Martin Fry has done his time on the comeback circuit – and in unexpected ways, too. Ten years ago, he trekked through the rainforest to the top of Mount Roraima, the flat-topped mountain in South America that inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World. He went not with Bear Grylls, or Ed Stafford, but with Spandau Ballet’s Tony Hadley and Richard Drummie from Go West, in aid of charity. Fifty or so fans came along to share the trip; 3,000 metres high, barriers were broken down. Still, Fry drew the line at sharing a tent with Hadley; they are both 6ft 3in. One night, camping in a car park in Venezuela, he awoke to hear his old 80s pop rival performing Gold on someone’s karaoke machine.
That might have been a sufficiently close brush with the foreign-travel-and-reunited-bands circuit: Fry is not sure he could manage a full-on 80s nostalgia cruise with other groups. But, given that time has a strange way of making old music sound new again, he probably won’t have to.
We meet just before the release of The Lexicon of Love II, the most anticipated record Fry has made in years. It’s the sequel to the album that broke his band ABC 34 years ago and featured songs that came to epitomise the music known as New Pop – The Look of Love, Poison Arrow and All of My Heart. Fry, the only permanent member of ABC, is still blond, with a tanned and lived-in look to the face that first entered the public consciousness under a straw boater and an 80s cowlick. He admits that veteran ABC fans have queried the album’s ballsy title – “I’ve had a lot of people on Twitter saying, who the hell do you think you are?” – but it’s obviously a companion piece to the first record, he explains. “It’s a kind of Godfather Part II. What has happened to these characters? Are they older, wiser, stupider, happier? I genuinely wanted to make a sequel with me as I am now, as a 57-year-old man.”
The new album is an eerie experience, grabbing you by the throat for 11 tracks cracked straight from a time capsule of New Pop songwriting – luxuriant chord-changes, big emotive statements (“I fly like a condor to the heart of the new day sun”) and the plushest strings you’ve heard since ELO – or early ABC, for that matter – courtesy of Anne Dudley of the Art of Noise, who scored the original Lexicon of Love. Fry’s voice is pretty much unchanged: he has found a few tricks to avoid the high notes – there are no yippee-yi-yippee-yi-yays – but there is one of his famous spoken word breaks on Kiss Me Goodbye.
He wrote the record with, among others, Rob Fusari, who discovered Lady Gaga (“and has consequently spent a lot of time in court”). He had 40 new songs in total, and persuaded Virgin Records to listen to a couple of them on his phone while attending a meeting about one of his “numerous compilation albums”. Shortly after, he was invited back and found himself “further up the building”. He couldn’t wait for Trevor Horn, who worked on The Lexicon of Love, to be available, so he produced the record himself, with Go West producer Gary Stevenson. Time was of the essence, after all. “I’m a man out of time till the stars realign,” as he says on Brighter Than the Sun.
Fry says the “contrary, stubborn bastard side” of his nature served him well in the early days of ABC, in Sheffield, when disco, funk, soul, Rodgers and Hammerstein and Sinatra came together in a perfect storm. When he watches himself on early Top of the Pops clips, Fry wonders if he was truly as imperious as he looked. “I used to obsess about ABC,” he says. “I didn’t even know there was a Falklands war on. I was obsessed with the minutiae, the back of the record sleeve, the fact that the 12in needed redesigning. Is that healthy?”
After ABC’s initial success, however, he veered away from the music that had brought him three Top 10 singles, turning to dour college rock for the band’s second album, Beauty Stab, described by Simon Reynolds as “one of the greatest career-sabotage LPs in pop history”. The third ABC album, How to Be a … Zillionaire, was a slightly confusing satire about money, in which the band were trying to style themselves as cartoon characters, Fry explains. He thinks it was ahead of its time; his record company didn’t care. “I walked into the Phonogram office and our poster was on the wall, and they had drawn moustaches on it,” he says. “This is the label! The record wasn’t even out yet!”
ABC’s chart presence continued to diminish, and in the late 80s Fry was out of action for a time, fighting Hodgkin lymphoma, a rare form of cancer. In 1992, his long-time musical accomplice Mark White left the band to pursue a career in alternative therapies (he is now a reiki master in London) and Fry was dropped by EMI as a solo artist and “came out the exit door” of his career.
“I went from having a Haçienda and Shoom card in my wallet to an Ikea one,” he says. He chews over the words “flatpack furniture assemblage”. He was still in his early 30s and his future was already behind him. “It was terrifying. I toyed with the idea of opening a boutique hotel-cum-sanitarium for anyone from the 1980s who had had a hit in the Top 40. My thinking was, you would be able to sit in the bar going: ‘Remember when my record was in the charts?’ I could have made a fortune. I salute anyone who has been through that process, from the Libertines to any of the bands on Eurovision. It takes a real survival instinct to get back on the stage.”
It didn’t take him long to do it himself. Fry had taken ABC’s hits from Dubai to Ghana to the Albert Hall with a 72-piece orchestra long before the 80s was offficially a thing again. In 1999, he got himself on an arena package tour with Culture Club and the Human League and was thrilled to see the venues selling out. He loved the experience, loved the ready-made audience and the way you could “recreate the moment of the record’s inception with smoke and mirrors”. “But I started wondering, at what point do you start to become your own tribute act, do you start to caricature yourself?”
The old days were like boxing, he says: “Spandau Ballet were the Islington heavyweights. New Order, Dexys, Duran Duran – there were loads of us all seethingly jealous of each other, if they would admit to it.” Being on the revival circuit got him used to not being at the top of the Christmas tree. The advent of acid house helped, too, he says, “because suddenly you were out in a field”. (ABC had flirted with house music on their fifth album, Up.) While the competition is still fierce among the golden oldies on the victory lap, as he likes to call them, the pressures of performing in the modern industry setting are much greater than they were. He compares New Pop and the New Romantics to Kabuki theatre: “You had the makeup, the masks and everyone was miming. Now, everyone needs to be able to play live – on Jools Holland or at Glastonbury. Only the repertoire you’ve built up provides a wall of protection.”
The Lexicon of Love II is a concept album about love in middle age, an unusual subject in itself. Many of Fry’s friends in the business have a succession of young girlfriends, he says; he credits his wife of 30 years, and his two children, with preserving his sanity. “Men over 50 gradually become invisible,” he says. “No one really listens to what they are saying. I’ve done my midlife crisis. Some of the people who’ve come to my shows, they’ve been through some crazy shit. Divorces, health issues, the failed companies they set up. I figured that was more interesting – that stuff is the real rollercoaster of life.”
There will be no gold lamé suit this time around. It doesn’t feel right, he says; he prefers a more subtle Ozwald Boateng number. He says Mrs Fry has warned him about “going down the hall of mirrors, the palace of Versailles”, which is the couple’s shorthand for the self-obsession and preening that comes with a life in pop. “It’s an attention-seeking, narcissistic thing, being a lead singer,” he says, “no matter what age you are.”
He has to go: he has an early cycling trip in the morning, although he has to be careful not to overdo the pedalling when he has a gig that night. Before he disappears, I ask him about a rumour that the album was originally going to be called The Lexicon of a Lost Ideal. “That was a statement asking, why the hell would you want to make an album in 2016?” he explains. “But then I realised it’s actually a pretty good time for albums after all. It’s like the art form is coming back. People do care, don’t they?” He has a gentle way of probing you for your opinion.
That leads him on to David Bowie’s Blackstar, which he thinks of as a unique double album. “There is the one you got on Friday 8 January and had the weekend to enjoy. And there is the album you got on 13 January, when he had died, which was his tombstone.” Bowie, of course, was a crucial figure to the New Pop generation. Fry had hitchhiked down to London to see him as a teenager, and the young Fry was coloured in shades of Bowie – the theatricality, the voice, the Englishness, even the sharp cut of the chin. “I never thought my parents would outlive him,” he says. “I’ve heard Nick Rhodes and Gary Kemp say it, too – that he was like a father, somehow.”
There will be festival shows over the summer, and then a full-on ABC tour in the autumn, including one show with an orchestra, the Southbank Sinfonia, at the Royal Festival Hall, conducted by Anne Dudley. It’s a big band – nine of them onstage with a three-piece brass section.
The other day, Fry was travelling up north on a train with his bandmates and the champagne came out at breakfast. The younger members of the band were amused by this flash of a former, more hedonistic, era in pop. And so, in a way, was Fry. “No one in their 50s should really be having this much fun,” he says. “Do you know what I mean?”
The Lexicon of Love II is out now on Virgin EMI.
