Martin Fry on ABC's The Lexicon of Love

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. In this new interview, Jason Barnard spoke to their frontman, Martin Fry, who talks about the significance of Sheffield, the writing and recording of their iconic LP.

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.