abc & me
ABC are back with the album “Traffic.” A package filled with layered strings and their trademark rich arrangements. This is an album that sounds like it cost money to make. A lot. It feels like glass-walled studios overlooking bays in the Cap or the Cape were used, as though the team retired to glittering shimmering dancefloors in exclusive Ibiza clubs post recording, as though, in fact, nothing has changed.
Oh yes, ABC are back; they sound like they’ve never been away; and, once more, that puts them so far ahead of the herd that only their dust can be seen.
The Lexicon of Love made no real impression on me. I was into ABBA. In hindsight, its luxurious melodies, soaring choruses, crisp production and shameless plundering of the entire canon of European pop music should have been supremely appealing to an ABBA fan. But, put bluntly, ABC were too cool for me, a contrarian with a reluctance to admit I quite fancied the singer in a band.
At a time when the rest of the world was either Arty or Funky, either Synthy or insistently sticking to the guitars, either sexy and vapid or Fleetwood Mac, either Cool and tuneless or Melodic and terminally uncool, ABC managed to be ArtyFunkySyntheticReal Sexy, Serious, Cool and Melodic, all at the same time. And they gave Trevor Horn – the man who would subsequently define pop for the first half of the ‘80’s – his first taste of mega-success.
Beauty Stab, too, went by largely unnoticed – by me and the rest of the record buying public. Classic Second album syndrome, they were unsure of what they wanted to do, but sure of what they didn’t want to do. The results are a little confused, but, twenty + years later, still sound fresh, sharp (especially on the remasters) and not half bad.
Then comes the opening of my relationship with Messrs Fry and White: How to be a Zillionaire is, in my book, one of the most perfect pop albums ever made. Ever. “There’s so much panic in this world,’ the opening lines go, ‘But we are living in the best … of all possible worlds,’ they finish, and, really, then, as now, who could argue. Songs such as ‘Fear of the World,’ ‘Tower of London,’ ‘So Hip it Hurts,’ and the Brilliantly conceived and executed ‘Title’ Track, with it’s statement ‘I’ve seen the future; I can’t afford it. Tell you the truth sir: Someone just bought it,’ - a couplet that would prove, as the eighties progressed to be prophetic to a degree even Nostradamus would have stated Kewl at - add up to a mixture of silly, fizzy electronic dance beats, fronted by a duo who had hired two stand-ins to make themselves look like a classic drums guitar bass vocal combo, styled the team so they resembled characters from a yet-to-be conceived Xbox game, written lyrics that commented on the paranoia and uncertainty of modern life, the vanity and desperation to be cool of contemporary urban culture, the probable economic results of all that uncertainty and consumption, and the fact that, at the end of it all, there was only love; that it wouldn’t matter what happened, it was all “Between you, and me.”
I loved the album. It was – despite it’s visual deceits – honest, breathless, wonderful pop. And it was smart, and it was witty. And it looked good. And it sounded great. The sampled voices on ‘How to be…’ Pounds…Dollars…Millionaire! Hadn’t been as widely heard as they are today. They made the record – so electronic and sonically unusual in so many respects – grounded. Made it feel that this heart of pure sonic fantasy was surrounded (as, in fact, it was) by a shell of brittle, brutal reality.
Alphabet City came next. Ostensibly a ‘return to form’ (record company speak for ‘we’ve managed to get them back to a formula that worked last time’), it had a cover that was blue satin, fifties American motor car interiors, pomade, airbrushing, suits, glamour, and swirly luxury type fonts. It was, in other words, The Lexicon of Love, part two.
Or, at least, that’s what the record company wanted the public to think. In reality, it was the sort of record Lexicon might have been, had it been made by two men (the overdressed sidekicks of Zillionaire having been sent back from whence they came) who had experienced the highs, lows successes and frustrations that Messrs. Fry and White had experienced in the preceding five years. It was, in places, perhaps a little too slick, a little too cynical, but it was still a glossy, shiny, beautifully tooled piece of machinery that showed Michael Jackson’s Bad (released at the same time) up for the dowdy girl with fat ankles that it truly was.
And, in true ABC style, it was followed up with a certifiable Commercial Flop.
I remember journeying home after the biggest storm in living memory, with the second side of Alphabet City blaring through my Sony Tape Walkman. I went from Wembley, where I’d been staying, to Putney, where I was still waiting for my life to begin.
A couple of years later, I was playing UP whilst travelling between the city of London and Highgate Station, and the chaos, the metaphorically uprooted trees, were in my own life. “North,” in particular, still rings true to me, with it’s story of a life spent chasing dreams, and the constant battle between the desire to move on, to achieve, to grow up, for Christs Sake, with the longing to return to the hearth, to be enfolded in the arms of the ones we love, who will kiss it and make it better, the fear that the longer we keep pushing on, the worse the mess is going to get. I was twenty, up to my ears in debt, unhappy with my progress, and living a passionless and largely isolated life. I was a serial killer waiting to happen, and the only thing that kept me sane was pop music, and the belief – persisting long after religious faith had waned – that there was better to come.
And it did come; by the time Abracadara was released, I was living in a flat in Westminster, happily in love, and shopping for records in Soho and on the Kings Road instead of at the Camden branch of Records and Tape Exchange. I’d been to nightclubs! I had had sex!! “Welcome to the Real world, baby,” Mister Fry sang, “Welcome to the way things are,” and, as the Italo-House Disco soundtrack of my summer (and several summers since) rang around the clubs and bars of my youth, I was positive not only that this was, finally, for me, The Real World, but also, as noted on the Album’s glorious opener “When Bogart saw Bacall, He knew that Love Conquers all!” And really, who else, in 1992, on an album of electronically generated beats and futuristic house grooves, would have had the sheer nerve to reference one of the Cinema’s Golden Age Romances without a blush? Only ABC.
And that’s why I loved them – love them still: Their ability (Largely, nowadays, Mr Fry’s ability, as Mark White finally gave up the ghost after yet another commercial disappointment with the Abracadabra album and retired from the band) to continually lay out the stall that drew me in back on Zillionaire: To be both joyously optimistic and in love with humanity whilst, three and a half minutes later, making music and poetry so world-weary, and performing a vocal so lovelorn that one could almost cry with the sheer hopelessness of existence. The magpie sensibility with which they steal from popular culture – movies, books, cars, musical movements – and the magical way in which they can do something – the rich dark timbre of Fry’s voice, perhaps, or something uniquely ABC – to the material that renders it, every single time, indisputably theirs.
1999’s Skyscraping is a case in point – a mish mash of styles and themes, unified by the glossy booklet that featured Martin in a series of glamorous and highly designed urban architectural pieces; it had songs that sounded like Bowie (“Who Can I turn to?”) only better than David had sounded in years, tunes that were the sort of thing that Peter Gabriel might have made had he been a little less up himself in the late seventies (“Light Years from Home”) and songs about escape (“Skyscraping”) falling in love (“Rolling Sevens”) and falling out of love (“Ask a Thousand Times”) and it was the last album I played as we packed up our flat in London and prepared to move to the suburbs, either giving up the dream of a glamorous urban existence, or transferring the passion to a bigger, slightly less obvious canvas.
Whatever, years passed, and, in all the hundreds of albums and cds that have crossed the threshold at Valley Boy Mansions, none have shifted ABC from their place by the stereo.
And now they’re back, and, as I stare into the jaws of a rather unsettling birthday, it’s nice to know that some things never change: Yes, Martin may be looking a little jowlier these days, his innate optimism perhaps labouring under a little more cynicism than when last we met, but I’m still hungering after that moment when I finally feel grown up, glamorous, complete. I sense it may never happen, that the journey may be the point after all; but with fellow travellers like Mr Fry, it’s a journey I’m happy to take.