Martin Fry of ABC: ‘Naivety is a great spur’

The Lexicon of Love propelled Sheffield band ABC to international stardom. Forty years on they are preparing to revisit it in the Steel City.
Martin Fry of ABC.Martin Fry of ABC.
Martin Fry of ABC.

Released on the summer solstice in 1982, The Lexicon of Love, the debut album by Sheffield band ABC, was something of a manifesto for a four-piece aspiring to be the biggest group in the world.

Luxuriously produced by Trevor Horn, it fulfilled singer Martin Fry’s stated intention to ‘mix funk and soul with a harder contemporary edge’, in doing so making them huge stars across the UK, Europe, the US and the Antipodes.

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Forty years to the day later, Fry is due to return to the city where it all began, performing The Lexicon of Love in its entirety with the Southbank Sinfonia at Sheffield City Hall.

“I always think that stupidity is a good thing to have, it protects you from failure,” quips the now 64-year-old singer, as he reflects on how ABC’s template for the album sought to fuse their love of Chic and The Clash with the romantic lyrical sensibility of Cole Porter.

Other touchstones included Frank Sinatra’s Songs For Swingin’ Lovers and the supple funk of James Brown and Grace Jones. Fry says: “I remember going to see a guy called Alex Sadkin to try and get him to produce the band, he’d done all the Grace Jones records, and we said we want it to sound like Pull Up to the Bumper and he said, ‘Yeah, but that’s Sly and Robbie, probably one of the world’s greatest drums and bass’. Naivety is a great kind of spur. We were bullet-proof, we were determined to develop and make it, coming out of Division Street and all those place in Sheffield.”

Looking back now, he says, “it looks a bit like a fairytale” but sticking to their guns enabled them to go far. “There weren’t many options back then either,” he says. “If you weren’t a professional footballer or a hairdresser you had to get out of Sheffield.”

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Today he wishes he could be in a K-Pop band “where somebody comes along and likes the look of you and they just cast you in the band”. Back then, he says, it wasn’t like that. “It was much harder work writing our own songs and developing our act and our look – that’s where the gold lamé suits came in, it was a cry for attention”.

The band, who had met in 1978 when Stockport-raised Fry was a fanzine writer and Mark White and Steve Singleton were a Sheffield-based electronic act called Vice Versa, had cut their teeth playing in clubs and art colleges – “Anywhere that we could afford to go to at the time as bohemians”. They first made a splash with their single Tears Are Not Enough, which made the UK top 20 in autumn 1981. Poison Arrow maintained their momentum, breaching the top 10 in March 1982, before The Look of Love carried them into the top five, and The Lexicon of Love entered the charts at number one.

The album was the second big production success for Trevor Horn, formerly of the chart-topping band The Buggles, who had helmed several hits for the pop duo Dollar. It was engineered by Gary Langan, later of Art of Noise, and featured string arrangements by Anne Dudley, who went on to score soundtracks for films such as The Full Monty and Les Miserables. “You only realise years later how young we all were,” Fry says. “Anne is a great musician and she was a great musician then. I remember Trevor going, ‘we could try some pizzicato strings’ when we were recording The Look of Love and Anne said, ‘OK, I’ll go and score them tonight’ and she came back in the morning with a little score she’d put together. We quickly ended up in Abbey Road studios with a full orchestra, so Anne got the gig of standing in front of the orchestra and conducting.”

All these years on, he says it will be “a great pleasure” to play the songs again with an orchestra conducted by Dudley.

ABC play at Sheffield City Hall on June 21. www.abcmartinfry.com

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