CityLife

Interview: Martin Fry

Martin Fry

HE may be an elder statesman of Sheffield pop, but Martin Fry is a Manc at heart. The man whose formative experience was seeing the Sex Pistols at the Free Trade Hall went on to cultivate an image the very antithesis of punk - the man in the gold lamé suit.

Asked how he became so dandified, Fry muses that perhaps it was a throwback to the 1960s scouse rock ‘n’ roller Billy Fury.

“It was like a suit of armour, a rite of passage,” he says. “If you could walk around in a gold lamé suit and not get beaten up too often you were doing OK.

“It’s a mod thing, I suppose…a suedehead thing. That’s what I grew up through - that and glam rock. That’s it in a nutshell – Motown and Bowie.”

Whatever it was, it produced The Lexicon Of Love in 1982 – a debut album whose songs (The Look Of Love, Poison Arrow, All Of My Heart and others) had such enduring appeal that Fry performed the whole album at the Royal Albert Hall in April. He now brings The Lexicon Of Love to Manchester Bridgewater Hall and Sheffield City Hall, performing with the Manchester Camerata orchestra.

Reminded that The Lexicon Of Love clocked a slender-but-lovely 37 minutes, Fry reassures us there will be more ABC delights to flesh the evening out.

'Pop national treasures'

Fry was born in Stretford in 1958, and has fond memories of Manchester venues such as Rafters, the Electric Circus and Factory – the club which pre-dated the independent record label of the same name. He went to Sheffield University to study English, and became involved in that city’s pop scene.

“Sheffield was very different from Manchester in those days,” he recalls. “A lot of it was untouched by punk. Sheffield was more maverick, and that was reflected in the diversity of the bands coming out of there.”

The Lexicon of Love was recorded at a variety of London studios. “We were coming out of the punk years, then post-punk with bands like The Cure and Joy Division,” he says. “With ABC we wanted to use that world and also Chic and Sister Sledge and disco music. It was a reaction against the times.”

Of the line-up which made the album, only Fry now remains. Drummer David Palmer now plays with Rod Stewart and lives in Los Angeles.

“Steve Singleton (saxophonist) lives in Sheffield,” says Fry. “I think he opened a shop. Mark White (guitar and keyboards) and myself wrote a lot of songs together throughout the ‘80s and into the ‘90s. Mark became a reiki master in 1991 or 1992.

“In recent years, I’ve been playing live all over the place, and toured in America. We are kind of pop national treasures. If somebody wants a guy in a gold lame suit that sounds like Martin Fry, they have to phone me up. That’s a nice feeling."

ABC perform The Lexicon of Love with a 50-piece concert orchestra at the Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, on December 6, 2009.