The New Cue #317 September 11: Martin Fry
“David Bowie walked into the session and had a cup of tea”
Good morning!
Let’s start the week with Martin Fry from 1980s heart-throb pop-stars, ABC. Martin came to talk to us about the band’s 1982 hit The Look Of Love for a Story Behind The Song feature but, as is so often the case when you encounter a veteran pop star with loads of good stories up their sleeve, he ended up talking about a whole lot more, including a cracking anecdote about David Bowie. Tuck in.
Enjoy the edition and see you on Friday,
Ted, Niall and Chris
Start The Week With… Martin Fry of ABC
The third single to be taken from ABC’s Trevor Horn-produced debut album, The Lexicon Of Love, 1982’s The Look Of Love was the Sheffield New Romantic smoothies biggest ever hit, going to number four in the UK charts and becoming a surprise hit in America. The Lexicon Of Love recently got a lavish, 40th anniversary 4 LP and Blu-Ray reissue. If you haven’t revisited the record lately, you really should. It still sounds phenomenal…
Chris spoke to front man Martin Fry a couple of weeks ago, who – it has to be said – also looks amazing for a pop star in his mid 60s. Martin didn’t fancy taking a selfie though, so you’ll have to make do with this screen grab from their Zoom call…
Hello Martin, you’re looking very smart – is that a cravat?
Thanks. No, I bought a lot of silk scarves recently. I’ve gone a bit Monty Don as an elder statesman of pop. Monty always has those canvas jackets I like when I’m out there in the ‘80s pop trenches playing festivals. Are we going to be talking about The Look Of Love?
Yes, but these tend to go a bit off topic sometimes. We did one with Dave Wakeling from The Beat about Save It For Later and ended up speaking about The Beat’s whole career.
I saw Dave on Twitter recently looking very proud because they’d named a day in LA after The Beat or something like that. I didn’t realise they had any days in the year left for that sort of thing!
What’s the best tribute you’ve been paid over the years?
They’ve been many and varied. It’s been a long, eventful and adventurous career. Sheffield University made me a professor of music. It was on the same day my daughter was graduating. She did say to me that she’s done all the work and I just got invited down. I’m a doctor of music, not a professor. I’m really worried there might be a time when somebody has a heart attack on a plane and they go, ‘Is there a doctor on board?’ And somebody pushed me forward. I’d be like, ‘I don’t know much about how to get that guy’s heart working, I do know who the drummer in [obscure ‘70s punk band is] Eater is though…’ I’m scared of its practical application.
Can you name Eater’s drummer in the above video?
Do you have initials after your name?
Yeah, Martin Fry MD. Over the years people have said some very nice things about ABC. Great things have happened.
Did you ever think that Lexicon Of Love would have such a long life? It’s been over forty years since it came out…
I’ve made a lot of records, but Lexicon Of Love was our calling card. I’m amazed forty years on that people still hold it in such high regard. As soon as you finish a piece of music it’s out there in the ether. It’s public property, you can’t change it, it’s gone. You let the public decide so it’s a nice feeling when I can play Rewind festival last Saturday in Germany and there’s 20,000 people singing the words of All Of My Heart Back at me. It’s a great honour to have that, especially for a man in his 60s. That’s an accolade. One of the best things that happened was when David Bowie came to the session for The Look Of Love.
Really?
Yeah! We were massive fans, I still am, and we were working in Dean Street at Good Earth, Tony Visconti’s studio. Bowie was just kind of wandering around and he goes, ‘Oh, what’s this?’ He sat in on the sessions and was really complimentary. He made suggestions for the track and the string arrangements, had a cup of tea and hung out. We’d had a hit with Poison Arrow at that point, but it was like him sprinkling magic dust on us. You can’t really describe how exciting that was for us. Those are moments I cherish.
How did ABC start?
I was making a fanzine called Modern Drugs. I’d go to gigs and be highly opinionated. Just anything that inspired me. I met Stephen [Singleton, saxophonist] and Mark [White, guitar/keyboard] because they were in a band called Vice Versa. I interviewed them and they invited me to join the band on the strength of my bullshit.
Did you have an idea about what sort of music you wanted to make?
For years I wandered around wanting to be in a band. My brother [Jamie Fry] was in a band before me. He’s younger than me and he was in a band that morphed into World Of Twist…
Wasn’t he in Earl Brutus too?
Yeah. So, I was kind of a daydreamer. Daydreaming is a big part of music, isn’t it? Modern Drugs was all black and white and post punk. Punk was dead. I loved seeing The Pistols and The Clash, but I knew that the future at that time was about Cabaret Voltaire, The Human League, Magazine and all these bands coming through. But later on, I figured it would be great to have electronic music but with a bass player and a drummer. To fuse the two worlds of R&B with electronic music. That was definitely at the core of what we were doing.
Did you feel that there was a certain romanticism missing in music at the time?Yeah. With the music that was floating around at the time, people would have a vision of the world as being very cold and robotic. Gary Numan was brilliant, but you got a lot of people copying him in groups in Sheffield. They were writing songs about electric pylons and trying to be very modern. I thought I’d put it on its head. Music should be emotional and romantic and bombastic. I remember hearing Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart and thinking it was an incredible lyric. It was like a Sinatra song, but Ian Curtis was moving it forwards. I thought it would be great to take sort of old showbusiness ideas but make them original and modern. That’s where songs like Poison Arrow, Tears Are Not Enough and The Look Of Love came from. The Look of Love is sort of a corny idea, but it was about how you make that into something meaningful and original.
ABC’s understated Poison Arrow video.
What was your set up in the early days?
Bass, sax, bongos, guitar, vocals and whistles. There was a lot of whistles. The core of it was we wanted to make people dance. The phrase ‘Fuck art, let’s dance’ was in the air back then. A very old-fashioned idea now, but it was like, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to make people move?’
And what were you wearing?
A dinner jacket, maybe. Punk was over and we were moving forwards. I got a long leather overcoat I bought in a jumble sale. Like every embryonic popstar in Sheffield - Jarvis Cocker and Phil Oakey - I was going through jumble sales. You wanted to walk into the pub and have heads turn and people go: ‘What the fuck?!?’ That’s the kind of core of what that all the peacocks of The New Romantics were trying to do. It was an attempt at sophistication. When you can see ABC, we didn’t look like any other band.
When it came to recording The Look Of Love in the studio…
Are you going to ask me if Trevor Horn thought of it all?
No, I was going to ask you whether it always had strings on it in your head…
Ha! I listened to a lot of Philly Soul, Motown, Stax and on those records there’s a lot of orchestration. We didn’t have access to an orchestra in Sheffield, so we’d have like a string machine, an approximation of an orchestra. We made Tears Are Not Enough and it was a Top 20 hit and then we met Trevor and we recorded Poison Arrow, but there’s no orchestration at all on that. It’s a couple of synthesizers, it’s a bit of a smoke and mirrors attempt to sound like strings. But by the time we made The Look Of Love we’d had a hit and the label were like, ‘OK, this is taking shape nicely – what do you need?’ So, we decided to put some real strings on it. I remember Anne Dudley [string arranger and composer] said to me, ‘You know you have to actually write down what you want the orchestra to play?’ It was complicated because we wanted it to sound a bit showbiz, but we didn’t want it to sound like Cilla Black or something.
Tears Are Not Enough on Top of the Pops.
Were you aware that it was going to be such a bit hit?
I guess we knew we stumbled across something. Sometimes the stars are aligned on a piece of music. I’ve made a lot of records in a lot of different circumstances and sometimes it’s not like that. But sometimes it is. There’s a magic there.
Is it true that the female voice on The Look Of Love is your ex-girlfriend who you wrote the song about?
No. It’s Karen Clayton who was the receptionist at Sarm studios who actually went out with [Lexicon Of Love engineer and future Art Of Noise member] Gary Langan. She would sometimes be in on a Friday, and we’d been looking for somebody to do a female bit of vocal. So no, that’s an urban myth. The Bowie story is true, but that’s an urban myth.
You alluded to it earlier, do you think that Trevor Horn is given too much credit?
No. Trevor was great. His work speaks for itself - Slave To The Rhythm, Frankie Goes To Hollywood. World class. The Lexicon Of Love was one of the first records he produced. His production process may have changed later on, but it was a great collaboration. We would sit and talk for hours and try and communicate what we wanted the record to be like. He wasn’t just there to make sure we were in time and in tune, it was to capture the vision and the magic of it.
Can we briefly talk about the video?
When we came to do The Look Of Love we said, ‘There’s Duran Duran over there on a yacht looking very sophisticated in their Antony Price suits in Sri Lanka. We’re in Shepherds Bush, what are we going to do?’ We wanted it to be like Mary Poppins and Benny Hill. We wanted to do visual gags. They say you should never work with children and animals and at one point I’ve got a parrot on my shoulder, a bunch of stage school kids down there and this crocodile from a Punch And Judy show. I’m thinking, ‘Would Joe Strummer do this?’ We just jumped into it. Trevor is in it and [music journalist] Paul Morley and the guys from Orange Juice. We just populated it with whoever we could get to come to the shoot. I think we were testing the audience’s cool barometer. We were testing how uncool we could be and get away with it. It went down a storm in America. We were trying to do the most un rock and roll video ever made. I think the record company hated it but I’m glad we didn’t do a moody, David Sylvian sort of thing. It’s a bit Crackerjack, end of the pier sort of thing. It’s served me well over the years.
Thank you so much for taking the time to chat to us Martin. Would you mind taking a quick camera phone picture of yourself that we can include?
Naaa, I’m not gonna do that, just use a picture of the sleeve! Take care. Bye now.
CC