MARTIN FRY
FOUR ★ Little WORDS
“Destroy, disorder, disorientate!” As he prepares to mark the 40th anniversary of The Lexicon Of Love with a lavish new live tour, accompanied by Anne Dudley and the Southbank Sinfonia, Martin Fry tells Classic Pop how ABC set about creating a timeless pop masterpiece.
PAUL KIRKLEY
ABC‘s Martin Fry: “I encourage the idea that The Lexicon Of Love is a classic.“
When Martin Fry steps onto the stage at Sheffield City Hall next June, it will be exactly 40 years to the day since the release of The Lexicon Of Love – the landmark pop classic that exploded like a musical glitterbomb from the Steel City’s grey, post-industrial landscape.
“That’s going to be an emotional evening, I know it is,” says Martin, when Classic Pop catches up with him over Zoom. “It doesn’t feel like 40 years. A lot happens in four decades, doesn’t it? But I have no regrets. It’s been a life well lived.”
Without The Lexicon Of Love, it’s fair to say Martin would probably have lived a very different life over those four decades... “I guess so,” he considers. “This is the George Michael question, isn’t it – what if I’d turned a different corner? It stopped me being a lot of things [this record] –I could have been an airline pilot or an astronaut! But you can’t think that way. It’s been very good to me, The Lexicon Of Love. But I’m just a custodian – as soon as you make a record, it becomes public property. It goes off into the world.”
A critical and commercial hit right off the bat, The Lexicon Of Love’s reputation has only grown over time: it’s a regular fixture in lists of all-time greatest British LPs, and it’s no accident that Classic Pop chose it as our first Classic Album, way back in issue one.
FROM SHEFFIELD WITH LOVE
To understand how such a lustrous pop gem emerged from the wintry first chill of Thatcher’s Britain – in a year when unemployment topped three million for the first time since the Great Depression – we have to rewind to late-70s Sheffield, where Manchester-born Martin David Fry was combining his university studies with editing a music fanzine called Modern Drugs.
After interviewing Stephen Singleton and Mark White, of local electro outfit Vice Versa, Martin was invited to join the band, which by late 1980 had evolved into ABC, with Fry as its lead singer.
With a Top 20 single, Tears Are Not Enough, already under their belt, ABC set about making their debut album with a bold and ambitious vision designed to inject a shot of shimmering, Rat Pack glamour and bruised romance into a world of dole queues and Protect And Survive leaflets.