Viva Love

If you were stopped in the street tomorrow and asked to name three bands who dominated the singles charts (and by inference Top of the Pops) in the 80s, your trio would more than likely be culled from Spandau Ballet, the Police, Wham, Duran Duran, Culture Club and, I'm guessing, ABC. 

This afternoon I reached for my most up to date* Guinness Book of British Hit Singles and discovered that ABC had spent nearly 90 weeks on the charts between 1981 & 1990. Pretty impressive, huh? But they weren't just a singles band. Their albums too were packed to the rafters with infectious songs. So why has it taken me forty odd years to finally get round to seeing them perform live. Good question. And one I don't really have a plausible answer to. Anyway, on Tuesday I broke my duck and from a superb vantage point on Row A of the Upper Circle I got to see a masterclass in how to showcase (and compress) 40 years of tune-smithery into a luscious set lasting just over two hours. 

The formula is quite simple really. The first half opened with the Southbank Sinfonia (a 35 piece orchestra conducted by Anne Dudley) teasing us with a five minute classical snapshot of what was to come in the second half. After which the band themselves filed onto stage and proceeded to play the 'ABC Songbook' - When Smokey Sings, The Night You Murdered Love, Be Near Me, Viva Love** The Night You Murdered Love, Ocean Blue et al. 

A twenty minute interval, just time to stretch my legs, grab a white Magnum and its straight into the second half - the main course - Lexicon of Love their groundbreaking debut album played in its entirety in order. You know the songs. By heart, probably. And for those down in in the stalls I could tell this wasn't their first rodeo; although Fry's voice is still holding up, the 2,000 strong crowd made for a great backstop if there were any notes he didn't fancy tackling.

The obligatory encore was as predictable as night following day: because The Look of Love opens side two, and therefore had already been put in to bat, it was pretty obvious Fry would have been run out of town had they not played it AGAIN! 

9/10. (Unlike the pretty rubbish photo I took on my phone.)  

ABC - Viva Love (2016)

* 1991!

** As you can see from the above video not only do we see flashbacks to 1980s Martin Fry but he also does a cameo 'Hitchcock' contemporary cameo.

Alpha Bravo Charlie

I love ABC; I won't hear a bad word said against them. Martin Fry, their gold lame suited frontman, has always been able to pluck just the right word, find just the right turn of phrase from his musical lexicon to give a song, any song, the gravitas needed to pull it out of a sea of lyrical mediocrity and turn it into a guaranteed floor filler. Tears Are Not Enough from 1981 gave notice that the prevailing pop landscape of the day was about to change. The band's (i.e. Fry's) debut album released the following year spawned several monster singles; each in turn given Fry's lyrical finessing and augmented by the lush production values of Trevor Horn (whose knob twiddling on Lexicon of Love ensured he'd never be out of work again); for several years afterwards if you ever went into a Hi-Fi shop to purchase 'a system' then Lexicon was the album they played to put any turntable/amp/speakers combo thru its paces. That or Thriller.

During the following 35 years after its release Fry had just about done that sound to death. Whilst all his follow up albums tried so hard to reach the dizzy heights of that first collection (some might say opus), he never scaled the mountain again. Though in 2016 Fry did what anyone other fading Smash Hits cover star would do when he was given the chance of recording with Anne Dudley (she of Art of Noise and a brilliant orchestral arranger to boot) - he wrote a dozen songs in the style of LoL and marketed it as a follow up. Thus Lexicon of Love II was born.

Of course it could never fill its big brother's shoes. How could it? But (on a couple of occasions) it came pretty close. Here's one of them...

ABC - Brighter Than the Sun (2016)

Today, I've mostly been listening to Saint Motel

I heard this tune for the first time yesterday. A little over 24 hours later, I can't get the bloody thing out of my head. And I can't help thinking I've heard it before, which, of course, I have: it's ABC's and Haircut One Hundred's notes but, to paraphrase Eric Morecambe, 'not necessarily in the right order.'