The Lexicon of Love

Which might have been yet another name for this project. I reach for this particularly glittery star now partly out of a need to establish my contested credentials for writing about 'romance'. I may not have been a very romantic lover, Madame, but I've always been a lover of romance. I judge this by an awareness that the first songs to stir me as a child were highly sentimental ones. I remember weeping (and enjoying it), to Terry Jack's 'Seasons in the Sun', aged 7. Surely an age when the recent realisation of the reality of death should preclude any such indulgence in the sweet melancholy that song induces. At the very least, I should have found it irredeemably 'soppy'.

I would love to be able to claim that I had been a punk. It's a pre-requisite of cultural commentary these days. It appears every soundbitist wheeled on to give talking head on the countless TV histories of pop feels duty bound to claim they were there at the Roxy, back in the day, and how much they were inspired by punk (the most absurd claim on this score I saw made recently was by Pete I-am-responsible-for-more-aural-misery-than-any-other-source-in-the 80s-especially-Rick-Astley Waterman, showing just how bogus it is, and suggesting it's only a matter of time before The Krankees, Keith Harris and Orville, and Rene and Renata claim the same). I was too young to be a punk, being 9 in 1976, but then I was also too young for the music I was into. Far too young. I was into Buddy Holly, Neil Sedaka, and Phil Spector groups. Very uncool next to punk. I didn't want to destroy. I wanted to dream.

I mention all this because I want to understand the role played by pop music in forming my own sensibility and outlook, and specifically what so-called 'New Romanticism' has with the old sort. How can I save its best bits from being considered either punk's camper cousin, or Thatcherism in fancy dress? I intend to give my penny's worth on New Romanticism in quite a few installments over the months, but thought I'd just jump straight in here with my belief that ABC's Lexicon of Love was one the best albums of the 80s, and certainly the best to be tarred with the 'New Romantic' mascara.

For in it I had found the same sentimental heart-tug that I had experienced with Buddy Holly and the Shirelles. If 'New Romantic' has any meaning at all, then it resides in the suave symphony of sentiment that is The Lexicon of Love. Roxy by proxy, perhaps. But I wasn't really aware of Roxy Music back then, or if I was Ferry had grown a tad too pompous to interest me. Pomposity, alas, was endemic in the 80s. A decade that took itself far too seriously. Even the bands that are supposed to really 'own' New Romanticism - those Blitz Kids with record deals: Visage, Spandau Ballet and Ultravox - fall foul of this tendency. There aren't many laughs from that lot (from, not at, the ludicrousness of it all is quite another matter). ABC at least had a sense of humour. Gold lame suit against Spandau's highland drag. I rest my case.

It was partly Trevor Horn's obsession with opulence, with the album's production shimmering like Fry's suit caught in limelight. And it was partly the hommage they played with their styling to the matinee idol lovers of lyrical long ago. But mostly it was Martin Fry's lyrics, that make his New Romanticism, true Romanticism. Other bands dressed up, wore their art on their sleeves, and packaged their pretension from the dressing up box of cliches past. But ABC matched their style with real substance in their lyrics.

"If you gave me a pound for the moments I've missed,
And I got dancing lessons for the lips I should-a kissed,
I'd be a millionaire, I'd be a Fred Astaire".

Genius. Camp, tongue-in-cheek, and lavishly sentimental, yet still heartfelt. The absurd hyperbole of the extended conceit, and the fact that it only just scans gives it a certain sincerity that implies Mr Fry might just believe his own paper moon-shine. The 80s were obsessed with 'cool', and many pretended to like jazz, some bands even attempted to play it. Nina Simone was idolised, people actually wore berets, beards and stripped shirts without an eyebrow raised. Roxy Music had hymned Bogart. But Bogey is cool, he defined cool. Astaire was not cool. He was bald, and wore tails way beyond their sartorial date stamp. To evoke him in 1982, not so long after everyone had been in either donkey jackets and denim, or bin liners and bondage pants, to swathe your white-funk in sugary symphonic chiffon takes balls (albeit glitter ones). This was pop music evoking the past, its style and its sentiments without pretence to poetry, or taking itself seriously. And that's why I for one, wholly believe in it.

I believe it when Martin Fry sighs when he contemplates the suggestions from friends that, Martin, one day you might find true love. 'I say, '"Maybe, but there must be a solution to / The one thing, the one thing we can't find"'. A search for the one thing we can't find? Arise Lord Fry of Sheffield, gold-suited seeker of the Impossible, and the truest, Newest Romantic of that absurd and really rather dreary decade.