Rip It Up and Start Again (51 page)

Still rolling off their initial burst of momentum, Ware and Marsh launched straight into the next B.E.F. project,
Music of Quality and Distinction Volume One
. Like
Penthouse,
it continued Ware’s mission to show that it was possible to make “synthetic music with soul.” This time around B.E.F. put themselves in the role of producers and arrangers. The
Quality and Distinction
concept was twofold. It consisted entirely of pop classics remade by B.E.F., and most of the songs were collaborations with different famous singers. One could see the whole project as an essay about pop, celebrating the Tin Pan Alley/Brill Building/Nashville tendency to maintain strict separation between songwriter, singer, and producer. Ware and Marsh rejected rock’s raw expression and aligned themselves with pop classicism. “We were fans of the genius producer, people like Phil Spector,” says Ware. “We loved the idea of assembling something of great beauty, almost like sonic architecture.” But beneath
Quality and Distinction
lurked a deeper psychological subtext. By elevating the producer’s role as auteur, Marsh and Ware slyly implied that Martin Rushent had everything to do with the success of Oakey’s new League.

Quality and Distinction
played some neat pop-crit games. Sandie Shaw covered “Anyone Who Had a Heart,” a tune originally associated with her rival, Cilla Black. Billy Mackenzie attempted to out-sing his idol/prototype David Bowie on a remake of “The Secret Life of Arabia” from
Heroes
. But apart from Tina Turner’s tour de force take on the Temptations’ “Ball of Confusion,” the new versions failed to surpass the originals. As a unified listening experience,
Quality and Distinction
felt flat and motley, and the original plan to release the entire album as a series of double-A-sided singles was cut short when the first few failed to get anywhere near the charts.

B.E.F. celebrated dry, radio-ready production, but another kind of aridity seemed to fatally permeate B.E.F.’s work, at least as far as their pop prospects were concerned. The lingering antimystique postpunk spirit kept them from being a group that everyday fans took to heart. “We don’t think it’s healthy for people to hold up fairly ordinary people as some kind of demi-god,” Marsh told
NME,
rejecting the very forces of identification and projection that animate pop culture. At the end of 1982, B.E.F. found themselves faced with an embarrassing quandary. Having styled themselves as a corporation, a hit factory churning out perfect consumer product, what were they to do when hardly anyone was consuming their products?

Despite its defects as a listening experience,
Quality and Distinction
could claim to be a seminal exercise in postmodern pop. At the end of the seventies, postmodernist concepts started filtering down from academia to the music press. In rock, the opposition between modernism and postmodernism corresponded neatly to the after-punk vanguard of PiL, the Pop Group et al. striving strenuously for total innovation versus the retro-eclectic approach shared by 2-Tone, Postcard, and Adam Ant. As a sensibility, postmodernism also eroded the certainties and knee-jerk reflexes of a certain kind of rockthink rooted in binary oppositions like depth versus surface and authentic versus inauthentic.

Postpunk’s struggle to avoid escapism and superficiality had led to either hair shirt propaganda (the Pop Group) or the existential abyss (Joy Division). Giddy with relief at jettisoning these twin burdens of guilt and despair, journalists such as Morley celebrated “the transient thrill” of disposable pop. They trashed well-meaning and meaningfulness in favor of hedonistic paeans to consumption and polished product. And they challenged the implicitly masculine critical hierarchies that despised the synthetic and mass produced.

This gender-coded shift from “rock” to “pop” sensibility was in many ways a flashback to glam. In the early seventies, David Bowie and Roxy Music had managed to bridge the ever widening gap between singles-focused dance pop and album-oriented art rock. They made “serious” music that was also playful and image conscious. Roxy Music, especially, wove together futuristic elements and period evocations, while Bowie (with
Pin-Ups
) and Bryan Ferry’s solo albums explored the creative possibilities of the cover version to the hilt. Glam, in fact, had been postmodernist long before the term had currency outside art theory circles.

New Pop involved a renaissance of glam’s interest in artifice, androgyny, and all the delicious games you could play with pop idolatry. Perhaps the climax of all these tendencies was the bizarre critical apotheosis of Dollar, a schlocky male/female duo that had already garnered a smidgen of campy love from hipsters for their sheer plasticness even before they teamed up with producer Trevor Horn.

Horn started 1981 as a has-been, despite having scored a number one hit in sixteen countries with the Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star” two years earlier. After two unsuccessful Buggles albums, he and partner Geoff Downes joined Yes for one album and a tour. Dollar were Horn’s ticket back from the brink of irrelevance. An accomplished musician who’d been in a youth orchestra and could sight-read from a score, the producer hated punk rock. For him, the true sonic revolutionaries of the late seventies were Kraftwerk, Donna Summer, and Abba. Accordingly, Horn’s concept for Dollar was to Moroderize the group’s M.O.R. Taking the duo’s fabricated fakeness to an almost conceptual extremity as if they were a work of pop art, “Hand Held in Black and White” and “Mirror Mirror”—the first two singles he cowrote and produced for them—dazzled the ears with their futuristic hypergloss. Dollar became hugely hip. And so did Horn.

ABC loved the Dollar singles and they were looking for a producer to help realize their sonic dream of fusing symphonic disco, nouveau Roxy, and piercingly intelligent lyrics. By the end of 1981, a year after Morley’s New Pop feature introduced them to the world, the Sheffield group had managed to get a major-label record deal, but their music fell short of their aspirations. Their October 1981 debut single, “Tears Are Not Enough,” sounded scrawny, a mere demo for the spectacular sound they wanted. On
Top of the Pops,
singer Martin Fry wore a gold lamé suit, but it didn’t sit right on his hulking frame. His dancing was awkward, his presence lacked authority. From sound to visuals, ABC were not yet walking it like they talked it. So they turned to Horn.

“Steve Singleton from ABC said to me, ‘If you produce us you’ll be the most fashionable producer in the world,’” laughs Horn. “I was really taken with that, the arrogance of it.” ABC told him they wanted to make “superhuman” records. Horn agreed to produce the band’s second single, “Poison Arrow.” It took him a while to grasp what the band wanted to achieve, a collision between the orchestral disco splendor of a Gloria Gaynor and the word-twisting lyrical depths of an Elvis Costello. “It dawned on me as I was working on the record—and this is what I’d tell people at the time—‘It’s like Dylan, except it’s disco music instead of an acoustic guitar.’ The guy’s writing about what he really feels, but it’s gonna be played in a dance club so it’s gotta have the functional quality of disco.”

A lavish tempest of melodramatic grand-piano chords, thunderous drums, and synth parts simulating string sweeps and horn fanfares, “Poison Arrow” sounded like a million bucks had been spent on it, and yes, it sounded superhuman. At its core, though, lay the DIY principle—not so much “anyone can do it” but “anyone can be a star.” And ABC
did
it. “Poison Arrow” went Top 10 in Britain. The next single, the even more magnificently appointed “The Look of Love,” which had real strings, angelic backing vocals, tympani, and trumpets, did even better, making the U.K. Top 5 in June 1982 and the
Billboard
Top 20 not long after. Both “Look of Love” and “Poison Arrow” (which was actually released after “Look” in America, where it was also a Top 30 hit) garnered lots of play on the fledgling MTV channel, thanks to ABC’s witty, glitzy videos.

To help him create the majestic sound ABC desired—James Brown meets Nelson Riddle’s Sinatra—Horn assembled a crack squad that included Anne Dudley, a classically trained keyboard player and arranger, and engineer Gary Langan, both of whom had worked on his Dollar records. ABC were actually capable musicians, and the tunes they’d written remained at the core of it all, but Horn and Dudley were given carte blanche by the group to embellish and expand upon these kernels. “ABC weren’t the least bit precious about their songs,” recalls Dudley. “They were eager to embrace everything, totally open to making it as exciting and epic as possible. Another big reason why the album sounds so lush and bright is Gary Langan’s engineering and mixing.”

The album was named
The Lexicon of Love,
and with good reason. Fry reveled in wordplay like a Cole Porter chronically addicted to puns and alliteration, mixed metaphors and perilously extended tropes. But what, underneath Fry’s fizzy wordplay, were ABC actually
about
? “Tears Are Not Enough” sounded almost like a New Pop manifesto (no time for wallowing or whining, strive and take pride) disguised as a song about heartbreak. Other ABC songs were more like metapop, playing games with pop’s cliché-encrusted lore of love. “The Look of Love” echoed Bacharach and David, “Many Happy Returns” quoted the Zombies’ “She’s Not There,” and “Valentine’s Day” harked back even further to 1930s Hollywood with its climactic lines, “If you gave me a pound for all the moments I missed and I got dancing lessons for all the lips I shoulda kissed/I’d be a millionaire/I’d be a Fred Astaire.”

The echoes of prerock showbiz carried through to the whole look of ABC’s records. Each single featured a sleeve note penned by Fry, an homage to the period (roughly pre-1967) when all long-playing records had them. To complete the atmosphere of bygone elegance, ABC added cute period touches, such as the little box informing the purchaser how to get the best out of the record (“Don’t use a faulty or worn stylus…. Keep it clean by wiping it with an antistatic cloth”) and the slogan “Purveyors of Fine Product,” located next to the logo for Neutron Records, ABC’s imprint through Phonogram.

Like B.E.F., ABC aimed to make music of quality and distinction.
Lexicon
was cunningly crafted to sound like no expense had been spared. It was widely assumed to be fully orchestrated, but in fact, strings were only used on four tracks. ABC also brought in appropriately deluxe sartorial signifiers such as tuxedos, bow ties, and gold lamé suits. “We wanted to look like we came from Vegas, so we went to Carnaby Street and hired this very camp tailor who used to make clothes for Marc Bolan,” recalls Fry. “It’s 1982, so he probably hadn’t been asked to make a gold lamé suit for nearly a decade.” For the cover photographs, ABC wanted the rich tones of “a Powell and Pressburger movie, where the color red is
very
red. Steve and Mark had decided that I should be like a character. ‘The album’s a movie and you’re the star.’”

The front cover of the album depicted Martin Fry as the dashing hero of a crime melodrama, brandishing a revolver, a fainting damsel clasped in his other arm. Flip to the back of the record, and the mise-en-scène is revealed as staged. We see the backroom people behind the theatrical spectacle, as played by the other members of ABC: the prompter reading from a script, a fatigued stagehand with a cigarette tucked behind the ear, a flunky with a bouquet ready for the leading lady. It was all decidedly Brechtian.

Indeed, for all the reinvocation of romance and Hollywood glamour, ABC deep down retained that signature postpunk wariness about love, love songs, and the unrealistic dreams propagated by pop. In a weird way, they, too, resembled Gang of Four. Tellingly, ABC’s manager Rob Warr was not only Bob Last’s partner, but had previously managed Gang of Four during the
Entertainment!
era. “Date Stamp,” at once the wittiest and most poignant song on
Lexicon,
recalled the imagery of “Damaged Goods,” as brokenhearted Fry is “looking for a girl that meets supply with demand.” In a world where “love has no guarantee,” he’s a discarded commodity whose sell-by date has expired. “All of My Heart,” ABC’s third Top 10 single in a row, sounded sickly sweet but its sentiments rivaled “Love Like Anthrax” in their bracing
un
sentimentality. “It surprises me when people pin a Valentino tag on the group when a lot of the songs were out to demolish the power of love,” Fry told
The Face
. “‘All of My Heart,’ for me, was saying, ‘Skip the hearts and flowers and wash your hands of the whole sentimental glop,’ you know?”

Yet for all the clever cynicism, at the core of the record was the real pain of Martin Fry, disillusioned lover. His genuine bitterness was the reason
Lexicon
worked. “We wanted the songs to be romantic in the traditional sense, but there’s also a sinister edge,” says Fry. “‘Poison Arrow’ is about falling in love but also how it kicks you in the teeth.” And Fry
had
been kicked in the teeth. “
Lexicon
is all about Martin getting dumped by this specific girl,” says Horn. “All of the songs are about that anger and outrage he felt. And on ‘The Look of Love,’ when Martin sings, ‘When the girl has left you out on the table’ and then there’s a girl going, ‘Goodbye!,’ well, that’s
the
girl. It was my suggestion—‘Why don’t we get the
actual girl
that you’ve wrote these songs for in to do the vocal?’ It was very funny!”

The triumph of
Lexicon
lay in the slight gap between Fry’s aspirations and his ability. Like Dexys’ Kevin Rowland, he wasn’t quite a natural singer. His range was limited, his falsetto slightly strained. Nor did Fry have the innate panache to fully play the debonair role he’d cast himself in. His moves weren’t slick, and his acne scars were visible through the makeup. Fry
willed
himself to be a star. “I am a punk, I always have been and I always will be,” he once said. “What Fry took from punk was the zeal,” says Paul Morley, ABC’s champion at
NME
. “ABC couldn’t have happened without punk because that gave people the possibility of creating their own master plans and manifestos.”