Speaking to a young lady of my acquaintenance and, for no real reason, I start to feel insecure and my mind drifts over to music, to what I wish I could listen to to reflect for a moment. I drift over to Martin Fry and ABC and “Poison Arrow”. To a disembodied woman’s voice feelingly but fraught with a lack of the lexicon or the look of love she says: “I care enough to know I could never love you.”
The year was 1982 and I knew more than my own fair share about getting it wrong and ABC -a popppier, smarter, less synthetic, more empathic, take on the New Romantic movement: “Poison Arrow” is aa Motown-y synth marvel. Made them superstars right away in the UK. Paul Morley in the NME flipped and before the album was a gleam in anyone’s eyes.
As a lyricist, at least on the first album, ABC were pop poets ala Smokey Rpbinson, clicking words of love like a hand of all Aces.
At the center of the album? “Poison Arrow”, “The Look Of Love” and “Date Stamp”. Punwise, “Date Stamp” is a riot. A kerching kerchange of flashing synth vibes (if the bpms were more 127 it could come from LCD Soundsystem -I bet James Murphy knows it very well). “Looking for a girl who meets supply with demand…” he warns and claims to be dated because love has no guantee and ching goes the cash register again. “Don’t touch the merchandize” he warns before the horn blows in, “I get sales talk from sales assistants when all I wanna do is LOWER YOUR RESISTANCE, everything is temporary written on that sand…”
Best of all is “The Look Of Love”. The best song of 1982. The sunth is a piano, the Dylan quote is a riot (“and gravity won’t pull you through…”). All I’m saying, he says (and that isn’t in quotation marks because anybody who has been in love could claim the same thing) is it takes a lot to love you…
The chorus is as good as the verse, the bridge is an instrumental and then this verse:
“If you judge a book by the cover,
Then you’d judge the look by the lover
I hope you’ll soon recover,
Me I go from one extreme to another…”
Pretty awesome right?
but here comes a spoken interlude and I am gonna point out the greatest moment in Fry’s professional life:
“And though my friends just might ask me
They say “Martin maybe one day you’ll find true love”
now here it is:
he says these words but he sighs
“iighhhhh Say…
Maybe, there must be a solution
To the one thing, the one thing, we can’t find”
And he is building to the coda…
“YIPIYI YIPIYI YAY...”
before repeating and a drum beat like a conversation stopped dead.