Martin Fry is celebrating four decades since the release of ABC’s seminal debut album, ‘The Lexicon of Love’, with the group’s first-ever live album.
Released in 1982, the LP took the band to the top of the UK charts, made waves globally, and delivered the hit singles Tears Are Not Enough, Poison Arrow, The Look of Love and All of My Heart.
In celebration of its latest milestone, they toured the record last year and performed a special show on June 21 – the anniversary of its release – which was recorded for the group’s latest release.
“The live album has sort of gone out of vogue… [But] I’m a huge fan of them,” the flamboyant frontman says of such recordings. “I loved Bowie’s ‘David Live’ and even went to the Tower Theatre in Philadelphia to see where he’d recorded it. And the concert album ‘Get Yer Yah-Yahs Out!’ was the first record I ever bought by the Rolling Stones.”
‘The Lexicon of Live’, which was captured at the band’s orchestra-backed show at Sheffield City Hall, is something of a full-circle moment for the musician. “We’d been playing so many shows with [conductor] Anne Dudley and the South Bank Sinfonia and it was really gelling,” he reflects, “so it felt like a good way to document what we’d been up to over the last couple of years. It felt like a live recording was destiny.”
It’s not the first time Martin has revisited the album; the group returned to the UK Top 5 back in 2016 with ‘The Lexicon of Love II’ – an album he never saw himself making. “I mean, 1983 would have been the right time but it did very well,” chuckles the singer. “For years I’d been avoiding the idea but after doing an orchestral show at the Royal Albert Hall I looked out into the audience and I could see and feel how much the songs from the original album meant to them.
“They’d been through a time capsule like I had of, you know, kids growing up, failed marriages, businesses falling apart, shit happening to them, and yet there they were singing along. It was like, ‘Wouldn’t it be interesting to see what was happening to them now as elder statesmen?’ and that’s where the germ of the idea for ‘The Lexicon of Love II’ came from.”
It was originally called ‘The Lexicon of a Lost Ideal’ until someone at the record company heard the tracks and suggested the eventual title. “If they’d suggested that at the beginning, I’d never have finished it because it would have been too intimidating,” he laughs.
“But I embraced the idea, like ‘If there can be 37 episodes of ‘Breaking Bad’, why can’t there be another episode of ‘The Lexicon of Love’?”
As regards a 40th anniversary reissue of the first studio album, Martin reckons: “The reissue will show up some time if Universal have anything to do with it. I’ve done an Atmos mix so that will appear some time soon, I imagine.”
The Lexicon of Love Live is out on May 19 on Live Here Now Recordings.
Read the full interview in the June 2023 edition of RETROPOP, out now. Order yours or subscribe via our Online Store, use our Store Finder to locate your nearest stockist, or get Digital Copies delivered direct to your devices.
