ABC are set to release The Lexicon of Love Live, which was recorded last year in their hometown of Sheffield to mark the 40th anniversary of their classic album, The Lexicon Of Love. The album was accompanied by a full symphonic orchestra and celebrates the band’s return to their roots. In this new interview, Jason Barnard spoke to their frontman, Martin Fry, who talked about the significance of Sheffield, the writing and recording of their greatest hits and the experience of performing their iconic LP live.
What are your memories of the night in Sheffield when you performed The Lexicon of Love live?
Vivid memories. We were putting together our orchestral tour and the band and somebody said to me, that it’s 40 years since the release of the ‘Lexicon of Love’ and that it would be great to play 40 years later, on the anniversary of that date in Sheffield. So yeah, it was phenomenal. It was a great night. Through the years I’ve not really put out many live albums, so I wanted to make sure I finally got it right. And it was a magical night. It meant a lot because obviously all of that music – ABC started in Sheffield. Those songs come from all the conversations, strolling down West Street and bigging the band up. ‘Poison Arrow’, ‘Look of Love’, ‘All of My Heart’.
All of those songs come from The Beehive, The Raven, The Limit – nights out on a Monday night. So Sheffield’s infused into the record. So yeah, it felt right. It was the right time in the right place to be performing that. It would have been weird recording elsewhere. I’m in Florida today as I’m working. I’m at Universal, looking out the window I can see Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, Bubba Shrimp and all that stuff. Like, ABC Live at the Hollywood Bowl, but no, it felt right to be live at Sheffield City Hall. So it was a great night, I will remember it well forever. The pressure was on. It had to be right. So that added to the excitement of the night with the Southbank Sinfonia, Anne Dudley and the band. With an orchestral show, you’ve got to take it to the next degree. All the parts are there and it can be studied and awkward. We like to crank it up a bit.
What do you recall about the recording of The Lexicon of Love 40 years ago? I read that you met David Bowie in the studio.
We’d had a hit with ‘Tears Are Not Enough’ and we met Trevor Horn, at the bottom of Bayswater, in a pizza parlour. And we started working with him in a tiny studio on Brick Lane called Sarm East. We set about recording ‘Poison Arrow’, but we got kicked out of there for a little while because somebody else was coming in. I think Trevor’s manager and wife, Jill Sinclair, her brother was producing Foreigner or someone like that. He was a record producer, too.
So Trevor said, “Okay, next Tuesday, Wednesday, we’ll go to Good Earth Studios”, back then which is on Dean Street in Soho, and it’s Tony Visconti’s studio. The Lexicon of Love is regarded as a classic all these years on, but for us we were in it together. It’s like our little record. We didn’t regard it as a classic at the time. So it was made on the run. So we went to Soho. We had two days working there. Anyway, long story short, Bowie came down to the studio, because he was what he was acting in Baal. It was a Bertold Brecht play, I think. So he came down to hang out with Tony Visconti, his mate. So I remember Mark White went to the loo. It was a urinal. Nobody told us that Bowie was coming down or anything. We were just there in this single studio, in this basement working. And he goes, he was kind of the next urinal down and he says to Mark “Oh, yeah, you’re pissing with the big dogs now.” He turns round and “Oh blimey, it’s David Bowie!”, So it’s probably the highlight of Bowie’s career – that!
[laughs]
I have to say that in the early 80s we loved Bowie and Roxy. His influence was massive, it’s hard to describe how mega an artist he was. I had to go off to the Record Mirror and do an interview but, Anne Dudley said he was sitting in and was making suggestions on tracks like “Look of Love”, saying “It would be great if you had the singer add loads of answering machine messages to this girl that’s not going to answer him back..” or something like that. And then they were doing the strings for ‘Look of Love Part Five’, [sings riff] there were all these dialogue parts and he was chipping in a bit. So I’m still talking about that 40 years later, as a fan, but I’m thinking [says joking] as well that he was coming down and nicking our ideas for Let’s Dance. His biggest selling album was around the corner, isn’t it?!
[laughs]
But no. Realistically, it was just a buzz. We were on the dole in Sheffield making our first album. Just to be in his lunar orbit is something special. But I say to people, now that he was sprinkling his magic dust on us, he was making sure that record turned out good. So anyway, that’s one way of looking at it.
I’ve been speaking to Trevor Horn about the recording of ‘Poison Arrow’. And he talked about the painstaking process it was to program the original rhythm track that underpins that. I don’t think people really know…
No. Everything you can do now, I wouldn’t even say on a laptop, everything you can do on a phone almost, sequencing samples basically, audio samples, digital samples, you couldn’t do that. So we’d spend hours, days cutting tape to extend tracks, obviously. And the whole process was totally different. So it was kind of cutting edge, we were trying to be as experimental as possible. We were looking over our shoulder thinking we got to do something that Duran Duran or Spandau Ballet won’t do on their record, we want to be ahead of The Human League on this.
And also we said to Trevor that we wanted it to be as good as Earth Wind and Fire or Chic, all these brilliant disco records. Because, as much as we loved, and still love, Joy Division, The Cure and all those experimental English bands, if you listen to those records, the pockets are not there. The pocket, the beat, the rhythm. We went to Alex Sadkin and said, “We want to sound like Grace Jones’ Pull Up to the Bumper”. But when I think about it, that was Sly and Robbie, that was probably one of the world’s greatest bass and drum partnerships. When you’re naive and stupid, it kind of protects you from a lot in a way when you’re first trying to make a record. We loved Kraftwerk.
But then you had to create your own template. Now it’s way beyond the click track. It’s just a graph. You can quantize everything. But the great thing was that Dave Palmer was a very good drummer, but he was also a really good programmer. I think that for some of the rhythm tracks we used Trevor’s Fairlight. So we put a kick and a snare, and then worked through. And it would be painstakingly, some of the drum program was step programming where you put in, [laughs] put in two bars, and then another two bars. But we wanted the record to sound and it does in a way, crisp, in time and very polished. And that comes from that programming. We’d made some demos as a band. But the days of the band just sitting there like The Stones doing 50 takes, that was over, the 70s was over. We were ready for the next way of recording. And I have to say we were kind of ahead of the game because that’s the way people did make records throughout the 80s and into the 90s. I can get boring on the subject.
No!
The other great thing with Trevor though, was that he’s got a great sense of humour. So even though we were meticulous, stuff was getting done on that record, every 20 minutes, you know what I mean? The flow was there. It’s not like we had six months to make that record. We were in Good Earth for two days, and then we were down in RAK studios, and then back in Sarm East. It was bus rides to different studios to get the record finished.
Lyrically songs like ‘All of My Heart’ and ‘The Look of Love’, if you take them at face value, you could see them as wholly positive. But there’s a little bit of, I don’t know if it’s darkness or melancholy, or a different side to those. They’re more sophisticated.
Well, at the time, nobody was writing love songs although I know ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ is a great example. It was a beautiful song by Joy Division and Ian Curtis that evoked the best of Frank Sinatra but was very modern. We were doing a similar thing with ‘The Look of Love’. ‘Poison Arrow’ is about universal themes. A lot of people were writing songs about unemotional, sort of fake sci fi versions of the future back then in the early 80s. We wanted to do stuff that was emotional, like a lot of the R&B stuff we listened to but had a twist. ‘Poison Arrow’ is a song about how logically nasty it can get when somebody doesn’t like you, doesn’t love you. Or ‘The Look of Love’, I wanted it to be about this giddy and the elation of being in love is. It’s not like the moon in June or it’s not like what the songs say in Hollywood movies. It’s kind of disorientating, it’s completely confusing, and there’s an element of that in ‘The Look of Love’ but I’d say lyrically those songs came from a very sincere approach, but also a very art orientated approach. Something like ‘All of My Heart’, it started off as a country and western type vibe. But it’s not, I don’t know really. But fortunately for us, so many people have had broken hearts so to this day, people still go to those songs and enjoy them. It’s really hard analysing a song.
You mentioned earlier about R&B and that came into one of your big hits later in the 80s ‘When Smokey Sings’. So one of your influences was more on the soulful side as well?
Totally. Going to youth club discos and listening to on the one hand Jeff Beck – “You’re everywhere and nowhere, baby”. And then they’re playing Sly and the Family Stone, ‘Family Affair’. Where I grew up, listening to Bowie and Roxy but also all the Philly All Stars – Philadelphia music, Tamla Motown, Stax, Chess. Northern Soul I suppose. Those records were played wherever you went in the 70s, so that sort of ingrained. You call it R&B I suppose now. I don’t know what you call it. But we never saw ourselves as a rock and roll band. We wanted to make people dance. Now, everybody does that. Why would you not? But back then, over 40 years ago, it was the approach we took.
One of my favourite songs of yours is from the mid 90s, ‘Stranger Things’ which is from your Skyscraping album. That was co-written with Glenn Gregory. Did you have a lot of contact with him and the other Sheffield bands?
Yeah, back in the early 80s, you’d walk down the street and you’d run into Phil Oakey, Martyn Ware or Adrian Wright from the Human League. In fact Ian Craig Marsh, who was in the Human League originally, had a detective agency on West Street. I used to ask him “What do you do?” He says, “I’ve decided I’m going to be a Detective, a gumshoe”. I don’t know how much detective work he did. He was also building synthesisers. I was quite good friends with Adi from Clock DVA and Richard Kirk from Cabaret Voltaire. It was brilliant, academic, I don’t know how you describe it, an academy for music. You just wander into any pub and to be somebody they’re telling you “They’re going to be the future of rock and roll”. It was great.
I could see Def Leppard play on a Wednesday night. There was music everywhere you looked. But of course, as soon as you get a record deal and you get near the charts, people stop talking to you the same way. It gets very competitive. In the 90s me and Glenn could get out. We spent a lot of time in bars. And we were both at a point in time when Heaven 17 had gone a bit quiet, with ABC it faded out. So we used to just mountain bike around to go to friends and then from that friendship we made a record. Because I didn’t really want to make a record at that time. I just didn’t want to do it. And the guys at Deconstruction said, “Why don’t you make a record” so it was a case of hanging with your mates making a record. It was a good experience. Keith Lowndes as well was involved in it.
On the new live set, there’s also some material that was from The Lexicon of Love II, the follow up to The Lexicon of Love. My favourite of them is ‘The Love Inside the Love’ which was written with Anne Dudley. Do you remember the writing process for that?
Anne Dudley played on The Lexicon of Love, and she’s an incredible musician. You go to Anne’s house and hidden away, near the loo, there’s an Oscar for her work with The Full Monty. She doesn’t even tell me about the sessions she’s been on. She’s also a brilliant arranger, but a conductor. A female conductor in a world of men. She has been conducting orchestras all her life and the film work. So I hooked up with Anne again. We met at the sessions of The Lexicon of Love and I’ve run into her through the years. After playing the Albert Hall, I wanted to do a very orchestral record. And it morphed into what became known as The Lexicon of Love II. So I sat in her kitchen saying, “It would be great to write some songs together”. So Anne, the great thing about her is that she’s got a very matter of fact, way of going about things. She just gets on with stuff. So she opened a door in her place in Sarratt, where she lives and there was a recording studio and a piano. She sat at the piano, and I started up and that’s where ‘The Love Inside the Love’ came from, that song. It’s a bit Tim Burton, a bit Gothic that song. So, it was a productive hour visit to a place – there you go, there’s a song. So it felt right to put it on that album.
So you’ve meshed the whole of The Lexicon of Love and weaved in some of your other big hits.
Originally on The Lexicon there were pizzicato strings on ‘All of My Heart’, but there’s not as much orchestral stuff as people think. We used Solina string machines and samples and stuff. So all these years on to do it on steroids with the full orchestra, we’ve been developing that show now for at least 10 years. So that’s what the live album on the anniversary of the release of The Lexicon of Love, that’s what that documents. So, in a way, it’s the ABC songbook, it’s a chance to play songs. It’d be nice to have done ‘Stranger Things’ too with a full orchestra.
So The Lexicon of Love is there in its entirety. But it was nice to throw in some other stuff and see what it sounded like with the orchestra, with the band in 2023, well, technically 2022.
[laughs]
But we’re hearing it now in 2023, other than the people that saw it live. Fantastic. Thank you very much for speaking with me.
Thanks Jason.
It was a pleasure listening to the album and talking about some of that wonderful material.
Nice one and regards to Trevor, when you next speak to him.
Further information
The album comes in 3 x CD and 3 x sparkly purple vinyl format & as a collector’s edition book and 3 CD: ABC – the Lexicon of Love – Live
Strange Brew Podcast with Martin Fry due in late April 2023.
Also on The Strange Brew: Podcasts with Trevor Horn, Glenn Gregory and Ian Burden (Human League)
Written interview with Trevor Horn on 10 of his most important songs including Poison Arrow
