By Terry Sweeney
ABC launched their breakthrough album, the Trevor Horn produced Lexicon in Love, in 1982. The much-loved album had top 20 hits in the UK with Poison Arrow, Tears are not Enough, the Look of Love and All of my Heart. The album peaked at Number 1 in the UK and reached number 24 in the US charts and stayed in the UK charts for 50 weeks.
On 17th November singer Martin Fry brought his band and a full orchestra to perform the ‘ABC songbook’ and the complete Lexicon of Love album to a packed Liverpool Philharmonic Hall.
The Lexicon Orchestra were conducted by Anne Dudley, original arranger on the album.
After the orchestra had played the overture, they were joined onstage by the ABC band and then Martin Fry, immaculately dressed in a black and white dinner suite, to play Set 1, the ABC songbook, opening with ‘When Smokey Sings’ from their 4th album Alphabet City. The orchestra and band belted out the opener, and Martin Fry was in great voice as he hit the stage.
The first part of the show had a great mix of old and some new songs, and included crowd favourites like ‘Viva Love’, and ‘The Night They Murdered Love’. The mix of love songs and ‘songs of lust’ such as Flames of Desire, went down a storm and people in the audience were already dancing when the first half of the show closed.
After the intermission, with Anne Dudley resplendent in a gold lame jacket and Martin Fry in an electric blue suit, the band played Set 2, the full Lexicon of Love album, which is chock full of great tracks.
Fry told us how they made the album, ‘in a small studio in a basement in Brick Lane’. The band went from wannabe pop stars rubbing shoulders with other up and coming bands like Def Leppard and The Human League in the pubs in Sheffield, to Top of the Pops and chart success within a few weeks.
The Set 2 song list was ‘Show Me’, a raucous ‘Poison Arrow’, ‘Many Happy Returns’, the audience were up and dancing by ‘Tears are Not Enough’; and stayed up throughout the rest of the set of ‘Valentine’s Day’, ‘The Look of Love (Part I)’, ‘Date Stamp’, ‘4 Ever 2 Gether’ and ‘All of My Heart’.
The encore of ‘The Look of Love (Part IV) nearly took the roof off, and the band reprised it as a second encore to bring a fantastic set to a close and send the audience home happy after a wonderful night.
This was the second time we’ve seen ABC with an orchestra playing the album, after they toured in 2022 on the 40th Anniversary of the release of The Lexicon of Love album, and, if anything, this was a better performance than last time.
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