ABC: The Lexicon Of Love

(#267: 3 July 1982, 4 weeks)

Track listing: Show Me/Poison Arrow/Many Happy Returns/Tears Are Not Enough/Valentine’s Day/The Look Of Love (Part One)/Date Stamp/All Of My Heart/4 Ever 2 Gether/The Look Of Love (Part Four)

“I am beginning to feel that music, when perfect, lifts the heart exactly as when you delight in the presence of your beloved. This means that music gives what must be the most profound happiness available on this earth.”

(Stendhal)

“To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive (by the limitless expansion of the ego, by emotion submersion) and impoverished (by the codes on which love diminishes and levels it).”

(Barthes)

“…indeed ‘The Lexicon Of Love’ would repay a detailed, academic study of its packaging and contents.”

(Jon Savage, The FACE, issue 27; July 1982)

“…I think I’m probably more interested in what you’ve got to say than what I’ve got to say.”

(Martin Fry, to the author)

They walked into the centre of the labyrinth.

They were in the middle of a park in late summer. There were flowers and people. Beds of flowers, so huge and oppressive that they would be lucky to be able to venture out of the park. Piles and piles of them. People bringing them over, more and more, many of them weeping and praying. They were less than startled.

Or they were inside a late Victorian sitting room, and there was Number One, sitting, alone and dead to the world, listening to the ghost of a woman on a wind-up gramophone, and suddenly, gently, the woman reappeared in the background. She seemed as much of a ghost as anything else; whether or not they will end up together was, perhaps purposely, left hanging in the air. For Number One was someone who had withdrawn into himself for what might have been justifiable reasons, although these were never explicitly expressed or explained. Let down by the world, he retaliated by constructing an immaculate and perfect world of his own.

Then the orchestra fell away; the singer was left alone with closing time piano and knew he had to make a decision, and a life or death one at that; “Sheeeeee’s cold,” he shivered, like negotiating a frozen hump bridge in plus fours). “She might laugh, but I love it,” he pondered, “although the laugh’s on me,” but then the orchestra returned in descending whole tones, and the turnaround happened; somehow, somewhere – was it via magic? – the rest of the orchestra rose from behind the strings, and a new lover rose with the sun, patiently but in fierce belief. “I’ll sing to her,” he declared, “Bring spring to her!” knowing that it was his last chance as the timpani roll, before making the astonishing ascent to “and long for the day that I’ll CLING to HER!,” going higher and higher, clinging to that extended CLIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIING as he had never clung onto anything or anyone before in his life, to meet and bear the winds of the song’s thunderous crescendo.

It was Frank Sinatra, singing his version of “Bewitched,” from the film of Pal Joey, the soundtrack to which was the number one album the day Martin Fry was born.

But the park was not exactly Kensington Gardens. It seemed wider, steeper, more blowy. It was evidently still London, or in sight of London, since all of London and most of Kent could be seen from its peak, but this was by no means a familiar part of town, and certainly not a reassuring one. You could, they felt, go for a picnic in this place and get lost, or disappear.

He strode angrily into the front office and threw down his resignation letter upon the FIFTEEN TONS OF LETTERS ON MY DESK.

So one way of telling this story could be to start and finish it in 1982, with songs involving tape or turntable scratching, and the interest of Trevor Horn. Not that Horn produced “Hilly Fields (1892)” – note the subtle anagram in the title – but he was intrigued enough by it to approach Nick Nicely, born in Greenland during a flight stopover, with a view to working together. Something, perhaps, in the manner of Yes. But Nicely hummed and hawed uneasily and Horn realised he really wanted to produce himself.

“Hilly Fields” was his moment, really, and seems about much more than a windy public park somewhere between Brockley and Lewisham, the birthplace of Marty Wilde and David Sylvian. No, the song’s protagonist – a “Mr C G Fields” – gets sacked from his job and decides to vanish. Where did he go, other than inside his head? Who knows? Everything is left in the airiest of airs; there was a minor psychedelic revival being touted in late 1981/early 1982 Britain, but “Hilly Fields” cuts past pastiche and connects directly with unresolved wistful business from 1967 (the subject of Bill Fay’s “Some Good Advice,” for instance. Fay – for many years regarded as an imagined, nearly invisible phantom in British music, although all he did in reality was go back to his day job and do music when he had the time, before returning with Life Is People, last year’s best record by a British artist). Victoria or Thatcher? Mr Fields doesn’t seem to be able to deal with either – and why should he? – and so disappears as firmly and resolutely as Major Tom. The mourning? “Pimply little postboy,” from a woman credited on the sleeve of this EMI single as “Kate” (although the voice actually belonged to a sometime Nicely collaborator, one Kate Jackson). Nonetheless, I do feel that Horn was touched more than somewhat by the record, and perhaps carried some of that fatal wistfulness into what he did with ABC.

What was anybody to do with ABC, truly? Once they were Vice Versa, Mark White and Stephen Singleton, in Sheffield, ploughing that gloomy Cabaret Voltaire/The Future furrow, and at around the time of punk rock they were interviewed by a teenage student called Martin Fry who ran a fanzine called Modern Drugs.  They got on, and then when their regular synth player David Sydenham went AWOL, the two musicians sent for Fry again. He wasn’t initially considered as a singer; the first choice was a teenage wannabe model from Sheffield called Fiona Russell-Powell, but that idea fell through for various reasons, and so Fry ended up as Vice Versa’s de facto lead singer.

Years passed, and things didn’t get any better, and then Ian Curtis, and so Vice Versa thought that it was time to change. The influences were still Joy Division and Gang of Four, but now artists like Michael Jackson and Chic were admitted into their viewpoint and the focus shifted to dance and funk. As with so many of their contemporaries, they elected to take their manifesto – such as it was in the summer of 1980 – into the centre of the marketplace. And so, in the Christmas issue of the NME – a place still deeply haunted by Curtis’’ ghost, and the more recent one of Lennon  - Paul Morley, like Fry a child of the fifties from Stockport (just under a year his senior), spoke to various exciting-looking new people, including Fry, and there was raised the modest proposal for this thing to be called “new pop” (then still strictly lowercase); pop with the ethos and energy of punk but louder, brighter and more danceable than anything with which the feeble, ageing pop mainstream could summon up.

The group’s name had changed to ABC, in honour of the Jackson 5 – that group who likewise found the brightest of escape routes from the mausoleum of the sixties – and for the first year or so of their existence as ABC they gamely set about pulling all of their aesthetic strands together. They knew it was no good slugging it out with Bauhaus and Theatre of Hate in the indie charts, and that to be able to signify anything, they had to compete with Diana Ross and Abba in the gruelling Top 40 trenches. And all the while around them was Sheffield, a declining and steely grey city; so the idea of sophisticated observations about the nature and reality of love projected on a backdrop of industrial dereliction was instantly arresting.  One of the many impressive things about Lexicon is how the listener is never really allowed to forget that behind the façade of these songs lie shut factories and mass unemployment; always you feel that this is a punk band eager to make you think they are urbane, international easy listening entertainers, but desperate not to let you forget that in essence they are a punk band. The surface and the depth never quite gel with each other – and this was Fry’s intention.

One striking thing about listening to the 2004 deluxe 2CD edition of Lexicon is how raw and rough the music becomes once outside the original album’s familiar context.  Listen, for instance, to the demos of “Tears Are Not Enough,” “Show Me” and the otherwise unrecorded “Surrender” which they recorded in the summer of 1981 for Phonogram (with an accompanying video!) – not to mention at least one BBC radio session from the same period – and you hear a rather top-heavy post-punk group essentially settling (for the 1981 summer “now”) in the then fashionable punk-funk trend (as opposed to the period’s actual Britfunk such as Beggar and Co., Light of the World, Central Line and Linx – and it is noteworthy that two stalwart Britfunk-connected horn players, trumpeter Claude Deppa and saxophonist Ray Carless, both later to become important participants in that decade’s “British Jazz Revival,” accompanied the group on their 1982 autumn tour). Fry mostly shrieks and rumbles his way through these grooves – they are not yet quite songs – and this “Show Me” in particular is radically different from the more familiar album version, with Fry repeatedly sobbing “I NEED someone!,” frowning that “skipping side issues sends me to sleep,” and demanding “not RHINESTONES, not RIBBONS – but PEARLS!!” The “where are the diamonds?” section is central to this version’s dynamic, as opposed to the coda it became a year later. “Surrender” barely clings on to its structure, as Fry invokes both Guy Fawkes (“Remember! The fifth of Novem-BER”) and Elvis (“Love Me Tender”) in a piercing attempt to get it across to his would-be lover how right it would be for her to come to him.

The single of “Tears Are Not Enough” sloped out in October of 1981 and bore enough critical buzz about it to scratch the surface of the Top 20. It was adored and loathed by roughly the same number of music writers on either side; the NME thought enough of it to place it seventh in their singles of the year list. A declaration of principles, for certain, but an oddly inconclusive one, as though the group were perhaps already admitting to themselves that the single, as it stood, with Steve Brown’s efficient-but-not-much-more production, was not quite enough, that its flatness undersold the Ken Dodd (lyrical) and Kevin Rowland (moral/metaphysical) citations. The sleevenote’s concluding admission that “Fry was already planning the next move” seems to confirm this (the whole sleevenote-as-manifesto schtick must have come from Dexy’s, who in the summer of 1981 had a Top 20 hit on Phonogram with a very different song entitled “Show Me”).

Yet, although stuck in the watery broth of late ’81 Brit-punk-funk, complete with a bassline that is trying very hard not to be “Good Times,” “Tears” was evidently a strong song, as proud and unforgiving a statement of intent as Dexy’s “Dance Stance” (another debut single not helped by a listless production); there’s Fry (and his fine vocal did not need to be changed an atom for Lexicon) searching for the “real McCoy,” trying to get past memes of human contact – all those blueprints and pictures he has to negotiate – all the better to explain to his lover why he is leaving her, or sending her away. This is a defiant Fry we don’t really see in the rest of Lexicon, except in brief, fierce glimpses. Don’t cry, he’s saying, these tears are just a product of your own emotional kneejerk discourse – via, of all things, a twisted whisper of a Whitesnake reference (they had a hit earlier in 1981 entitled “Would I Lie To You?”) –and since “you’ve said things worth believing,” you are therefore BETTER than this. Or so the singer hopes. The “used” of his final “all used” (as in “all used up,” although that last “up” is never sung) drains away like the residue from an epistaxis. Staccato brass (trumpet and trombone; Kim Wear and Andy Gray respectively) hover in the background like impatient bouncers.

But I think “Tears” transcends all the tainted love stuff to become a wider manifesto, perhaps even a New Pop (now capitalised) calling card; you’ve had your mourning and greyness, the song appears to suggest, but it won’t suffice where we’re heading – you are capable of more.  With the glittering Lexicon version in mind, I asked Martin Fry if the song was “not so much raging against a dying light, but trying to relight and resuscitate it,” to which he gave me a very direct response: “’Tears Are Not Enough’  is simply about climbing up off the canvas, changing and standing up for yourself; empowerment, I think they call it. Finding your dignity and something to believe in. If people compared it to Dexy’s, well I’d be very proud of that.”

The B-side was “Alphabet Soup,” not a song which would have remotely fitted in with the rest of Lexicon, but nonetheless one of ABC’s most important songs which they would continue to use as a set closer in 1982. Here, following Fry’s Norman Wisdom-as-James Brown protests with David Robinson’s drums (“Hit me!,” “Hit me two times!”), we are firmly in post-Pop Group 1981, with Mark White’s post-Nile Rodgers chattering guitar, Mark Lickley’s thumb-but-don’t-slap bass and Stephen Singleton’s early Andy Mackay-meets-James Chance skronking alto – and, above it all, Fry’s high-pitched announcements and statements of intent (at one point he cries “I’m swimming against the TIDE!”).

It is fair to assume that if ABC had had nothing more to offer than “Alphabet Soup” they would have been forgotten as swiftly as Stimulin or Funkapolitan. But perhaps more startling is their edited performance of the same song, in much the same style, on the BBC’s Multi-Coloured Swap Shop Saturday morning kids’ TV show, recorded at the end of November 1981 (by which time David Palmer had replaced Robinson on drums). Amid the placid world of such as Noel Edmonds, Keith Chegwin and John Craven, here was Fry screaming: “Sax – equals SEX – equals SAX – which means Stephen’s porno-GRAPHIC!” (and Singleton scarcely toned down his skronk style for the programme). A gatecrashing Pistols could not have done better.

However, it was clear that to realise their vision more thoroughly and definitively, ABC needed to get away from their cult-funk pigeonhole and make a real advance. Their first instinct was to find a bigger producer; the initial front-runner was the late Alex Sadkin, but that fell through after a thunderous row between producer and band at a Funkapolitan gig – Sadkin felt that the best way forward was to take Fry alone and use session musicians, but Fry and the rest of ABC were violently against this.

At which point, the group heard a pop record on the radio, wondered at its unexpected glory, and wondered even more about who had produced it.

In the autumn of 1981, Trevor Horn and Dollar needed each other. In Britain, Horn was only really known as half of Buggles, and then as part of Yes, when both he and fellow Buggle Geoff Downes were drafted in to replace the departed Anderson and Wakeman (the story? Yes and Buggles had the same manager, and one day in early 1980 they were working in adjacent studios. Horn and Downes dropped in to say hello; Chris Squire happened to be a Buggles fan and after sitting in the duo were asked to join. The resultant album, Drama, largely had metaphorical critical tomatoes thrown at it, although it really is not bad at all; in Britain, I only just missed writing about the record (it spent a fortnight at number two behind Roxy Music’s Flesh And Blood) and in terms of getting to grips with a new decade it was an ambitious effort; “White Car” and “Into The Lens” are Buggles songs in all but name, while “Run Through The Light” featured the first appearance of engineer Hugh Padgham’s patented “gated drum sound.” But a subsequent tour was less than successful and Yes broke up shortly afterwards (Downes followed Steve Howe into early eighties stadium rock behemoths Asia, while Horn found his true metier as the producer of a reformed Yes’ highly successful 1983 album 90125).

If this glum processional of facts hasn’t already sent you to sleep, then consider the position of Dollar, who in the summer of 1981 hadn’t had a hit for some eighteen months. But Therese Bazar had crossed paths with Trevor Horn back in her seventies days with Guys ‘N’ Dolls, and she and David van Day loved “Video Killed The Radio Star” and wanted some of that modest adventure for themselves. Horn, meanwhile, freshly out of Yes, regarded Dollar as an interesting challenge. Here is what Horn, interviewed in the July 1982 issue of The FACE – by Fiona Russell-Powell – had to say about the matter:

“What I wanted to do was to make some really good MoR records but that weren’t MoR in the old sense of the word where they had real drums and real violins on them, but to use synthesisers and robot drummers….(“Mirror Mirror”) I tried to make…almost like a computer had written it and produced it.”

In other words, the “Vince Hill does Kraftwerk” theory, and over a beautifully paced set of four singles, Horn and Dollar managed to pull it off. Basically the Dollar tetralogy was concerned about people’s relationship with other people and with technology, and how the latter ends up swallowing the former. Explaining “Hand Held In Black And White” in The FACE, Horn said that the song “was about a frame of mind, you know when you take a very quick snapshot…well, I saw a photo of Dollar that was taken with a handheld camera in black and white and I thought it was a nice attitude.”

The record achieves rather more than that; with its swipes at Thatcherism (“in graffiti, WINNER TAKES IT ALL”) and its Gothic arches of drums (however they were achieved), it put Dollar in 3D, raised them high above what their supper club peers were doing (“HIGH ABOVE THE GROUND!”) and made them both hip and (again) popular; although it climbed no higher in the chart than #19, it sold consistently enough to be ranked 1981’s 49^th best-selling single.

And it was heard, and seized upon, by ABC as their way out of the fashion trap. The next Dollar single struck out even further: “Mirror Mirror (Mon Amour)” is so buoyant and weightless a piece of modernist pop that it’s easy to overlook that the song is (Horn’s words again) “supposed to be about someone looking in a mirror telling themselves how much they loved themselves.” However, David and Therese looked lovingly into each other’s eyes when singing it on TV, and thus transcended the conceit, although the record does not end so much as fizzle out into the next galaxy, all echoes, echoes, and voices and keyboards striking out for heaven knows where.

“Videotheque” was actually the single which was recorded next, but the duo were insistent on a ballad for a follow-up. Slightly irked by this, Horn set out to find them “the sloppiest ballad I can find” and so alighted on “Give Me Back My Heart,” written by one Simon Darlow. Horn wrote and appended a coda to the song, and then proceeded to turn what could have been one of the soppiest of all pop records into one of the best. Starting with “I’m Not In Love” as a template, Horn patiently builds up the call and response between the two singers who are now losing each other, bringing in new ingredients into each succeeding verse and chorus, with incidences of the visionary (van Day’s stereo-panned “Miss you so, miss you so” passing over Bazar’s second verse like a fleeing albatross, his later, deadpan “I. Love. You”). Anne Dudley got involved at this stage, and her very characteristic piano break sets the scene for several Lexicon songs, “All Of My Heart” in particular. Then, everything recedes to a simple, drum-pattern heartbeat before Horn breaks the picture open again.

And then, instead of ending or fading the song where it would normally be expected to end or fade, Horn ups the ante dramatically; their voices now become stentorian, monolithic; Bazar’s (computer voice print generated?) harmonies multiplying to necropolis level, synthesised trumpet fanfares bringing down he planet…and out of nowhere comes…Jon Anderson, singing a lyric straight out of Time And A Word? In fact the voice is Horn himself, and then a closing cascade of bells and Bazar’s angels which would not have disgraced Brian Wilson. Now the music fades, and so does van Day, leaving just a few Bazar voices left to harmonise: “Always together, always the same/NOW YOU’RE GONE.” He has managed to turn an MoR ballad into a Yes album closer by way of Pet Sounds; the lessons from those seventies John Howard sessions had been fully absorbed and reinvented.

“Videotheque” may well have been the best of the four;  here, the Fairlight dominates as the duo can now only see each other on either side of a video screen. The slowed-down (again Beach Boy-esque) vocal harmonies in the instrumental break set us up directly for Art of Noise. And Bazar’s closing, icy descent of “Only ghosts are lovers on the screen” is one of the most chilling moments in all of pop. The job had been done; the story told.

“The heart is what I imagine I give. Each time this gift is returned to me, then it is little enough to say, with Werther, that the heart is what remains of me, once all the wit attributed to me and undesired by me is taken away: the heart is what remains to me, and this heart that lies heavy on my heart is heavy with the ebb which has filled it with itself (only the lover and the child have a heavy heart).”
(Barthes)

I asked Martin Fry what attracted him to the Dollar/Horn work. “There’s the epic sonic frame for sure,” I said, “but also a progressively more fragile grip on emotions and love; I wonder whether the emotion of the Dollar records attracted you as much as their sonic adventure.”

“’Hand Held In Black And White’ was the one,” Fry says. “It sounded widescreen and glossy and intelligent and nonsensical all at the same time. Brilliant. Greater than the sum of its parts. Pop magic. Not attracted by the emotion – it was more the sonic scale of it all and the sheer over-the-top cheek of the production.”

When ABC and Horn met, in a Queensway pizzeria, they found, perhaps to each other’s surprise, that they got on extremely well. Horn, who had no great expectations of the meeting and was slightly puzzled about why ABC wanted him, was delighted by their urbanity, intelligence and instinctive good manners, as well as their ability to know exactly what kind of sound they wanted to achieve in their music, and which audience(s) the music should be aimed at. The “Dylan but with a disco beat rather than an acoustic guitar” strategy has been much commented on and echoed through the intervening three decades, but it struck me that Horn had as much to prove as ABC did, that he perhaps also saw ABC as his own big break. I wondered whether Horn’s involvement was at the Eno level, less of a producer as such and more of a collaborator.

“Not entirely,” Fry told me. “Trevor could definitely see that we were onto something. There was some stuff on Lexicon that Trevor didn’t seem to like. Some of the lyrics on ‘4 Ever 2 Gether ’; the middle-eight on ‘Tears Are Not Enough.’ A few things but not too much. As you can imagine he was very, very professional and inspiring to be around. We were all striving hard to create something special. We all wanted to make a record that sounded polished and brand new. Trevor really liked Yes and would sometimes gently encourage us to make the album more like a concept album (author’s note: in fact, at the end of the recording sessions for Lexicon, Horn presented Fry with a copy of Yes’ Close To The Edge; he was proud to have produced a record which he felt was of equal calibre). That seemed a bit old fashioned to me at the time. It was never going to be a concept album. Too seventies. We were raw and very opinionated but also very focused. To be honest we all grew in stature once Lexicon was released - Trevor as a producer and us as a band.”

The first released fruit of band and producer collaboration was the second single, “Poison Arrow,” a pop record which more or less sent everybody else back to the drawing board, so determined and vast a step from “Tears” that it entered the Top 40 at a higher position than “Tears” had peaked. Just as soon as Dare had been felt to be pushing the pop envelope as far as it wished to be pushed, “Poison Arrow” elevated the bar again (“Raise your aim!”). A record so brilliantly and logically constructed that Noel Edmonds was moved on his Sunday morning  Radio 1 show to offer a lengthy peroration on the tactics and strategies  which made it such a great record. Horn moved ABC away from the funk – and away from the tastemakers at places like The FACE, who never entirely forgave ABC for not being The Haines Gang – and towards the old Chic device of deploying disco memes as emotional minefields.

The scenario of “Tears” is reversed; here Fry is the one being dumped, and the music resonates and rages all around him like an irate cathedral (Singleton’s saxophone, now determinedly late Roxy era Mackay, swarms around the singer’s head like an admonitory bumblebee). Nobody else was daring to rhyme “Cupid “with “stupid,” nor with such force – the song in itself could have been a hit for Barry Ryan or Love Affair (or indeed Cupid’s Inspiration) in 1968, but Horn succeeds in bringing it up to the 1982 now.

In a theme which will recur elsewhere on Lexicon, Fry does OK until he makes the dumb mistake – his perspective – of saying “I love you,” whereupon everything goes pancake flat, although he himself is cynical of this (“Right from the start when you knew we would part!” he loudly protests near the end).

Perhaps the song’s high moment is the point where Fry’s spoken lament is answered by the coldly rational voice of the woman who has deserted or rejected him (though uncredited, this was the voice of one Karen Clayton,  who provides a similar cameo on Art of Noise’s “Close (To The Edit)”) whereupon drums explode downwards like Zeus kicking a fridge down the side of Mount Olympus – in 1982 this gesture was unprecedented in pop, and quickly became one of the most badly imitated gestures in pop. More hurt than Humperdinck, more tortured than Tom, “Poison Arrow” was a great pop record about other pop records, while at the same time wondering why other pop records bothered. Was the intention, I asked Fry, to subvert the disco norm or just expand it (i.e. "I Will Survive" x "Watching The Detectives")?

“There’s no denying that. We were trying to fuse our love of Chic and Earth Wind and Fire and Change with our love of Joy Division and Bowie and Roxy and Costello….and countless others. Two worlds colliding. We tried to make ‘Poison Arrow’ like a mini-opera with an emotional charge that took you through the highs and lows of unrequited love. We milked the drama . We didn’t want any of our songs to have fades. Just a big explosive ending. ‘Everlasting Love’ and ‘Eloise’ do that too I guess (author’s note: although technically speaking both records fade, they both have huge important pauses – the drums on ‘Everlasting Love,’ while ‘Eloise’ turns on the whim of a raised-eyebrow upward bass run). We wanted everything to be amplified and exaggerated . That's why the drums are as big as we could make them in the middle section. Crashing down .”

It certainly does sound on “Poison Arrow,” and especially at that key moment, that love and humanity are crashing down in ruins around the singer; the bottom has fallen out of his world. On the single B-side, “Theme From Mantrap,” we hear “Poison Arrow” as a slow jazz croon, but with icy synthesiser replacing strings and a few extra lyrics (“Sticks and stones may/Break my bones but/Words, they almost KILLED me,” and he offers her the hopeful option of returning). ABC were striking out where a lot of other pop (but not all of it) was too timid to follow.

I emphasise that “but not all of it” because by early 1982 it was palpably evident that a great deal of pop was striking out. Records like “Party Fears Two” and “Ghosts” were redefining what could be achieved with pop music on a near-weekly basis. The charts, hitherto on the verge of moribund, became exciting again. All due respect to Hendrix and Zeppelin but I can attest first-hand that in the first half of 1982 – the second half was a different matter, but we’ll get to that soon enough - there was no time to listen to the old stuff when so much colourful and innovative new music was demanding my attention.

“The Look Of Love,” the scarlet-coloured third single, which I first heard on a balmy, sunny May college afternoon, was, unbelievably, miraculously, even better than “Poison Arrow.” One could feel, never mind hear, Fry and the group pulling New Pop up by its bootstraps towards the heavens.  The saxophones were now a hallowed choir, the horn section of “Tears” and synthesised horns of “Arrow” had been succeeded by actual strings, brass and far-off operatic soprano – the latter, I think, a nod to Joe Meek – and there, oh the glorious cheek of it, a Dylan paraphrase: “And gravity won’t pull you through” (on “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” it was “negativity” that wouldn’t pull you through).

All in the meantime, Fry wanders around, scratching his head, wondering just what this “love” is, how it manifests itself and where to find it. He doesn’t actually find a solution, as such, within the song, but there is a talking section, out of a restrained heartbeat-driven break, where he third-persons himself, just as Oakey had done on “Love Action” – and both were inspired by the same piece of music; “Jesus, this is Iggy…”

While “The Look Of Love” was being recorded, at London’s Good Earth studios, David Bowie and Tony Visconti dropped in to say hello. Hugely impressed by ABC’s work, and by “The Look Of Love” in particular, Bowie made various suggestions to Fry about what could be done with the song, including possibly the talkover section (“They say, hey Martin, maybe one day you’ll find true love…”) and an idea for a montage of telephone answering machine messages which wasn’t taken up but is used on another important album later in 1982. ABC must have felt blessed.

And the song just won’t stop building; the “Arrow” drum rolls are back but now exultant and celebratory, until strings scrape the sky, Fry rejuvenates some old Stax memes (“Sisters and bro-THERS!”) and by the time he is screaming a Frankie Laine cowboy paraphrase, there was the warm knowledge that pop music could get no greater than this; the Miracles silver-suit tribute (though not unprecedented; see the video for Godley and Crème’s “Wedding Bells,” a top ten hit a few months previously) made wrinkled old record collectors’ noses turn up but made everybody else happy. And still he is not seeing “love” beyond what Barthes calls the “image-repertoire” (“Paul Morley once lent me a copy of A Lover’s Discourse after he heard ‘The Look of Love,’ Fry wryly admitted to the author, “but I confess I never read it and I never returned it.”).

Fry’s sleevenote on the single of  “The Look Of Love” was also his best, and I think he meant it rather than sending up the pre-Beatles concept. “My ambition is to make a record you can cherish and be ‘Number One’ in your personal chart,” he wrote. “maybe ‘The Lexicon Of Love’ will be such a record.”

We were about to find out.

* * * * * *

“I do not dare say what I feel on this subject; I will appear insane to Northern people.”
(Stendhal)

* * * * * *

They stood, amazed.

“He seemed quite happy,” he remarked, “out on his boat in the middle of an ocean, in the middle of nowhere – isolated but not lost, and not particularly unhappy about his lot. You could even say he was, in a way only he could understand, contented.”

Number 2 looked at him.

“Well, I don’t know what you saw,” she said, “but I saw a downtrodden troupe of blackface minstrels on a stage at the end of a pier, playing to a sparse audience of pensioners.”

He considered.

“I suppose each one of us sees in this thing what we want, or prefer, to see.”

“And so it is time to listen to the record itself?”

“Not quite. One more relevant diversion.”
“Relevant to whom?”

“We’ll find that out soon enough.”

* * * * * *

An Epiphanic Interlude

It was the exact moment when what is still conveniently known as “improvised music” finally broke free of American models. Even AMM acknowledged the importance of Cage and Wolff (so much so that the latter became a floating member). It occurred at the ICA on the final day of the 1982 Company week, on Saturday 3 July, the week that The Lexicon Of Love went to number one. The occasion was recorded and can be found on the Epiphany/Epiphanies set. In the inner sleeve you may observe a photograph of an earnest , bespectacled young man looking at what, or where, George Lewis was aiming his trombone. Indeed I was in the audience for all of the three days of the event. The personnel which Company director Derek Bailey – a man born and raised in Sheffield - assembled for that year was a predominantly contemplative assemblage of musicians – thoughtful and inward-looking types including the aforementioned Lewis, pianists Keith Tippett and Ursula Oppens (the latter making her improv debut, although she contributed “orchestral piano” to Carla Bley’s 1975 recording of 3/4 For Piano And Orchestra, Bley herself taking the rôle of solo pianist in lieu of an on-tour Keith Jarrett), Julie Tippetts on vocals and occasional guitar and flute, violinist Phil Wachsmann and harpist Anne LeBaron. The predicted question mark was the inclusion of the considerably noisier guitarist Fred Frith, then making atonal waves with the more extreme manifestations of Bill Laswell’s Material; but the unpredicted question mark came in the form of the two Japanese musicians participating; bassist Moto Yoshizawa and the unclassifiable instrument-maker Akio Suzuki. And although the music was certainly the best heard from any Company line-up since that of the original Company Week in 1977, it was visually and aurally evident that the real disturbances and transitions were being effected by Suzuki and Yoshizawa. The quintet featuring those two, along with Bailey, Frith and Lewis, was a gigantic but still loosely conventional roar. Jazz roots could still be glimpsed, however dimly under the surface franticity.

But, in the final evening’s final improvisation, a trio of Bailey, Suzuki and Yoshizawa, which fittingly concludes the second record of the double album, I witnessed a new form of music being born, first cautiously, and then with flattening confidence. Lasting just over 18 minutes, the improvisation began with the usual cautious introductory pluckings and scrapings, though obviously more Eastern in texture and approach than standard. I’ve never quite worked out whether the “analapos” or the “kikkokikiriki” was the row of drums (slightly smaller and rounder than the average tom-tom) or the higher tower of seemingly differently tuned, and occasionally remote-controlled, spinning plate lookalikes. Early in the performance, however, it was down to Bailey to initiate some rhythm (on the CD edition, this occurs at 4:47 and again at 6:02), although behind him there was a high, ululating drone, Yoshizawa having moved closer to the bridge of his bass. From 8:00-8:56 the music comes as near as could be imagined to the Standard Jazz Trio (Suzuki skittling lightly on his pots), although visually it seemed as though this were the one thing the trio were keen to avoid. Nonetheless, soon afterwards (9:44), Bailey (playing acoustic) rolled out some Eddie Lang chords, as though to wave farewell to The Old Life. His solo masterpiece, Aida, recorded not long before this performance, indicates just how much brutal power he could put into even acoustic guitaristics (and there’s certainly more than a hint of Bailey’s lateral and at times anti-tonal aggression in some of David Rawlings’ more extreme work behind/with Gillian Welch). These chunky chords seemed to be the signal for the trio to raise the ante, and at 11:23 they prepared for the big push. The music visibly rose in intensity and temperature, Suzuki now alternatively scrabbling at his percussion and blowing through his enormous “glass harmonica,” Yoshizawa’s high-register abruptly bowed bass now sounding like Evan Parker at his squalliest; yet the music continued to ascend to near-demonic heights of noise and passion. As the performance climaxed, there was suddenly a terrible certainty about what the musicians were producing; unearthly howls and screams threatened to demolish the polite ICA theatre space entirely. But this was not the ecstasy of Ayler, nor the gleeful thuggery of Brötzmann; rather a new and as yet undefined means of expression.

And at the absolute apex of the performance (14:20) Suzuki started screaming vocally through his glass harmonica. The cries of the newborn child. It was like watching music being invented, its atoms being snatched from the exploding universe and reordered. Something was born on that evening; and it may be that people still coming to terms with its existence and growth.

The music then receded naturally, with the vaguest of suggestions of Lang and Venuti from Bailey and Yoshizawa; the quietude belied the complete satisfaction of the musicians, the spirit sated, the new life making its way towards the incubator, and ultimately the nursery. And maybe even towards the charts, which subliminally and not so subliminally was what some of us were hoping for from New Pop.

* * * * * *

What do you think?

I think you’re trying to impress your readers with a show-off display of your fine musical knowledge.

Not a bit of it. I’m trying to get to the core of this tale, noting how one newborn scream can sound surprisingly like another, and how newness has different methods of making itself known and insinuating itself into the language. Don’t forget Clock DVA, or some of what Singleton was doing in those early “Alphabet Soup”s.

It really is time that we listened to the album. Making your readers wait like this is akin to cruelty to animals.

I want to impart how long waits sometimes have to last before a miracle comes. But you are correct; it is time to address the thing itself.

“if the voice is lost, it is the entire image which vanishes...”
(Barthes)

Look at the cover, first of all. Such darkness. Such blue.

As though rescued from the bottom of the ocean.

And yet, such violent red to the left, like drying blood.

The presentation, the typography, is such an advance from the singles. Classically romantic rather than utilitarian modernist.

It is like an old theatre programme. Or the cover of that 101 Strings record which really was more important than anyone suspected.

Words, words, taken randomly from songs and drifting off the cover into shipwrecked detritus.

Note the three monitors on stage, as though this were only the prelude to a rock concert.

The gun – is it the assassination of rock?

Melodrama has its place but doesn’t dictate the pace. Now, what’s he doing with that gun?

Threatening to shoot it. The girl fainting in his left arm…

Perhaps she has already been shot. Her eyes are open but dead and she is clutching her left lower chest wall.

What has he done?

It’s hard to say, but note the orange colour of the woman’s dress, like sunset. Where are we, exactly?

Hampstead? There’s a sign which says “OAD NW3,” the rest obscured by the bloody red curtain.

Haven’t we seen that typography before?

On the back of Abbey Road!

He’s firing or pointing a gun, possibly in the direction of Abbey Road…in the summer of 1982, this was still a sensitive issue.

You really have to be careful not to read too much into things.

But look at the two figures, one dark, the other light; one standing defiantly, one swooning in defeat, and how they play against that row of dustbins behind them?

It is as if they have been superimposed on the scene.

Note also that the apartment block which forms the nocturnal backdrop to this scene is suspiciously modern. In the third window along from the left at the top, we can clearly see the blue light of a television radiating out. Others are not in; at least one apartment has its windows shuttered.

But it must have been a thrilling thing to see in the record racks.

It’s difficult to convey just how thrilling it was. It looked so different, even from Avalon.

And yet it is so clearly a stage set. Where else in real life could you see such a vivid red?

According to Fry, the inspiration for those colours came from Powell and Pressburger’s 1948 film The Red Shoes.

An undeniably powerful spectacle, but none too faithful to Andersen. In the original story, the girl can’t stop dancing and dies when the red shoes, with her bloodied feet ensconced in them, are severed from the rest of her. Still dancing.

Is he saying it is now time to stop dancing?

Or dance differently. There, on the back – behind the scenes! The attentive prompter, the bored and possibly falling asleep stagehand, the dapper bouquet of flowers. A rack of costumes and the rest of that turquoise brick wall. It’s deconstruction time!

Lots of people spoke about it, but so few actually went ahead and did it.

And on the inner sleeve; words, words, words which keep sending variants on the same message, and credits, and it’s all very formal – but oh! The couple are taking a bow and the backstage hands are applauding and cheering them!

It’s all a show.

So much of this record seems to be about showing.

“’Show me whom to desire’…The loved being is desired because another or others have shown the subject that such a being is desirable: however particular, amorous desire is discovered by induction.”
(Barthes)

“I am making all possible efforts to be dry. I want to impose silence on my heart, which thinks it has much to say. I constantly fear having written nothing but a sigh, when I believe I have set down a truth.”
(Stendhal)

And that label…Neutron. Subatomic.

But every neutron needs its proton.

Quite. What about that title?

Taken, I believe, from the headline from an NME review of ABC, written by Ian Penman.

But he didn’t write the headline. That was Andy Gill, who now reviews albums for The Independent (never to be confused with the guitarist from Leeds proto-New Pop quartet The Gang Of Four). Still, I’m sure Barthes was in Gill’s mind; what he says in A Lover’s Discourse about the necessity “to choose an absolutely insignificant order…to let it be understood that there was no question here of a love story…”

It’s the story of this record, isn’t it? He’s hardly ever happy on it.

It may be that the protagonist spends far too much time searching through dictionaries and far too little time attending to the matters of his own heart. As though what Stendhal calls the “crystallisation” of love is preferable to the messier reality.

Let’s put the record on and listen to it.

Such a slow fade-in. With inbuilt long-playing record crackles which are in keeping with the overall tempo.

Those sombre strings; it seems so…majestic. So unlike anything else around at its time.

It certainly wasn’t unprecedented, but you have to remember how purposely out of keeping this beginning was with everything else happening around ABC in the middle of 1982. It was a way of saying; this is something different. Something special.

And yet also something very, very old.

Which goes back to Nat “King” Cole and his lush musings on love and even to Rodgers and Hammerstein, string overtures and everything.

The strings seem to appear out of nowhere, emerging from a grim, bleak fog.

Like a sunken ship full of rich cargo, as the music will later soundtrack. The strings’ appearance and setting match the lyrical concerns with which they will eventually be coupled.

So grand – didn’t Phil McNeill in the NME at the time compare it to Scott Walker?

Yes, and he must have been thinking of the “Prologue” which begins ‘Til The Band Comes In before merging, electrifyingly, into “Little Things To Keep Us Together,” where the orchestra appears to shoot straight at you through the speakers.

I really do hope you’re not going to indulge in the usual lazy critical appraisal of that record?

It is the usual, isn’t it – great suite of songs, then peters out with cover versions. Goes to show who has actually listened to the thing. The first half-hour or so is an interlinked set of songs wherein Walker sings about everybody except himself – whereas Martin Fry only really sings about himself – and it has its own inbuilt architectural logic and I can’t see how it could be improved upon. And the cover versions are better than you think.

Really?

I don’t think that Scott has ever sung a word that he didn’t believe.

Was there not an actual “Overture”?

There was, artfully arranged for strings by Anne Dudley, and it appeared on the B-side of the single of “All Of My Heart.” It may possibly have been composed after the event, but it was performed at the beginning of every ABC concert in their 1982 tour.

The “All Of My Heart” single being the point where a lot of people thought they had lost themselves.

The concertmaster/tweed hunting get-up didn’t really work; it looked as though the band were becoming what they had beheld. And there were no sleevenotes, friendly or otherwise. But I was always rather sad that “Overture” never began the album itself; skilfully segueing all of the album’s tunes, it is a dark and somewhat wistful picture that is being painted, and among the strings are echoed samples of Fry’s speaking voice from the record, sounding like a mind at the end of its tether, sounding uncannily like…

...Ian Curtis!

Not so fast; we’ll get there eventually. But back to the beginning of the record itself; the strings build up and up, are joined by fulsome brass fanfares, and just as it is about to boil over, the band jump into the record, with Dudley’s deadpan piano chords…and that bass!

That’s what I was going to ask you about. It’s not Mark Lickley?

Lickley appears on the singles and co-wrote fully half the songs on the album but left before the album itself was recorded. There were stories of Horn, himself a bassist by trade, being unhappy with Lickley’s funky style, and of bass and drum notes being punched into the computer mix one note at a time (for those of a technical bent, the lines were fed through a Minimoog and then filtered through a CV/Gate device). The rest of the bass work on the album was provided by one Brad Lang, a session musician.

Who does open up the songs somewhat; the sliding Mick Karn style is more in keeping with the slippery, elusive nature of the songs’ emotional objects.

And also making the bass something of a lead instrument (like Peter Hook), as it is generally more prominent in the mix than White’s guitar, which is left to roam fairly freely in the style of early Phil Manzanera.

Such a glamorous soundscape; in what luxury was it created?

Principally Sarm East Studios, crammed into the basement of a clothes warehouse called Trendfever, somewhere in or near the Brick Lane of 1982, decades prior to its regeneration. The premises were cramped and the toilet was prone to flooding. You concentrated on the work.

And yet, look how elegantly, and “on time,” Fry’s voice enters the record.

Striding down the not yet existent red-carpeted staircase, strolling confidently to the mikestand, taking the microphone with one hand and launching effortlessly, straight into business: “Once I needed your love, but that was just one thing left on my mind.”

This is Technicolor compared with the demo version. Now there is a song, electric piano comments slightly sarcastically, White’s guitar pings like The Edge. And that deep. lush background hush on the bridge!

Underlining the talk of pirate stations and buried treasure, all building up to a chorus far more exultant and defiant than it was originally. He sings the “free” of “and you can be free” as though he is in considerable emotional pain.

And then he gets to the key line of the record: “Some things are hidden, some things you’ll see.” So he is still not going to show us everything; a lot of it we will have to work out for ourselves. Over drums which stamp as mercilessly as Paul Cook on “Holidays In The Sun.” “Nine out of ten, in every case,” he doesn’t quite contradict himself, “She might look pretty but there’s make up on her face.” What is there when the façade has eroded? And so a fanfare for three different types of keyboard with a thrilling twin-pronged harmonic modulation back into the chorus; the Fairlight, its tones falling like meteors (and with an unconscious echo of the end of Escalator), actually sounds like teardrops running down and through the cosmetics.

Finally, Fry roars in real anger: “Where are the diamonds? Where are the pearls? Where are the things that you took from this world?” I said to Fry that the outrage that he expresses at the end of this song was worthy of Lydon. He replied: “Love is truly blind and mesmerising so some things you see , some things you don’t.’ Show Me’’s all about the inner turmoil that comes with love. Fear of losing love. Nostalgia for the first magnificent moments of love. What’s real and what’s fake. Fear of falling faster and deeper into love than the person you love. It’s a pretty fucked-up song.” When I pressed him about whether there was an anti-Thatcher subtext to the song (her distorted ideas of “freedom”) he pointedly and rightly upbraided me: “Forget Thatcher. She didn’t have a monopoly on the eighties.”

And straight into “Poison Arrow” without missing a beat! It’s such an exciting record!

Side one did always give me the impression of being sequenced; its five songs are not segued into one long whole, and the side doesn’t always follow the same bpm pattern but every element seems in its natural place. Was this a nod to pioneering disco albums like Gloria Gaynor’s Never Can Say Goodbye or Donna Summer’s Once Upon A Time? Fry is more sanguine: “Not really. At least not intentionally. I guess the bpm was around the 120/124 area. The human heartbeat dictates the pace.”

That piano interlude in “Poison Arrow,” so reminiscent of “I’m Not In Love.”

Then “Many Happy Returns.” “When I accepted this job, I was resigned to my fate…”

I remember being in a Virgin Megastore a couple of weeks after the record had come out, one lunchtime, and there was a young woman, browsing, doubtless also on her lunch break, and Lexicon was playing and she just sang along to this song that wasn’t even a single. The passion for the record was universal, at least in Britain. For about a month and a half, no other record seemed to matter; everybody owned it, and played it, and kept playing it, such that a plaintive Charles Shaar Murray in the NME was moved to extol a record by pleading to his readers to “give Martin Fry the night off” (the record in question was Juju Music by King Sunny Adé and his African Beats, so actually he was right to plead).

And “Many Happy Returns” – yes, I know that was the title of an episode, and I acknowledge the “resigned” part of the lyric, but we need to press on – is a great song; “Like a Phoenix coming back from the ashes – uh-HUH,” breathes Fry over a patented Chic arrangement pattern, he rhymes “Axis” with “fascist” and hates himself, since every time she leaves, he takes her back and the Sisyphean struggle begins anew; out of boredom or misplaced pride, or fear of death?

“A turnabout occurs: I seek to disannul it, I force myself to suffer once again.”
(Barthes)

Things reach an unearthly climax in the final verse when the punk in Fry finally punches his way through: “Now she’s gone, she’s GONE A-WOOOOY! Now she’s gone, FOR! GET! HAR! Coming back NO OTHER DOOOOY! So why resur-RECT HER?” He sings these lines as though the sinews of his life are being torn asunder while he sings then, as saxophone moans, guitar arches and drums cascade, before the string synthesiser reaches a high C and Tessa Webb’s Bazar-like backing vocal chorale pours candlewax over Fry’s grief. He is wholly defeated. Then the song recedes to allow Dudley’s wandering electric piano solo before one final dramatic downward four-chord keyboard flourish, held on a disturbingly long drone before heading straight into the rejuvenated “Tears Are Not Enough.”

“Tears are an extreme form of smiles.”
(Stendhal)

I asked Martin Fry about the motives behind “Many Happy Returns.” “Punk; a slight return - it is as if you're forever doomed to rebound on and relive the same affair or scenario over and over, Moebius strip-style,” I suggested to him, “but those vocals in the final verse constitute a pure howl of 1977 anger, as though the Pistols were trying to irrupt through a Sinatra session. Love; can't live with it, nor without it?”

“’Like the world spinning round on its axis , I know democracy but I know what’s fascist.’ Yep, there was a lot of fury in there,” Fry admits. “Some anger. Alongside a song title that could have come out of a Hallmark birthday card. I always think the nineties started in 1988 and Acid House. So it could also be true to say the eighties probably started in 1977.”

Even in 1982 I was puzzled by the seemingly uniform condemnation of Lexicon by writers who really ought to have been listening more attentively. Twee? Bland? Conservative? Were they even listening to the same record, or deafened by then-fashionable ideology? Lexicon continues to strike me as a particularly angry piece of work, and its music is deeply imbued with the sounds of punk – guitars crash, drums hammer, perhaps hammering home the songs’ point, denying the possibility of hiding within its words.  I asked Fry about the punk element of ABC’s work.

“I loved Punk. I hitch-hiked to Coventry once to see the Jam. Saw the Pistols and the Clash and the Buzzcocks and the Heartbreakers and the Subway Sect and the Banshees. I also loved James Chance and the Contortions. Television and Patti Smith. We were never going to sound like a carbon copy punk band. It was more Punk to try and reinvent show business and write love songs and sparkle. That went against the grain of any of our contemporaries in Sheffield at the time. We wanted an international shiny sound. That antagonised as many people as it entertained at the time. For us rock was dead.”

Or, perhaps, just resting.

The album “Tears” is much more forceful and enraged than the single original, just as “Dance Stance” re-emerged as the furiously uncompromising “Burn It Down” – and yet all Horn did was to brush up the original track, as if that were all he did. Fry again: “Trevor remixed it and added the harpsichord in the middle eight. And tweaked it beautifully as only he knew how.”

Side one finishes – or, more properly, climaxes – with “Valentine’s Day,” the great majority of which is instrumental, with only a few vocal flourishes riding ominous waves of a Prokofiev-like keyboard figure. But what flourishes these are; now all the suppressed emotional rage is unleashed in full, and mostly at the singer himself, but also at the phoney society which dangled all of these attractive carrots before his nose all of his life, only to withdraw them when he is old enough to reach them and tell him that he can’t afford them (you do as you are told – “Baked your cake in little slices” – think you’re grown up – “Kept your eye on rising prices” – but the game is already fixed  - Wound up winning booby prizes.” You want to be Bill Gates, you’d settle for being Richard Hawley, and you end up being the guy sitting in the seat across the way from you on the bus). Santa Claus, Harpers and Queens, School for Scandal (“Language, old boy, language!”), the Great Barrier Reef – none of it can help you  now; buried beneath the final assault on its listeners’ consciousness is the line, “When you don’t tell the truth, that’s the price you pay.” And then the hysterical coup de theatre about dancing lessons and Fred Astaire, following which band and song, like so many others on this record, suddenly snap shut on him, like a coffin lid. Or the song runs into a psychological brick wall.

I saw Fry performing “Valentine’s Day” at the Glasgow Apollo in early November 1982 – about three weeks before the Hammersmith Odeon concerts out of which the live segment of the 2CD Lexicon edition is comprised – and I was reminded, unavoidably, of Ian Curtis, as he writhed helplessly amidst streams of multi-coloured strobe lights and acres of velvet string players (the song has a similar, unstoppable momentum to “She’s Lost Control”). On side one of the original album, it works up to a barely controllable dervish. Building up and building up, and climbing up to and reaching the top…only to find you’re at rock bottom.

And then turning the record over, wondering how it could possibly get better than what you’ve just heard – and there’s “The Look Of Love”! It’s close to an overload!

There are people who feel that they still can’t keep up with the sugar rush of the first six songs of Lexicon, each outdoing its predecessor – only a very few albums had tried this before, including one which was a direct influence on Lexicon – and who sensed that such an unsustainable high could only be followed by a crashing low. In fact, “The Look Of Love” wraps up fairly neatly the common song structure at work throughout most of the record; the pregnant, funk-derived three-chord roundabout, one dominant and two auxiliary. Like Satie’s Gymnopédies, these songs appear to be reflecting off each other. Fry says: “The songs do reflect back and forth obsessively on the same subject , like a prism. Not all the songs but some of them. Moodswings. Elation , euphoria , paranoia, the whole spectrum. Love is a many splintered thing.” And the unspoken question within “The Look Of Love” is: “why are you looking so hard for something that’s staring you in the face?”

The one thing, the One thing, we can’t find – the same thing that, eighteen years before, money couldn’t buy.

“Date Stamp” – a key song on the record. That thumping bass and rhythm sounds familiar.

It was Horn already trying out the blueprint for Frankie; if it sounds like a prototype for “Relax,” it was probably meant to be so (even if Horn had heard neither band nor song at this point). It is our old post-punk friend, love as commodity of trade, something to be exchanged for a profit…

And yet there he goes again. “A ship in the harbour with wind in its sails.” We’re going to have to think very hard about all this sea imagery.

Perhaps he’s putting a message in a bottle;  barely eighteen months later, he will have released a metaphorical song called “S.O.S.”

Or maybe he’s asking the listener if they’ve bought into this thing yet. “Still refuse to reach in your pocket.”

It’s a great moment, isn’t it? He is asking the listener “am I convincing you? Do you even believe all of this?” before warning that it’s all as temporary as the love letters “written on that sand.”

It’s also very moving, those choruses. The Bazar-style choir singing “Love has no guarantee” and “Promise ‘til eternity” answered by Fry dolefully murmuring “Guess I’ll fade away.” It’s not just about “love,” is it?

It is as if ABC are already signing their own death warrant. Pop music, credit cards, capitalism, love – none of it will last, all will decay. Five years from now ZTT will release a song entitled “Snobbery And Decay.”

And that female voice. Is it…?

No it is not Tina Charles, the former partner of Trevor Horn, who once played bass in her touring band; it is session singer Tessa Webb, later Tessa Niles, and her solo verse is the only time on the record that the “other” voice gets to be heard, not including the rhetorical spoken death blow on “Poison Arrow” or the “Goodbye!” on “The Look Of Love” which Horn maintains was the actual girl who dumped Fry (and hence helped inspire this record), although I’m not clear whether this was indeed the case and not an Emulator-ed group of Frys.

Fry sounds really upset towards the end of this one.

Can you blame him? He’s realising he may have been sold a bill of goods and, worse, that the expression of love in a pop song may always have been a hopeless chimera (“No chance of subtlety/No promise of e-TER-nity!”). The observation is terminated by the cash register which has been ringing all through the song…

Which reminds me of “Money” by Pink Floyd.

I wonder if this tale is ever going to escape the lunatic on the grass.

So we reach this record’s equivalent of “Us And Them”?

“All Of My Heart,” the jewel in the Then Play Long crown. An opening piano (with guitar) chord with which a different version of this tale could have been opened. Then David Palmer’s unforgiving snare and fuse-dousing hi-hat flurries. Then Lang’s sensual but worried bass, as though the singer’s lover is still standing at the door, waiting for him to change his mind.

This is followed by a marvellous inversion of the album’s general three-chord trick, such that the dominant chord settles on a major rather than a minor, with peaceful strings – real strings this time (those who routinely write up Lexicon as an “orchestral pop record” forget that an orchestra only appears on four of its ten songs, including the prologue and epilogue).

Then Fry sings:

“Once upon a time when we were friends, I gave you my heart. The story ends.” Fouling the situation again, and he’s too old and experienced to believe in fairy tales any more (including wishing on a star, which he knows didn’t help Rose Royce).

The others return. “What’s it like to have loved and to lose that much?” To which Fry retorts with a chorus straight out of 1968-9 Humperdinck, the jilted diner squatting at the far end of the restaurant trying to make himself invisible, but still wanting her back – not in the sense of avoiding boredom, but in the Jackson 5 “I Want You Back” desperate sense.

Dudley’s strings are turned slightly down in the mix to allow Fry’s “Remembering, surrendering” to become more pronounced in the mix – and then, for the first of three occasions on this album (and all occur within the same song) he finds himself alone, and sings, very quietly, “All of my heart,” only to be woken up by thunderous Spector tympani, although any aggression is quickly dispelled into a firework display of co-existing and mingling sounds from Dudley’s keyboards and Jonathan Jeczalik’s Fairlight (four or five in total) which never sound overbearing or unnatural and do not remotely recall Rick Wakeman (for better or worse). Then everything calms down for the second chorus, in which Fry now expresses fresh doubts about love; he is at war with himself.

In fact, he is at his most furious (although his fury remains controlled, like Billy Fury) in this second verse, which sees him systematically destroying all accepted notions and signifiers of “love,” telling his would-be lover that, really, it’s not worth it; witness how his “You’ll be disappointed and I’ll lose a friend” moves from condemnation via despair and self-pity to compassion in the space of only a few seconds; this is great pop acting, as great as the four or five changes in facial expression Eric Morecambe could pull off in as many seconds.

“No, I won’t be told there’s a crock of gold at the end of the rainbow,” sings a newly-outraged Fry, over a gorgeous rainbow arch of a string line (so gorgeous that Michael Jackson used it five years later behind the chorus of “I Just Can’t Stop Loving You”); the reference here may be to Richard Thompson’s unremittingly bleak “End Of The Rainbow” from nearly a decade earlier, a song which issues many of the same warnings that this album has done, although when Fry gets to the pleasure and pain and sunshine and rain, he sounds marginally fuller of hope.

Then he ends the second chorus differently - “The kindest cut’s the cruellest part” (three years before Propaganda’s “Duel”) - sings the title alone again and this time is answered, not by thundering tympani, but an elegant little string and rhythm section passage succeeded by a harder-edged, snare drum-driven howl which might have fallen off the end of In Through The Out Door (indeed, Fry was in later years approached by Robert Plant, who said approvingly that “All Of My Heart” was his and his wife’s song).

Fry then returns for the third and final chorus, and now he has jettisoned the notion of love as superficial plaything, realising that he had the real thing in his grasp all the time and didn’t or couldn’t or wouldn’t recognise it, even giving up his intricate rhyming schemes: “And I shrug and I say/That maybe today/You’ll come home soon.”

There is a third reprise of the song’s title for solo voice.

A longer pause, and then a downward stroke of electric piano.

The rest of ABC come back in softly, closer than the ear can hear, as Dudley’s electric piano tries to soothe and caress – and Fry collapses, his last “all of my heart” degenerating into a pitiful sob.

And then, in the most sublime passage in all of British pop music, Dudley’s string orchestra rises to embrace him, to accommodate the sobbing singer in its bosom.

The camera pans back – there is no need for further words, because, as Barthes said (and Morley later quoted on the sleeve of a ZTT release), “one tear will say more than any of them” (tears are not enough?) – and the film, the story, has indeed ended, the strings rising and filling the spaces over a broken, grey England like Vaughan Williams’ resurgent lark, drifting slowly over these two-hundred-and-sixty-seven records which as far as I can see mostly say that love is to be accepted, and kept, and loved in return, with grave consequences if you do not. It passes over the ghosts of Billy Bigelow, Jud, Tony and Laurence, and one of the record’s meanings becomes clear – in an environment of number one albums where timidity and safety-first have been the norm (as they are with most humanity), Lexicon asks whether you are prepared to take that dive into the wild, the unexpected, the dream you have been hoping to avoid ever coming true your whole life – and what you risk losing, including most of your meaningful life, if you turn your back on or misinterpret this chance.

In this sense it is actually a good thing that Fry is not the world’s greatest singer – he can sing very well but is apt to strain for the high notes and has to work hard at spacing and timing – since melismatics and high Cs (or, for that matter, grunting sweat) would, I think, get in the way of the emotions he is trying to express. We know that Fry knows that he is not really Frank Sinatra but a skinny, acneiform punk kid having a go at being Frank Sinatra – and it is the resultant humanity with which we, as listeners, can empathise. He has as much “soul” in him as Nick Drake or Ian Curtis had.

The music of “All Of My Heart” continues to fade out very slowly, as one by one the lights are switched off to reveal White’s twitching, not quite tonal guitar strikes, and Singleton’s phased/lyriconed saxophone, which continues to play towards quietude as the rest of the music disappears, like Bowie at the end of Low.

But this is not the end of the record.

It’s a very extreme record, isn’t it?

In the sense he sings about going “from here to eternity without in-betweens” on one song, and going “from one extreme to the other” on another. There’s no halfway house with Fry; it has to be total, all-enveloping, or limbo nothingness. I suppose you could say that the record takes pop music to its extremes – but then what else is pop music for?

Like Henry Higgins, the protagonist likes to pretend that all of this “love” stuff is beneath  him, whereas it is what is keeping him alive.

“Speak…no…EVIL.”

Oh, the shock!

And, suddenly, such a familiar picture; that mourning synthesiser, the air of finality. Before going any further, it is worth citing two albums without which I don’t think Lexicon would have found or identified its cause (and I leave Searching For The Young Soul Rebels out of this – for now).

There is Off The Wall, the record I suspect Lexicon most wanted to be; its structure is almost identical, with a dance-orientated first side which just gets more and more demonic as it progresses until finally (“Get On The Floor”) the franticity is near-ahuman. And then, after a bright beginning (the title track), side two slows down and becomes more reflective. Like Fry on “All Of My Heart,” Jackson loses it on “She’s Out Of My Life,” but does come back somewhat thereafter, with lovely ballads like Stevie Wonder’s “I Can’t Help It”; the real Jackson often became most palpable in his quieter moments (“Human Nature,” “Stranger In Moscow”).

But with Fry, there is no way back, and hence the second relevant album, Joy Division’s Closer, the record I think it fair to say that without which New Pop would never have happened, or existed as we now know it; there is initial, ghastly turbulence (“Atrocity Exhibition”) and the general air of urgency about the record’s first side is brought to a mechanical halt at its end (“A Means To An End” indeed), as though the gramophone has wound down. “I put my trust in you!” Curtis repeatedly cries at one point. Side two likewise slows down, but beyond “Twenty-Four Hours” (the record’s “Date Stamp”), the speed becomes funereal, so “The Eternal” is as slow and compassionately dogged as “All Of My Heart”…

…and “4 Ever 2 Gether,” despite its sometime schaffel nature, is Lexicon’s “Decades,” the hell-borne scenario of Curtis’ words echoed in the repeated references to religious imagery which Fry makes (“how to find belief,” “your twelve disciples,” “move the mountain,” “speak no evil”). But he is no longer looking for love per se, but some kind of faith. The question now is: how to find and recognise it. Those stars in the sky make a reappearance but he’s more interested in what she’s got to say, like Werther fruitlessly trying to persuade Charlotte to make a go of things (A Lover’s Discourse is essentially a prototype blog about a man writing a prototype blog about The Sorrows Of Young Werther, which really is mainly there as a hook on which to hang the rest of the writer’s theories and proposals).

But a few seconds later, Fry changes his mind and now attests: “You CAN’T tell me…I gave up listening years ago.” Then, an atonal piano-led breakdown with slowed-down Frys speaking no evil from every corner of each speaker, balanced against a mocking Fry playground chant. But the final “EVIL” is Earth core deep, the musical picture (especially White’s guitar) thickens and Palmer’s drums crash through the gated drum gate (inspired as this passage was by “In The Air Tonight”). As the choruses return, however, it becomes evident that collapse is inevitable, and so Fry gives one final cry, buries his borrowed demons (“Three coins inside the fountain”) and the “Decades” lament returns, wandering slowly towards the oblivion (or Propaganda)-driven horizon. The last words we hear from Martin Fry on this record are “Speak no evil,” the “EEEEEEEEEVIL” stretched out on a falsetto rack, as though he could anticipate the pop hell to come; is “evil” the third party making two a crowd?

Is the singer’s own worst enemy himself?

There is nothing left, save a quick reprise of “The Look Of Love” theme by Dudley’s string section and choir, all Trevi fountains and splendoured things, like the end credits to a film, a theme song, like “You’ll Never Walk Alone” at the end of Carousel (for those wondering, the 12-inch single of “The Look Of Love” came in four parts; Parts Two and Three were the full instrumental version and the band-only mix respectively; a white label remix – “Part Five” – briefly did the rounds in early 1983).

* * * * * *

And that’s it?

Things are rarely, if ever, wrapped up as smoothly as that. Consider that lost man, walking alone, perhaps lost to the world, at the end of “All Of My Heart” – that could be the over-proud plantation owner quietly singing to himself “This Nearly Was Mine.” Or the dying newspaper magnate left with nothing but a snow globe and damaged memories. The one who wanted to be loved but had no love of his own to give, except for himself, because whatever love he had in himself was taken from him when he was eight.

I think you want to place Lexicon as the Citizen Kane of pop records.

Not really, apart from noting what Kael said about Kane being “a shallow masterpiece,” and if pop is shallow, then Lexicon is its high tidemark. The two works were conceived in very different circumstances, and to extremely different ends. Welles had something to prove; Fry wanted to prove something.

Do you think he managed it?

I think he managed it as well as anybody in pop could have managed it, and a good deal better than that. He made a pop record which continues to tower over all other ones, and not just number one albums either, in terms of ambition, cheek, purpose (not the same thing as ambition) and adventure. It is as if the rest of this tale has been  leading up to Lexicon; then again, that is how I structured it. The album seems so much more complete than other ones. The point of it all – in terms of the high point, the apex.

And yet it remains such a mistrusted record. Never appears in those all-time top ten album lists people are prone to compiling.

It isn’t guitar-dominant, nor particularly rock-dominant either, except in subtle ways. But a lot of people prefer the easy, the obvious. Hence the Bowie record which routinely gets ranked highest in such lists is Ziggy, the most easily palatable of his records to rock ears, and yet it is one of the Bowie albums to which I return the least. An Observer critics’ poll done a few years ago had Lexicon at #42; top was The Stone Roses, which just goes to show how often individual writers’ ballots are more interesting than the compromised final result.

But Lexicon doesn’t really comfort the listener. It is not a reassuring record. And history, as we all know, gets written by the victors, and so it is people like Duran Duran who are now regarded as avatars of the era, whereas nearly all of the originators of New Pop are never mentioned, or confined to the oldies package tour trail, as though New Pop and New Romantic were interchangeable, rather than two parallel developments. People generally prefer to be told things they already know.

Which is what you’ve been battling against.

I want people to act differently, and not just in terms of how they respond to music. This tale has endeavoured never to go down the easy route, but equally has tried not to make things difficult for difficulty’s sake. Its aims are higher than that.

And these are?

I have said on many occasions that Then Play Long is not so much a blog about number one albums, but a blog about somebody writing a blog about number one albums, using these records as a signpost to try to understand more about himself and what he has done with his own life. At least that’s how it is from my perspective, although I am aware that two minds and voices are always at work; it was Lena’s idea that I should start the blog in the first place, and from entry #18 onwards she has collaborated directly with me, and I with her, on all entries.

It was never the intention of this blog to be a history, definitive or otherwise, of postwar pop music or postwar British culture and trends; such things are for other writers to attempt. No, my quest has been a very different one; not just why these records were at some stage more popular than any others, but what they might still mean or signify to me and therefore, by extension, to my readers. And the other aims, which I will talk about in another 1982 post.

All I will say here is that, with ABC, a music writer took it upon himself to become involved in a pop group, and changed pop music as a result.

What do you think you’ve learned?

I knew that when I heard the mournful strings of “The Look Of Love (Part Four)” that I had found the object of my quest. And I know that there are still well over seven hundred number one albums to take into account, and that if I don’t get a move on writing about them I may never live to “finish” the tale. I may have to write about the remaining ones differently, because I do believe that this tale can be firmly divided into records that happened before Lexicon and records that happened after it. And it is also my belief that after Lexicon, that great acid test of public tolerance of avant-garde ideas, the public and pop took a fatal wrong turn, at least as far as number one albums are concerned. This despite the placing of my “self” in the text as a narrator with constantly shifting opinions who is sometimes prone to make mistakes or come to too hasty a decision. Even Stendhal needed his Salviati.

But it also may well be that pop couldn’t get better, or do better, than Lexicon. If it’s a shallow medium then ABC did well to sail their ship on its unreliable surface.

Acknowledgements

Above all, I am extremely grateful and thankful to Martin Fry for granting me an interview, just prior to his departure on a trip to Ghana; the limited time available meant that I couldn’t ask him all the questions I wanted to ask, so I had to come to my own conclusions about side two of Lexicon in particular; my apologies to Dr Fry (he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Sheffield last year) if my projections did not concur with his intentions.

The Stendhal quotes dotted throughout this piece are from his On Love, written in 1821 and translated by Sophie Lewis and published by Hesperus Press in 2009. The Barthes quotes come from Richard Howard’s definitive translation of A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, published by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, Inc., in 1978.

Researching the piece also meant thumbing through approximately three years’ worth of back issues apiece of Smash Hits and The FACE; then as now, I have no doubt which side of the fence my sympathies lie, although the enjoyably bad-tempered Jon Savage who wrote for the latter journal in 1982 remains extremely entertaining (“In principle, I approve of Boy George provided he doesn’t give too many interviews”). I also searched through back issues of the NME dating from December 1980-June 1982. I must also acknowledge Rip It Up And Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984 by Simon Reynolds (Faber and Faber, 2005); although I profoundly disagree with the book’s central premise and conclusion, it does have value as a source of information in terms of the extensive interviews with key figures, and these have been helpful to me, although I have not directly quoted from the book.

The Derek Bailey/Company interlude is a remix of a piece I wrote for The Church Of Me in 2003. I hope it still has legs, and I do think it highly relevant here.

The edition of The Lexicon Of Love used for this piece was the 2004 Universal 2CD Deluxe reissue; I would like to express my gratitude to Daryl Easlea, who will no doubt be glad that I have at long last accomplished what I told him I’d do nine years ago, for his very detailed and informative essay and the insights contained within.

Acknowledgements too to Gary Langan, who ingeniously engineered the album, and to harpist Gaynor Sadler and percussionist Luis Jardim who are not mentioned elsewhere in this piece but who also served (particularly Jardim on “All Of My Heart” and for his Spector castanets on “Show Me”).

Thanks, as always, to Lena for everything and beyond.

And there are a hundred or so other records lying behind the ones I did manage to mention in my piece, not least the one ABC went on to make after Lexicon.

I was wondering when you were going to get to that.

Think about it – you go on a world tour with the gold suits I have so far successfully managed to avoid mentioning, visit the most exotic places on the planet that there are to visit, meet people you probably had on your bedroom wall aged 14, and you come back, and there’s still Sheffield, still deprivation and unemployment, and the charts reverted back to their worst behaviour. Wouldn’t you so want NOT to be part of this?

So kill the king. Beauty Stab.

In real terms it was as if Roxy Music had reversed from Avalon to Stranded, and pound for pound, lyric for lyric, it is easy to see why some commentators have ranked it above Lexicon; a sober paperback of the observation of social decline (by the time Fry reaches the closing “United Kingdom,” one is ready to shut down the world) against the bright and eager Comic Cuts (no criticism, just a different way of doing things) of Bragg’s contemporaneous Life’s A Riot With Spy Vs Spy. Songs like “By Default, By Design” and “Unzip” seem to extract the Lexicon pain from its shipwrecked island and restored it to a more brutal world.

Which was the world they were going to anyway.

“What is a hero? The one who has the last word.”
(Barthes)

I will bring this particular curtain down with two elements from the Deluxe edition of Lexicon. One is a studio fragment, from May 1982, entitled “Into The Valley Of The Heathen Go,” which is not much more than two minutes of the band goofing around, except they are in loud heavy rock metal mode, White thrashing out power chords and Fry squealing every rock cliché that he can drag in (“Make the b*tch scream!” “Let’s ROCK!” “Guitar SO-LO!” “AAAAAAAAARGH!” “The Vikings…INVENTED ROCK AND ROLL!”). As usual, the least typical piece of music here represents the direction in which they would, for the time being, be going.

The other is from the compendium of Hammersmith Odeon performances from the end of November 1982 pulled together to make a live album, of sorts (disappointingly, the voice/piano reading of the Gershwins’ “I Wish I Were In Love Again,” a concert highlight, is absent). Here, to end the performance, is…”Alphabet Soup.” It’s introduce the band time, and apart from the core of Fry, White, Singleton and Palmer, they are all hired hands; one Robert Clarke handles the bass, keyboard duties (and very inventive ones) are shared between David Clayton and Jeff Hammer (the latter then a recent member of the Teardrop Explodes), and the aforementioned brass section of Deppa and Carless are noticeably freer and looser than Singleton, who is by now in sensuous 1980 Andy Mackay mode.

I told Martin Fry that I was at the time delighted to see that they were still playing "Alphabet Soup"; though not on the album, its joyfulness and high humour gave out the necessary positivity and attack to counteract the "melancholy mirage" of the Lexicon songs. Did he think that people still tend to miss out on the fun and funk of ABC's early work? How much did "Alphabet Soup" stand as a manifesto for the group?

“’Alphabet Soup’ was always pretty spontaneous live. I guess it contained a big chunk of our ‘through with matt and into gloss’ manifesto. It was our flag. It separated us from the pack. You couldn’t imagine Wire or the Cure or Visage or anyone coming out of Sheffield at the time , name checking the band in quite the same neo-show business way. There’s a sly wit and humour in some of the songs on Lexicon but I know what you mean.  We had a couple of other early songs we outgrew. One was “Boomerang” which was closer to the B52’s in spirit. One was called “Funky Becket” .Some of the songs on the Lexicon are gloriously preposterous and comical and pushed the limits of what you could and couldn’t get away with. That was part of the appeal.”

Unfortunately, by the time Beauty Stab crept out, the British public had decided that they really only wanted the bright colours, the wacky costumes and the catchy songs, and had no truck with whatever else New Pop musicians might have been wanting to tell them. Hence ABC, Marc Almond, Altered Images and the Associates, or their components (and these are just the “A”s) were not asked to participate in Band Aid, had by then disappeared below the radar (except for ABC, whose excellent electro-tinged third album How To Be A Zillionaire – Deee-Lite half a decade ahead of schedule, the Archies do Shannon, Keith Le Blanc on drum programming, Fiona Russell-Powell now a member, “I’ve seen the future/I can’t afford it-UH!”) - did considerably better in the States than here). And I think that is “our” mistake. So we have to look upon Lexicon as a somewhat forlorn peak in a ruined jungle, a reminder not just of where this tale has been, but where we might have gone.

Oh, and the record at the other end of 1982 involving Trevor Horn and turntable scratching? “Buffalo Gals.” One has to do something – including saving New Pop.

* * * * * *

Number 2 looked at him.

“You are free to go,” she said.

“Free to go,” he considered.

“Is it all downhill from here?”

“Not all downhill. There is a second peak, unanticipated when I began this tale more than five years ago. I owe it to myself to get there, if I can manage it.”

“You and your ambitions.”

“One has to do something.”

* * * * * *

“Indeed, half – the most beautiful half – of life is hidden from him who has not loved passionately.”
(Stendhal)

“Isn’t it rather, all things considered, that I remain suspended on this question, whose answer I tirelessly seek in the other’s face: What am I worth?”

(Barthes)

“…I had a dream about Ian Curtis last week. Nothing much happened in the dream but I came away thinking how much I missed him.

Pop Music is life.”

(Martin Fry, to the author)

* * * * * *

… of how to fashion what is inside them to present themselves to a world which might love them and ensure that further humanity is possible - or simply in sheer terms of the ceaseless transformative capabilities of the voice in relation to popular song…

ROXY MUSIC: Avalon

(#266: 5 June 1982, 1 week; 19 June 1982, 2 weeks)

Track listing: More Than This/The Space Between/Avalon/India/While My Heart Is Still Beating/The Main Thing/Take A Chance With Me/To Turn You On/True To Life/Tara

“She was teaching us about Gatsby, the way he disappeared into his own Platonic conception of himself, the way he followed the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, drunk on the impossible past. But what did I know about the past? I didn’t have one yet. I could only covet hers.”

(Rob Sheffield, Talking To Girls About Duran Duran: London, Penguin, 2011; chapter: “Roxy Music, ‘More Than This,’ 1982)

The past becomes less and less possible the more time goes forward. On Sunday, while preparing this piece, I listened to the final edition of The David Jacobs Collection on BBC Radio 2. Jacobs has broadcast on the BBC since the forties, but is now eighty-seven, and treatment for liver cancer and Parkinson’s disease has taken its toll, such that he has had to retire.

I have no idea whether the final edition was broadcast live, but given that it was going out at eleven o’clock at night, I suspect it was not. The gradual shuntering of Jacobs’ broadcasting to the somnolent graveyard zone had long been inevitable, and it gives me no pleasure to think that perhaps some managers at the station are quietly breathing sighs of relief at his going; like Peel, here’s an immovable obstacle out of the way, it’s our opportunity to change things and, Lord help us, modernise. Russelll Davies’ long-running Sunday show is also set to go in October, and so Radio 2 can continue gradually giving up on its remit of their Sundays as a memorial of what the station used to be, for those few loyal people still listening.

Because, of course, their Holy Grail is the younger listener. This outlook is doomed from the outset; Radio 2 was born at the age of 42, and that has been a major part of its charm. But it is all part of the gradual closing down of history, the banishment of pre-1963 popular music to the limbo-like preserve of a few diehards and specialists. Please Please Me represents the drawing of a line in the sand; anything before that will now be, by definition, prehistoric.

I am, however, sure that I am not alone in my dismay at the prospect of what can usefully be umbrella-termed The Great American Songbook receding into anti-existence. Who will now be left to play these old songs, the carefully constructed mini-musicals, or songs from musicals, with their smart talk, integrated structures, harmonic ambiguities (learned from close study and, in some cases, direct knowledge of the writers’ classical precedents) and historically-gleaned wisdom? Rock threw smart talk out of the twentieth floor window, preferred directness and simplicity, and so it is now a task to re-wire ourselves to absorb the once-popular music which came before it.

What was the secret of Jacobs’ longevity, apart from his being a vital link to radio’s past? It didn’t have anything to do with anything particularly profound or memorable that he ever said, much more to do with an unspoken shared knowledge. He concentrated on old Tin Pan Alley tunes and Broadway numbers because they constituted what he called “our kind of music.” The “we” very pointedly being the few people who would yet venture to listen to him, last thing of a weekend. The few people who feel in their bones that something of their past has died, or been allowed to die, and that this programme served as a kind of aesthetic life preserver.

Jacobs did what he wanted. He’d play the same song twice if he felt like it, break into long anecdotes about sharing a taxi with Lena Horne from London to Blackpool, extol The Good Companions or Mack And Mabel, even sing along with the song. His repertory company was few in number but very select: Sinatra, Crosby, Bennett, Vic Damone, Robert Goulet, the occasional Streisand, instrumental interludes by Robert Farnon or the Johnny Douglas Strings, and others of that nature. It was not quite radio’s last blank page, for he had filled it to his own satisfaction, but it represented one of radio’s last remaining chances to be something other than a formula.

I thought about this while listening to Sunday’s broadcast; this week’s “Triple Common Denominator” was Marni Nixon, and Jacobs played three songs where she essentially ghosted for other actresses; “Hello Young Lovers” from The King And I, “I Feel Pretty” from West Side Story, and “Just You Wait” from the film version of My Fair Lady (where she read Audrey Hepburn’s lips). These are, of course, all songs that I wrote about in the very early days of Then Play Long, and it once again occurred to me that most of those thirty-two predecessors to Please Please Me are in imminent danger of dropping off the edge of the world. It may well be that there is now virtually no audience for this kind of music, with modern audiences repelled by what they see as hammy, loquacious and grandiloquent hangovers from the days of Tales From The Vienna Woods.

So I can state, as I have done before here, that part of TPL’s brief has always been to help rescue this music, prevent selective history from erasing it. My fear is that the lack of understanding of not-so-ancient history may feed into the deliberate ignorance of history which is now eating into whatever is left of the world.

And it has always intended to try to preserve the dream of romance which is latent in all popular music. For his last record, Jacobs, tasked with choosing between Sinatra and Crosby, plumped for Bing, singing “Incurably Romantic,” best known in the version performed by Marilyn Monroe and Yves Montand in the film Let’s Make Love – and it struck me that its poise and observations  (“I’m susceptible to stars in the sky”) would fit Bryan Ferry perfectly.

Remember that nearly a decade before Avalon, Ferry had recorded his first solo albums of standards from various ages, These Foolish Things, and although on it he turns Dylan’s “Hard Rain” into glam apocalypse and converts “It’s My Party” to a political statement eight years ahead of Dave Stewart and Barbara Gaskin, his heart was always palpably with the old, cool days of Cole and Jerome, songs as metaphorical lists, or regretful diary entries. One somehow knew that he would eventually become that which, in 1973, he still beheld with some ironic detachment.

There is absolutely no irony in Avalon, nor any detachment save that of the singer’s continuing efforts to detach himself from the rest of the world. Where Flesh And Blood was still full of grievous ire, there is little to witness on Avalon apart from a cool – never to be confused with “cold” – stillness. Ferry’s heart might still have been beating, but he now seemingly made it his mission to slow his heartbeat right down, to, but not reaching or breaching, the point of non-flutter.

If you stay, or float, on Avalon’s surface, you could be forgiven for wondering why Ferry even needed to bother with another Roxy Music album in 1982. The total running time comes in at just over thirty-seven-and-a-half minutes, and two of its ten songs are short instrumentals; all ten, however, appear to reflect and comment on each other, and the minimal divisibility between individual tracks means that the whole plays like a continuous, cyclical song suite (if indeed it does finish up where it started, of which I am not entirely convinced). Moreover, Ferry’s vocals are frequently so quiet and/or treated that it’s a miracle that he even deigns to open his mouth.

But do not confuse apparent laxity of delivery with having nothing to say. The edition of Avalon that I am using for this piece – editions of “you”? - is the 2003 21^st Anniversary DSD Multi-Channel remaster. “DSD” stood for Direct Stream Digital – yes, it does sound a bit Alan Partridge – and its mechanisms I cannot recall at all, despite their being very carefully explained to me at the time by producer and remasterer Rhett Davies. If you had DSD-compatible equipment, there was an eleventh track – “Always Unknowing,” which is much of a muchness with the rest of the record (“Take what you want and go/Just give me time”). Even heard on a simple CD player, it sounded fresh, cleaned up (Canada’s Bob Clearmountain on remix duties) and there was a definite Sensurround feel to the music.

I got this copy at a press launch at the Groucho Club. Yes, I know immediately how that must read, but it was ten years ago and I had a free Thursday. The three main Roxy musicians drove over from Barnes. I do not remember seeing Phil Manzanera. I exchanged a few pleasantries with Andy Mackay, who looked like a prosperous middle-aged Harley Street surgeon in his pinstripe suit and gold-rimmed spectacles. Ferry was there in the same room, and working it, but I didn’t approach him – why, I figured, should he be remotely interested in my miserable and complicated story?

Actually, I spent most of the day with Chris Roberts as my drinking companion, and I’m sure I remember the occasion a lot better than he does (one main consequence of having a stroke and being on Warfarin is that one is compelled to be forever sober). But I took the record home and listened to it, as I had been asked to review it for Uncut. I scribbled some thoughts and emailed them.

Between then and now, I have hardly revisited the record – whereas the first three Roxy albums all get regular replays. But I think that, in the context of a year that was neither 1952 nor 2012, Avalon is one of 1982’s most important albums. Consider the manner in which they performed, or mimed to, “More Than This” on TOTP – in the presence of many important New Pop operatives for whom Ferry was their idol. The song itself presented a very odd but fulsome smoothness and serenity which in 1982 was probably unprecedented in pop (though not to those who knew their ECM); the group appear to be trying to play as quietly and minimally as possible – but “appear” is the key word since Mackay’s high-pitched atonal circular breathing is present, though right at the back of the mix.

Meanwhile, Ferry sings, in a high-pitched croon which doesn’t have much to do with either Bowlly or Faith – if anything, the Adam Faith of this period sounded like Ray Davies – about the sea on the tide, and how it has no way of turning. “More than this,” he sings, “You know there’s nothing.” “Tell me one thing.” “Nothing.”

But it is not a lost nothingness; instead of desolation, there seems to be an air of quietly euphoric calm, as though the “nothing” is everything else that Ferry now needs. There is only this moment, he is saying, and he doesn’t seem to mind; as the song winds into its unusually long instrumental fadeout – Ferry stops singing at 2:45, so it is “Sound And Vision” in reverse – Ferry, miming his keyboard part on TOTP, puffs on a toothpick in his mouth, acting as a cigarette, and doodles his hands like any first year Slade School of Art student; he is dressed in a lumberjack check shirt, polka dot bowtie and leather jacket, and nobody – but nobody – could get away with that combination as masterfully and naturally as Ferry does. The song melts down to its synthesised core; are you sure you want “nothing” (more)?

With its miasma of saxophones and its very precise deployment of angles between percussion and silence, “The Space Between” is everything Spandau Ballet desperately wanted to be; despite its Walker-like haiku lyric (“We better/Close it up tonight”), it subtly skanks; slow it down by a few bpm and it could be lovers’ rock. It is the same story with the title track – hear it and react to it as reggae, and see what I mean – in which Ferry at long last allows himself, even on his last legs and presumably drunk as a skunk at four in the morning, to be overcome and transfixed by the intrusion of beauty into his shuttered world. She appears “out of nowhere,” there is hardly a word (“and your destination/You don’t know it” – she can’t find her way home) and when she dances, he is smitten, I slightly bewildered (“Would you have me dancing/Out of nowhere?”).

The chord changes are inevitable and majestic – and both song structure and arrangement suggest some familiarity with the work of Simple Minds – such that Manzanera’s channelling of Duane Eddy in the middle eight does not sound at all jarring or misplaced. And of course there is Haitian singer Yanick Etienne, discovered by Ferry during recording sessions at New York’s Power Station (although the album was mostly recorded at that most early eighties of recording locations, Compass Point in Nassau), wordlessly articulating the spirit which has entered and entranced the room; by the time of this album’s last week at number one, Ferry had married 22-year-old Lucy Helmore, and there is no doubt whom this song is intended to represent.

“India” is a brief instrumental, though Ferry’s dissonant keyboards suggest that the old Roxy hasn’t been lost but has merely repositioned itself at a different angle. “While My Heart Is Still Beating,” however, is one of Roxy’s finest, with an outraged, protesting vocal and a twirling minor/major harmonic line which places it as an unfunny nephew of “In Every Dream Home, A Heartache,” as well as making it a great lost Bond theme (it out-Durans Duran with insolent ease). Ferry’s piano is as spiky as it was on “Re-Make, Re-Model,” and the final couplet gives the message away: “My heart has flown away now/Will it never stop bleeding?” – their version of “Jealous Guy” may not be present, but this is a fury-filled homage to Lennon. Where to find peace, and why is it so hard to find?

So there are chinks of disquiet irrupting the seemingly calm façade, but still Avalon is an immaculate block, if possibly carved from the finest stone. It is an immovable record and makes great play of its wilful immobility. But if you think of Avalon as a block of stone, then if it were struck by lightning it might sound something like this:

Ferry was so impressed by them on TOTP that he negotiated to get their backing band to accompany the three Roxy musicians on their European tour to promote Avalon. But, though sharing much of Ferry’s casual, verging on reckless, poise, Sulk is as different a record as you could imagine. It is vulgar, full of primary colours, perfervid, disorientatingly psychedelic, lascivious, howling.

And yet both records bear the air of a dream. Both sound as though recorded on another planet; imperfect recollections of pop laid down by earnest Martians. Both are drenched in echo and other mixing desk treatments, and both sets of vocal tracks carry an overall sonic impression which at times supersedes comprehensibility.

Like Avalon, Sulk is made up of ten songs, two of which are instrumentals (and which, on Sulk, bracket the rest of the album like television opening and closing credits). There the similarities end. Billy MacKenzie holds nothing back; Bryan Ferry keeps everything in – but you can be convinced by both of them that they mean it. “No” is a frightening post-Closer shriek-filled aria set to an almost impassive musical march. Ferry would, I suspect, not even countenance covering “Gloomy Sunday.” Whereas “Bap De La Bap” and “Nude Spoons” threaten to jump off the compass completely, layering sound upon prank in ways which not only recall early days Eno-inclusive Roxy, but which also at times threaten to burn through the record thoroughly; the concluding harpsichord flourish in “Nude Spoons” is not so much euphoria, more a steely dagger of death (I think of Barry Ryan battling with the Birthday Party of Junkyard).

Side two, however, is the relatively calm pop side, and the place where the group loosens up enough to laugh at things; hence MacKenzie’s Churchill impression on “Skipping” set to a sublime synthesised landscape, “It’s Better This Way” as a proto-ambient update of Scott Walker doing “The Girls And The Dogs” and the triumphant pair of hits – although even the Ferry of “Love Is The Drug” was never as uneasy about socialising as MacKenzie is on “Party Fears Two,” and I suspect that he might have found the attack of “Club Country” as biting the 1982 hand which fed him.

Side two of Avalon begins with “The Main Thing,” a Wilson Pickett/Stax workout on Jupiter morphing into an eighties club banger, all clenched fists and “your words of sand/I can nearly understand”; it is sobering and instructive to observe that the sounds on this record, so new and unprecedented at the time, would turn into the bedrock of so much of eighties pop and rock – but rarely did its mimickers carry it off with such graceful ease.

If “Take A Chance With Me,” a Ferry/Manzanera co-composition (I suspect Manzanera is responsible for the Siouxsie-like intro and outro sections and Ferry for the main body of the song), is the record’s most immediately attractive song, it’s because, in the midst of an album where he has been so indecisive, Ferry finally shows his hand, owns up to wanting to be loved and love back – and getting past the forbidding Gothic arches of the introduction, it is such an elementary song (Bobby Vee could have sung it in 1962).

Or maybe not so elementary; “People say I’m just a fool,” Ferry observes at one point. “All the world, even you/Should learn to love the way I do.” The easy pun of “I was blind, can’t you see?” drifts by like so much driftwood.  And so (bearing in mind that “Heaven knows, I believe” and that the video for “More Than This” has Ferry in a church, underneath a cross and watching himself on a screen) he asks her to take a chance with him (as opposed to Abba’s “on me”). As he extricates himself from his self-constructed mire, Manzanera’s playing is a couple of stops past inspired, making me think simultaneously of Simple Minds (“Seeing Out The Angel” in particular) and Johnny Marr (who will later work with Ferry). At song’s end, Manzanera’s harsh guitars clamp down on Ferry like a trapdoor, or perhaps they’re just a disguised question mark. Maybe, as Lena remarks, it’s hard being Cupid (like Austen’s Emma, Ferry always seems to be setting other people up to fall in love with each other, rather than run the risk of have anyone fall in love with him, or vice versa).

And then there is “To Turn You On,” a masterpiece in which the whole world appears to melt and merge into a Norwegian tundra, even down a raining Fifth Avenue. He is in love, is Ferry, and he aches for her; he will, as he says, do anything to turn her on, to get himself out of his single room with its window on “a world.” Perhaps the funniest moment comes when he sings “I could walk you through the park/If you’re feeling blue…or whatever.”

But then, by the song’s final verse, she is the lonely one, and Ferry becomes especially animated and not a little disturbing: “Who cares about you?” he asks, quickly adding “…except me, God help me (is this is the most spiritual of Roxy albums, or was Ferry thinking as much, or more, about Annette Funicello than King Arthur?).” There is a lovely modulation in the middle eight into Manzanera’s solo – so courtly the veneer, so tortured the underside.

And so Ferry begins to rub himself out of our picture completely. Like the other two Roxy albums I have written about here, “True To Life” finds him drifting out to sea. The difference here is that he does not drift alone. He wanders through a lyric which cites “living in darkness” and “agitated in Xenon nightly” and even casts him as Bruce Banner (“So I turn the pages/And tell the story/From town to town”). Deep down he is still that “poor country boy” from County Durham, feeling a little bit of an imposter, but…well, it can’t be avoided, he actually likes this semi-emptiness, walking the world like Prospero striding around his cell.

And, most importantly, he is happy and spoken for (his “diamond lady” or “seaside diamond”), happy enough not really to care about the negative side of things (“Well, she’s not talking,” he notes, “But that’s alright,” unconsciously (?) paraphrasing Presley). He has become what he beheld, and he is waving goodbye, not drowning; having already slimmed Roxy down to its three core members, he realises the group’s imminent redundancy and is content to take everyone and everything away to sea, receding from us, growing dimmer and more distant.

He has got what (or whom) he wanted and managed not to lose what he had.

He believes those foolish things enough to know now that they are anything but foolish.

The last sung lines on the record are: “I’ll soon be home.”

But not like Scarlett O’Hara.

I think of Cliff, leaning against that Brighton lamppost, or ready to embrace those waves. Like Cliff, Ferry is old and experienced enough to know what love is, but unlike Cliff, he is finally ready to embrace it.

“Tara”? It’s an obvious enough pun and Roxy have used it before (the closing vocals on the title track of For Your Pleasure). But who should have the last word?  Why, it’s Andy Mackay, who, having behaved himself throughout the album, now steps forward to give his verdict, or maybe just pay tribute to Jan Garbarek.

One small harmonic modulation, and it is ended. Nothing is audible except the waves.

But wait, what?:

The album appeared at much the same time as Avalon, the difference being that this Brian put most of it together himself, using field recordings of wildlife and nature as well as “composting” his own back catalogue (not that any of the latter is ever readily discernible on the record). These are eight overlapping drone-based pieces which drift towards a faint but determined darkness; people like Bill Laswell and Michael Beinhorn helped out on the opener “Lizard Point,” which plays like a marooned Shadows, and Jon Hassell’s unmistakeable trumpet slithers into view on “Shadow” – do you see a subtle theme developing here? – but otherwise it’s Eno working his way out of, or through, the world. There is dissonance as subliminal as that on Avalon…

…and why, of all Roxy albums, does this one’s cover star have her back turned to us? Dressed as Queen Guinevere, ready for falconry into the unknown…

…on a weightless cover designed by Bryan Ferry lookalike Peter Saville (and we know the other source of buried sadness here, don’t we? I’ll find my soul as I go home)…

…the lady by the lake appears to have turned into The Lady Of The Lake. She has been found, there is no need for any more cover, for Bryan Ferry will have married the cover star by the time this record is at number one…

…and then, on the last composition, “Dunwich Beach, Autumn, 1960,” a commemoration of a town long since eroded by the oncoming sea and its waves, a real hint of mourning, the entry of other people – Michael Brook and Daniel Lanois…

…but then, wasn’t Eno’s intention here to paint a picture of stillness? He has said of the record: “my intention in On Land was to make music that was like figurative painting, but without referring to the history of music - more to a ‘history of listening.’” Whereas Ferry is in the midst of actual stillness, records it faithfully, and is perfectly at home with it.

But go back a minute to “Tara,” and wait for that final chord change…

…and I thought as much – it is exactly the same root chord of “Dunwich Beach, Autumn, 1960.”

“And so the two travellers, after nearly a decade apart, found themselves in exactly the same place. And Brian looked at Bryan, and 6 looked to 1, and Gatsby looked to Carraway, and art looked at pop, and it was now impossible to say which was which.”

*  *  *  *  *  *

He put down his single malt whisky on the dresser.

She considered.

“It’s a happier ending than Gatsby got, at least,” she said.

“There’s still that dire knowledge that once you have reached that frontier there is only the sea,” he replied. “But yes, at least Bryan Ferry got the girl, if that’s how you’d like to see it.”

“So many questions being asked on that first side.”

“And such simple answers on the other side. It’s pretty music all right, but tough with it. That’s what links them to the Cocteau Twins. As do the Associates, through Alan Rankine. Funny how all these voices end up converging on the same place.”

“It’s almost Quantum Roxy Music – they are so peaceable!”

“Yet so profoundly disturbed at the same time. The “poor country boy” line is, I think, important; as if Ferry never quite felt he matched up to the ruling class. Afraid that he might really have very little to say and a relatively limited amount of ways in which to say them.”

“But they loved him all the same. Don’t you think Diana would have jumped at the chance…?”

“Quite. It is sobering to imagine the number of thirty-year-olds who were conceived to the sound of this record.”

“You know who Bryan Ferry really sounds like?”

“Not Faith or Bowlly.”

“It struck me while listening to that last David Jacobs show. Gene Kelly! ‘A Very Precious Love’!”

“Not primarily, or at all, a singer, but yes, I do see your point. And the Percy Faith Orchestra playing ‘Ebb Tide’…”

“Is it all going to be swept away now?”

“It’s almost exactly five years. I think I owe the readers an explanation. Or I would do if I hadn’t already explained it.”

“This music…this life?”

“Why d’you think I bothered with it in the first place?”

They paused for a few seconds. A clock ticked distantly.

She said: “It’s time, then.”

“It has to be,” he replied.

She rose from her seat.

“And so I take it that we’re now ready to meet Number 1.”

“I’ve never been readier.”

He got up, and they wandered out of the room, and offscreen.

Next: The Point (or should that be Thrill?) Of It All.

MADNESS: Complete Madness

(#265: 22 May 1982, 2 weeks; 12 June 1982, 1 week)

Track listing: Embarrassment/Shut Up/My Girl/Baggy Trousers/It Must Be Love/The Prince/Bed And Breakfast Man/Night Boat To Cairo/House Of Fun/One Step Beyond/Cardiac Arrest/Grey Day/Take It Or Leave It/In The City/Madness/The Return Of The Los Palmas 7

Madness, madness, they call it madness, the kind that gets you lying prostate on a park bench, trying to sleep in the rain, or dropping dead of a heart attack on a crowded bus; the kind that makes you scream “SHUT UP!” at the world. The kind that keeps you in waking nightmares when you’re trying to sleep, having spent the day trying to be as jolly and extroverted as possible.

The wackiness of this madness is but a breath away from the sort of madness which gets you carted away in a van (“There are degrees of madness,” Ian S Munro has his doomed visionary painter Donald – doomed such that he can only function as a patient in a mental hospital in Lenzie – to the protagonist of his radio monologue The Artist In Search Of A City. “Mine’s maybe not the worst – it only harms myself”).

“IF YOU’D’VE BEEN WHERE I’D’VE BEEN, YOU’D’VE SEEN THE FAIRY QUEEN!” is the childhood Glasgow mantra Donald goes on to recollect – the missed and forever lost chance to find one’s Holy Grail. But then you might see the Holy Grail as the turning of life itself, even seen from the shadows of gloomy tower blocks in Camden.

Although the sixteen songs on this collection – twelve hits, two album tracks and two B-sides – were recorded over a period of some two-and-a-half years, there is a strong case for arguing that the stories they tell could have taken place within only four or five blocks – in Camden – and that they are not only interrelated but may also tell the story from the perspective of Suggs’ protagonist being the same character. The school-leaver of “Baggy Trousers” who hasn’t quite grasped what his schooling was for may be the bewildered would-be boyfriend of “My Girl” who may be the only person who doesn’t see where he’s going wrong, may descend into being the hopeless petty criminal of “Shut Up” (where it’s still everyone else’s fault but his) or even the semi-derelict, borderline psychopath of “Grey Day.” Even if he manages to get everything else in life, there remains a fundamental self-hatred which will do for him on the bus to work (were office commuters still wearing bowler hats in 1981?).

Crucial to the linear development outlined in these songs is Suggs’ own deadpan delivery. Like the younger Roger Daltrey, Suggs doesn’t really try to “sing” these songs as such, but mouths them, slightly despondently but with a necessary overlay of unquenchable cheer. His two overall messages are “Why me?” and “Why not?” And this is important to the music’s success, since it’s fair to say that Madness songs never really go anywhere, but rather circle on themselves until the singer is trapped in a loop. “My Girl” describes what’s wrong – from one flawed perspective – but there is no ending, happy or otherwise; the song simply ends, unresolved. In both the single and video versions of “Cardiac Arrest,” a happy ending of sorts is salvaged – in the video, Chas Smash literally springs back into life just as he is about to be buried – but on the original album mix, we simply hear piano and drum heartbeats, gradually slowing down and then stopping, with no way back.

Perhaps it is simply a reflection of the way Camden sometimes seems to turn in upon itself; beyond the High Street, Lock and Market, and before it turns into Hampstead, it is a deprived and grim-looking part of town, though, importantly, not bereft of life. The world which these songs describe is not, by and large, a materially wealthy one and quite often is a brutal and unforgiving one. Hence, if Madness wish to come across as zany and wacky, it is essential to remember that their good humour is built on a foundation of profound pain. Comedy can be as much of a mask as it can be a guide.

If we take the story chronologically, it all seemed so simple at the beginning – or did it? Given that two of the three earliest songs here are Prince Buster covers, and the third a Prince Buster tribute, Madness’ development does, shamefully, remind us how minimal a role ska and reggae have played in this tale thus far – a part wholly out of proportion to the importance of these musics and their centrality to the mindset, wellbeing and coherence of post-war Britain. And yet, like former 2-Tone labelmates The Specials, Madness used ska only as a skeleton, a framework for wherever they felt like going next; by the time they reach “House Of Fun,” they are straddling the thin stylistic line between English music hall and polka.

To those of us just a few years too young to get the full impact of the Pistols, however, 2-Tone was our “punk,” and when Madness appeared on TOTP with their first two singles, it was yet again time to open the window and let in the metaphorical sun. Over in the States, Lennon heard their extraordinary recasting of “One Step Beyond” – Chas Smash’s intro mostly derived from Buster’s “The Scorcher” via “Double Barrel” (the group were the epitome of the 1969-71 skinhead generation’s younger brothers coming to adulthood) – if not their even more remarkable, break-down-every-wall performance of the song on TV, and knew that something new and refreshing was happening (even though he chose to misremember the intro as saying: “Don’t do that…do THIS!” But hasn’t that always been the point of pop music, as protection against ossification? The song is taken with great, gruelling aggression which still carries within itself the aura of triumph. Likewise, “Madness,” the song, is taken with an  irreverence which ventures to the border of surreality (saxophonist Lee “Kix” Thompson’s stubborn refusal to modulate keys during his solo) as if to say: well, we are reinventing this music.

But “My Girl,” which appeared as a single, at the beginning of 1980, was the first palpable evidence that the group were stretching beyond any “ska” boundaries; the song’s rhythms are subtly derived from ska, but the song’s melodic and rhythmic impetus have much more in common with Ray Davies, a bus ride away in Muswell Hill, and its demons are audibly troubled; keyboardist Mike Barson has said that the song was initially inspired by Costello’s “Watching The Detectives,” and there is always the same, if more faintly expressed, terror that things might turn violently sour; the reality behind some people’s notions of “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers.”

The predominantly instrumental “Night Boat To Cairo” is also rather unsettling, with its over-eager accelerandi and rallentandi, its violent hammering of familiar Eastern musical tropes, as if wanting to blow the Nile up once the last boat, with its grinning, toothless oarsman, has run its course. An improbable, courtly string section – the Empire running through Shostakovich’s lines one more speedy time before being detonated? – which appears near the song’s end amplifies the disquiet.

“Baggy Trousers” was an especially big hit, and deservedly so, since its end-of-term knees-up air disguises a deeply ambivalent meditation on schooldays – the singer didn’t really enjoy school or its associated japes, appears to have learned nothing from it (whereas in reality Suggs had once been a grammar school boy) – with some of the most sophisticated chord changes to be found outside jazz.

“Embarrassment,” which sees the group trying, of all things, sixties Motown , is the sad yet inevitable consequence of these japes and their wider relation to society, yet its placing as the opening track on Complete Madness is, I believe, significant – its story of society closing its doors in the face of a girl who has become pregnant by a black man, coming less than a year after what were essentially race riots in Britain, is a slap in the country’s face in itself. One can look at recent events in Madness’ former back yard and wonder whether the British have progressed an inch over the last three decades.

Two of their four 1981 singles offered as dark a vision – perhaps darker by virtue of being inconclusive – as late Specials-period Jerry Dammers. “Grey Day,” with its synthesised wind noises, purposely over-harsh trumpet and baritone sax figures and tolling bells, could have emerged from a cauldron adjacent to New Order’s “In A Lonely Place” and depicts a life without purpose or relief. Whereas “Shut Up” remains one of New Pop’s most disturbing singles – New Pop? Barson said “Grey Day” originally owed something to Roxy’s “The Bogus Man,” and underlines my suspicion that beneath this nutty skanking band are an art-rock group earnestly trying to get out – since its climactic paraphrasing of Weller’s “Start!” is aimed at the listener with a distinctly accusatory air, in the manner of: “you LET me happen.” It was once a ten-minute epic, with song title included in the chorus, but conveys so much more in its abbreviated final form; on the 7 album (not an uplifting listen), Barson’s piano and the Carla Bley chord changes just carry on, bumptious and disregarding.

Such darkness illuminates why their cover of “It Must Be Love” came as such a relief. Or did it? The video to the single, which appeared at the end of November 1981, that month of “in memoria,” begins with the group standing around a graveside, filmed from the perspective of the deceased. And although it is perhaps the only song on this record to concern itself with love, its arrangement is too jarring and discursive for easy comfort – dub cut-out tactics leading to David Bedford’s fulsome, formal string section, a three-note rockabilly guitar solo from Chris Foreman, Thompson’s sax suggesting – as elsewhere – a buried need to go all Davey Payne or George Khan and just BURST free of its surrounding picture. All as part of an interpretation of a song first recorded a decade previously by its author, Labi Siffre (who happily took a cameo role in the video), Britain’s first prominent black gay singer/songwriter.

“Cardiac Arrest” was sneaked out as a kind of audience-testing single in early 1982 but nobody was fooled by the superimposed happy ending and it became their first single since “The Prince” to miss the top ten; it may in retrospect have been wiser for the group to flip the single and promote the B-side “In The City,” written and performed for a Japanese car commercial, although that performance is boisterous to the point of worry. But their next single, “House Of Fun,” premiered here, gave them their first, and by common consent a most welcome and long-overdue, number one; here the Suggs of “Baggy Trousers” – or maybe we should call his character the Worried Man of Camden – is just out of school, grown up and eager to learn the lessons of life; but he’s at the chemist’s and can’t quite summon up the nerve to ask for a packet of condoms, stammering out incomprehensible codewords and stymied by the repeated appearances of the old lady next door in the shop, against whom Suggs has no option but to keep his countenance. Unlike the album version, which simply fades out on the chorus, the 45 abruptly crashes into a fairground calliope which loops to fade; is maturity going to be as disappointing as childhood was? Nonetheless, the single deservedly sat on top of the greatest UK singles chart there has ever been or is ever likely to be (you doubt my word? Read it for yourselves).

Which leaves the two stray album tracks; “Bed And Breakfast Man” from 1979’s One Step Beyond… and “Take It Or Leave It,” from 1980’s Absolutely and also the title song from the band’s autobiographical 1981 movie. Both show startling sophistication for a band so seemingly wet behind their ears (although, as the North London Invaders, they had been going in various forms since 1976; Chas Smash, far from being a random stage dancer, had once been the Invaders’ bassist); the carousing, tonality-challenging organ runs of the former and the jagged 14/8 structure of the latter, both coupled with Suggs’ studiously disinterested vocals, suggest clear ancestors of Blur (it is unthinkable that the teenage Albarn and Coxon, growing up in distant Colchester, wouldn’t have spun Complete Madness over and over; it is, amongst its many merits, one of the great party albums to get to number one, provided that you don’t listen to the words too closely). And we know that, in a largely baffled and uncomprehending USA, the fourteen-year-old Gwen Stefani, among a few others, was taking careful notes. The sense that all this celebration is only the prelude to apocalypse.

I have left the album’s last track until last; “The Return Of The Los Palmas 7” was the first of their quartet of 1981 singles, and is mostly instrumental (the one-word lyric I will leave you to discover, if you don’t already know it), but is one of this record’s most important songs in that its cautious optimism finally places Madness on the side of life. In the accompanying video we see the group tucking into their full English breakfasts in a greasy spoon caff called Venus – haven’t I seen that street before somewhere? – or dressed up proto-Brideshead style in tails and bowties, in a posh mansion, or indeed as cowboy gunmen, rolling back down Primrose Hill into town.

But cut into these sequences are not-quite-random montages of moments – Harold Wilson, Morecambe and Wise, Bobby Moore, Margaret Thatcher, failed car stunt vaults, Ashes triumphs, Apollo orbits; the list goes on and on – which seem to suggest, well, here’s Britain, and here’s the world, and we all know that people are the same wherever you go and that, well, there’s good and bad in everything.

As the song ends, the musicians come out of the café and walk back out into the street. Where are they? But then the camera pulls back and we see that they are but specks in the gigantic yet reassuring shadow of the Trellick Tower, for a generation the comforting signifier of coming back into London, and for personal reasons I find this rather moving, as well as a pointer to “For Tomorrow” and, eventually, “Under The Westway.” That is their Madness – and study that cover photograph carefully; are they really happy or truly mad? – in that you can throw whatever you like at them, and however far down they sink they will never, ever, be out. At least, not for now. Or perhaps take the view that, as in Lear, it's the figure of the Fool which tells the most truth.

But next we meet again with a man keen to make himself sink without a trace, and a stylish trace at that.