and about the frustration of its protagonist, the singer, at being unable to find it and, despite himself, to build a solid, meaningful relationship. This puts the record in fairly stark opposition to "Penthouse And Pavement" by fellow Sheffield residents Heaven 17: forget love songs, the air breathed in that city was one of factories, unemployment and young people's fear of the future, of the arrival of the controversial figure of Margaret Thatcher on the British political scene. And yet there's nothing political, or even vaguely political-sounding, in the album's nine songs (ten, if you count the closing orchestral reprise of "The Look Of Love"), and the band prefer to sublimate their mal de vivre into vivid musical snapshots that swing between the serious and the tongue-in-cheek, thanks above all to Martin Fry's lyrics, which alternate moments of anger and confession with witty, sarcastic maxims with a Sparks-like aftertaste and rhymes bordering on the improbable. The visual package is no less striking: in the glittering age of New Romantic, ABC proved to be excellent musicians who were also highly attentive to their look (David Bowie, and especially Bryan Ferry, clearly hadn't gone unnoticed) and kept a watchful eye on the world of the discotheque. It's impossible not to smile watching the video for "The Look Of Love", one of the band's best-known and most recognisable songs: pastel colours and the atmosphere of a children's TV show, with a Martin Fry who is irresistibly self-mocking (especially right after the near-nonsensical line "if you judge a book by the cover, then you judge the look by the lover"), together with the gold lamé jacket that marks out the album's other great hit ("Poison Arrow", which arrived just before Spandau Ballet's "True" and "Parade") are more than enough to make audiences fall in love with them and with the album, which would easily reach number one on the sales charts.

Unlike other Trevor Horn creations, ABC weren't built in a lab: they wrote their own songs and explored territory that was new for the time: rather than a remix mini-album along the lines of "Love And Dancing", the album was accompanied by an actual film titled "Mantrap", built around the songs on the record and featuring the band in the cast, directed by Julien Temple (who had already worked on The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, and would later direct "Absolute Beginners" with Bowie). Every song could have been released as a hit single: "Valentine's Day" only came out as a 7-inch in Japan, and it's a frantic litany of misfortunes (from the postman who doesn't ring the bell on Valentine's Day to the umbrella that won't work exactly when it's raining), of reckonings and regrets ("If you gave me a pound for every chance I let slip by, and if I'd taken dancing lessons for every pair of lips I might have kissed by now, I'd be a millionaire, I'd be Fred Astaire"). "All Of My Heart" is the aching ballad, written on guitar and rounded off with an instrumental coda featuring a gorgeous swirl of strings: throw in the fact that Led Zeppelin's Robert Plant and his wife got engaged to this very song, and its status as a classic is more than assured. The atmospheric "4 Ever 2 Gether" is co-written by Dudley and is perhaps the track where Trevor Horn's imprint is most pronounced and evident (and the only one with a hint of prog), while the bassline and effects used in "Date Stamp" (a reflection on the connection between love and money, complete with a sampled cash register) anticipate, by just a couple of years, "Relax" and "Welcome To The Pleasuredome" by Frankie Goes To Hollywood. The spoken-word inserts have a distinctly Broadway flavour ("I thought you loved me, but it seems you don't care", to which a female voice replies "I care enough to know I can never love you"): it was Bowie, who happened to be in the same recording studio while working on the music for "Baal", who suggested the one used in "The Look Of Love".

“Even with a pedigree… love has no guarantee”

Martin Fry would grow tired of the New Romantic uniform in record time, but the new directions he pursued didn't always win over the public: "Beauty Stab" is anything but the "Lexicon Of Love Part II" that fans and critics were expecting, yet its author never loses his sense of humour ("She's vegetarian, except when it comes to sex", from "Unzip") either here or on the following "How To Be A Zillionaire" ("I've seen the future, I can't afford it"). "Alphabet City" would also work, even though the marriage of soul and electronics was by then commonplace (Phil Oakey and the girls, in 1986, went to record "Crash" in Minneapolis with Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, producers of Janet Jackson and Alexander O'Neal); no sooner had they dipped a toe into the waters of house music, complete with a remix by Italy's Black Box, than along came M People's Heather Small to steal their crown (not before duetting with Martin on a song from the first album, "Northern Soul"). Since 1992, only Fry has remained behind the ABC name, with musicians changing from record to record (Heaven 17's Glenn Gregory appears on "Skyscraping", while "Traffic" sees the return of Gary Langan, who had already produced "Beauty Stab"), and "The Lexicon Of Love" remains, across thirty years of career, an unmatched masterpiece. Trevor Horn, after the hangover of the mid-Eighties and faced with the rise on the charts of the fleeting productions of the Stock Aitken Waterman trio, would end up working on adult-contemporary records with artists like Rod Stewart, Paul McCartney, Tina Turner and Cher, would launch Seal's career, and would briefly return to the atmospheres of "Lexicon" in 1991, when Wea's Rob Dickens convinced him to work with Marc Almond (who had just joined the label's roster at the time) on "Tenement Symphony".

ABC's "Lexicon" proved, ahead of others, that you can make intelligent pop music, and that you can win over the dancefloor with style and character too (the Pet Shop Boys would later drive the point home, thanks to Neil Tennant's excellent lyrics, disco quotations ranging from "Can't Take My Eyes Off You" to "Go West", and orchestral touches courtesy of Ennio Morricone and Angelo Badalamenti). The album was also included in Robert Dimery's list of "1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die", more than one international outlet has called it one of the best debut albums of all time, and we're certain that more than one producer of today's chart pop has taken plenty of notes from it (aren't those strings we hear on Lana Del Rey's "Summertime Sadness"?). It has been reissued several times so far, including a lavish deluxe edition in 2004 – remastered, with the addition of a concert recorded at the Hammersmith Odeon. A "guilty pleasure"? Not in the slightest. A record you need to own.

Who needs the moon when we’ve got the stars?

(Martin Fry)

Ride the wave of great music

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22/07/2012