"We wanted to sound like Sinatra with a fairlight"

As the UK synthpop scene gathered momentum at the turn of the 80s, a bunch of ambitious modernists from South Yorkshire were thinking bigger. ABC, in a very different yet not entirely unrelated post-punk way to The Human League, Soft Cell, Haircut One Hundred et al, would create a vision of shiny, post-modern pop that endures on their finest recorded hour: The Lexicon Of Love. Leader Martin Fry remembers how, for a short, surreal period, it all went so gloriously right. Alphabet superstar:

- By David Stubbs

Before ABC there was Vice Versa, a Sheffield-based electronic group arising from the same scene that produced avant-futurists such as Cabaret Voltaire, Clock DVA and The Human League. However, when Martin Fry turned up to interview the group, they asked him to join them, albeit initially not as a vocalist. By 1980 they had transmogrified into ABC and in 1981 had their first hit with Tears Are Not Enough, white funk with a kinship to the likes of Haircut One Hundred.

However, there was a sense that ABC had something else about them. This was fully realised in their debut album, the Trevor Horn-produced The Lexicon Of Love. Melding the grandeur of a more gracious cinematic age with contemporary funk rhythms, it was one of the pop pinnacles of 1982 alongside The Associates’ Sulk, Simple Minds’ New Gold Dream and Scritti Politti's Songs To Remember, seeming to imply transformative new vistas to come, the epic radicalisation of UK pop music.

The dream did not quite come to pass and, by 1983, a new “new pop” had arrived in the form of Nik Kershaw and Howard Jones, who replaced a post-punk pedigree with mere peroxide. Meanwhile, The Smiths heralded a new era in which post-punk’s relationship with funk was broken, with Morrissey expressing open hostility towards black music.

ABC did thrive commercially in the rest of the 80s, including success in America and even the brief possibility of working with Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, even if there was the sense that the definitive achievement of Lexicon… cast a shadow over them. They went through various changes: the antiLexicon feel of