For the most recent retrospective anniversary reappraisal, it’s Martin Grey vs Martin Fry! A glance again at – and an in depth re-examination of – ABC’s second album Magnificence Stab, which was launched in late 1983 and divided followers and critics alike with its decidedly stripped down, unadorned and extra aggressive rock sound and extra politically conscious lyrics.

The Tough Second Album Syndrome?

Point out The Lexicon Of Like to most individuals of a sure age and they’ll readily nod their heads in acknowledgement and title the band who recorded it. The truth is such was the affect of that debut album from Sheffield’s purveyors of nice product (in response to the strapline of their very own label imprint Neutron Data!) that it turned a model in itself – one which, even in spite of everything this time, has by no means diminished one bit as considered one of the nice pop masterpieces of the Eighties.

Now, ask the identical folks to call ABC’s second album which adopted barely 18 months later, and you can be greeted with a couple of quizzical nonplussed appears, which is hardly stunning, given by that time the album in query – Magnificence Stab – had barely made something like the identical affect of its illustrious predecessor.

This was not helped by lukewarm evaluations from music critics both, nor by its comparatively disappointing chart efficiency – getting into the UK album prime 20 at quantity 12 earlier than dropping swiftly like a stone to quantity 33 the next week (a shock again in these days when chart longevity was a given with many bands of ABC’s stature and recognition). Every week later it was floundering even additional down within the recesses within the mid-40s to 50s placings!

It was a far cry from Lexicon’s sterling run within the listings which noticed it debut *at* primary within the LP charts in early summer season and stay within the charts for simply two weeks shy of a full 12 months. (The truth is, not many know this however Lexicon shared a fairly distinctive distinction of being the ONLY UK primary album ever that shared pole place with one other – The Youngsters From Fame – which extremely chalked up similar gross sales figures that week which means, for all its absurdity, BOTH ABC and TKFF have been simultaneous number one albums. It is a outstanding feat which has by no means recurred to this present day!)

For Magnificence Stab nevertheless, it was deemed the album that price ABC their beforehand commanding place in many individuals’s hearts, in addition to their business momentum. Such was its vital reception that the band swiftly ceased to be the common prime 10 presence that they have been due to the earlier album and its large hit singles.

Even the album’s sleeve artwork was indicative in additional methods than one at what to anticipate: the depiction of a matador engaged on the level of battle, coupled with the garish and decidedly much less refined typography (observe the one occasion of the band title accompanied by only a single star as an alternative of the customary three that has featured on virtually each different album).

That Was Then……

The album was trailed by the primary single – and album opener – That Was Then However This Is Now, which appeared a couple of weeks beforehand. Not like their previous couple of singles, this one gatecrashed one’s unsuspecting senses a bit just like the bull on the duvet after the preliminary cascade of descending piano that opens the track.

Exhausting hitting drums and guitars have been the order of the day, as an alternative of lush symphonic strings and twinkling synths. Mixed with Martin Fry’s extra withering opening strains (‘Why make your previous your sacred cow? /I assume you’ve modified, you’ve modified and the way…!’) which might virtually be self-referential given the band’s startling change of route right here, this was the sound of a band who have been reluctant to easily play issues protected.

Sure, it was a whole shock to the system for a lot of, and it wasn’t helped when within the second stanza Fry comes out with considered one of his signature non-sequitur rhyming couplets: ‘Can’t complain, mustn’t grumble / Assist your self to a different piece of apple crumble’, which for sheer clod-hopping clumsiness surpasses a earlier gem that happens inside the in any other case impeccable The Look Of Love (‘When you choose a guide by the duvet / then you definitely choose the look by the lover’).

That apart, there had additionally been personnel modifications within the band : drummer David Palmer had stop after Lexicon’s mammoth world tour and earlier than this second album’s classes began, and ABC have been right down to a trio of Fry, Mark White and Steve Singleton. For Magnificence Stab they have been augmented by a rhythm part from the final recording/touring line up of Roxy Music: Alan Spenner on bass and Andy Newmark on drums.

This single too didn’t do in addition to the earlier three mega hits – stalling at quantity 17 and dropping out quickly afterwards. ABC’s glory second, it appeared, had handed.

Lukewarm vital reception

The music press have been virtually unanimous in expressing their bafflement and even displeasure on the full volte face in ABC’s sound for this sophomore launch. File Mirror’s Jim Reid (not the Mary Chain member by the best way), memorably, signed off his evaluation by lamenting that – while paraphrasing the only’s title – ‘That was then…however that is 1972 revisited.’

To be truthful, he had a degree, as a result of different critics had additionally seen that the band had deployed this distinctly outdated retrograde guitar sound that basically did hark again to the rock behemoths of the early Seventies like Nazareth, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin et al.

One other reviewer elsewhere hit the nail proper on the pinnacle too when describing Chunk The Hand (aspect two, monitor three) on the album as making out precisely like ‘an unholy collision between Isaac Hayes and Deep Purple’. And it does! The creeping bass and eerie strings that adorn the track because it tentatively builds up pressure earlier than the entire thing erupts right into a stampede of livid metallic guitars and floor-shaking drums is backbone tingling to say the least. I really assume the monitor is superb – considered one of many ‘WTF?’ moments on this album that make it so astonishing and thrillingly pleasurable to this present day.

Magnificence Stab: from art-rock to heavy rock and varied factors in between

Of the dozen tracks that make up Magnificence Stab, solely 4 are gradual downtempo numbers that hark again – partly – to the ABC of yore: the remaining being quite a lot of pile-driving guitar-dominated tracks and extra intriguing and genre-melding art-rock numbers shot by with dollops of wholesome cynicism all through, although there are nonetheless nonetheless moments of subtlety and finesse among the many clamour and tumult that dominates the album.

Love’s A Harmful Language – aspect one, monitor two – is one such instance. From the surprising and disquieting flurry of electrical guitar which opens it, there are dynamic shifts right here between the strident Roxy Music-esque art-rock (circa Manifesto / Flesh And Blood) which kind the majority of the track earlier than it then abruptly, with out warning, offers strategy to a bridge performed in waltz time, with Fry intoning his strains in a hushed deadpan voice, earlier than the track bursts again into life.

This occurs twice and after the second time it’s adopted with atonal rock guitar squawks which distinctly recall Robert Fripp’s axework on Bowie’s Scary Monsters (assume Trend and the title monitor). The incongruity is sort of startling and I can see how this may confuse the hell out of many followers who thought ABC had effectively and really misplaced their method. It’s among the finest songs on the album.

The tempo drops a bit for monitor three, the fairly beautiful, extra reflective and understated If I Ever Thought You’d Be Lonely, which this time recollects Roxy’s Avalon section (undoubtedly a unconscious nod right here because of Newmark and Spenner being a part of the musical tapestry) – earlier than the eye-opening metallic stomp of subsequent quantity The Energy Of Persuasion ushers in ABC’s most shamelessly retro ‘heavy Seventies rock’ monitor of all of them. That is then swiftly succeeded by the title monitor, a tough hitting instrumental that tears alongside at a relentless tempo however later turned acquainted to many who didn’t even know of the composers because the adopted theme music for the Monterey Rock Competition.

Fry has opted to eschew his earlier ruminations on affairs of the center and soul and, on Magnificence Stab, head straight for the jugular by the use of a extra overtly political / socially-conscious lyrical method – deemed needed due partly to the truth that Thatcher had simply gained a landslide victory for a second time period within the Normal Election a couple of months earlier than. Thus on many of those tracks he has coupled his musings decrying the state of 80’s Britain with extra muscular and confrontational preparations.

Producer Gary Langan (who, together with earlier Lexicon-era collaborators Anne Dudley and Trevor Horn would later comprise The Artwork Of Noise) has performed a pivotal function right here in guaranteeing the general sound of the album is extra direct and fewer embellished, leading to a recording that dispenses utterly with the shiny 80s trickery that quickly turned so commonplace all over the place else to the purpose of cliche. Most of the tracks are rawer, extra visceral, however nonetheless sound really majestic even when cranked up (the quiet/loud dynamics of the sinuous Chunk The Hand being notably arresting).

The stately string association (by famend composer David Bedford) that backs aspect one’s nearer By Default By Design, for instance, is very spectacular if somewhat ominous and foreboding. They lack the heat and lushness of something on Lexicon of Love however that’s in all probability intentional, mirroring this album’s starker sentiments slightly than the unabashed romanticism that underpinned the whole lot on that landmark debut.

Metaphorically talking, ABC are doing their rising up in public and it’s virtually as if this album has sprouted many unpleasant scars and fault strains in deliberate defiance of individuals’s expectations. Every part is mired in a veneer of gritty realism and it isn’t all the time fairly, however that’s what constitutes this album’s major strengths in additional methods than one.

The preliminary pairing of Hey Citizen! and King Cash which open aspect two function an completely genius segue between each which – on the danger of citing them but once more within the area of one other such evaluation – really pre-empts by three years the seamless transition between Summer season’s Cauldron and Grass on XTC’s basic Skylarking album. It’s so imperceptible that it appears like a continuation of the identical monitor…..however there the comparability with XTC ends.

The nagging guitar determine which surfaces at common intervals on Hey Citizen! is filled with rancour and menace, however then proper on the dying it drops straight into the languid, virtually Nile Rodgers-esque, arpeggios that open King Cash (there you’ve it – the Stylish obsession lastly reappears on this, probably the most unconventional ABC album of all of them!), an anti-capitalism tirade of kinds which then ups the ante by cunningly revisiting the mutant funk with which ABC set out their stall with their first single Tears Are Not Sufficient.

Unzip which follows the aforementioned Chunk The Hand is a spikier affair however no much less participating if just for one other of these immortal Fry couplets contained inside: ‘She’s vegetarian besides in terms of intercourse / He’s strictly advert lib besides when he consults the textual content’. Nonetheless, it’s really the least memorable of the rockier tracks on present right here.

After all of the previous turmoil, Magnificence Stab lastly winds down with two guitar- and drum-free slow-burners. S.O.S. was the second single launched and was – sadly – a flop, solely scraping the highest forty at no. 39 earlier than swiftly disappearing. This was a cruelly undeserved destiny for simply one of the attractive ABC singles ever. Comprised solely of piano and a delicate patter of TR-808 with woodwind and synth thrives, coupled with probably the most minimalist set of lyrics up to now, it’s the most tender and tranquil monitor on the album and the best on the ear.

Most notably, its concluding chorus / coda options none apart from Frankie Goes To Hollywood on wordless ‘ba, ba-ba-la-ba…’ refrain backing vocals. It’s thought that they have been roped in to do these because the earlier producer Trevor Horn was engaged on overseeing FGTH’s personal debut album (Welcome To The Pleasure Dome – launched the next 12 months in 1984) on the similar studios – Sarm in London, and the lads simply occurred to be knocking round on the time.

Album nearer United Kingdom is the valedictory tour de drive, carried out as a stripped down grandiose piano ballad with Fry’s slicing lyrics lamenting the ‘busted, rusted, upper-crusted, bankrupted performed and dusted, no-man-to-be-trusted’ state that pricey previous Blighty had descended into. His tone is resigned however nonetheless defiant. Depressingly, forty years on, the emotions expressed inside the phrases are nonetheless as related now as they have been then.

Industrial hari-kiri? Profession suicide? Not a little bit of it!

It must be stated that Magnificence Stab isn’t alone amongst examples of albums  which initially divided or alienated an entire fanbase on their launch. Solely eight months earlier, OMD achieved precisely the identical factor with their extra experimental and fragmented Dazzle Ships album which adopted their business watershed that was 1981’s platinum-selling Structure & Morality.

The parallels between these respective ‘tough’ albums are intriguing to say the least – each Dazzle Ships and Magnificence Stab’s worldwide gross sales have been only a tenth of their respective predecessors. Every additionally spent simply 13 weeks within the UK album charts apiece. Quick ahead a matter of twenty, thirty – and now forty – years on and these two data, on re-evaluation, are actually considered not simply courageous undertakings demonstrating each bands’ willingness to not merely repeat a profitable formulation, but in addition impressively intriguing albums in their very own proper which have clearly stood the check of time.

In ABC’s case, there was in all probability additionally a want to interrupt away from the opulence of what got here earlier than, and as an alternative make a report that extra precisely mirrored the zeitgeist. Out went the artifice and decadence and in got here unadorned starkness (reflecting the fact of life in Britain at the very least). Apart from, whether or not it was intentional or not, ABC definitely pre-empted a couple of of their contemporaries in introducing loud rock guitars to switch the over-reliance on synths and 80’s manufacturing values with this second effort.

Different bands who quickly took the same cue embrace Easy Minds (from the cool European fashionable rock shimmer of 1982’s New Gold Dream to the much less refined stadium bombast of 1984’s Sparkle In The Rain) and The Cult (from the gothy post-punk of 1984’s Dreamtime to the shameless all-out US-oriented cock-rock of 1987’s Electrical).

Even Spandau Ballet, who excelled in being nice however exceptionally bland between 1983 and 1984, later determined so as to add a little bit of six-string fervour and a splash of the de rigueur social conscience for his or her 1986 album By means of The Barricades. The extra cynical amongst us would wager they too chanced a little bit of an earful of Magnificence Stab and determined that ‘yeah, let’s have a little bit of that lets eh, lads?’ and flex a little bit of fret-muscle as soon as once more….

An initially misunderstood album belatedly getting its due

It seems that the passage of time has certainly turn into kinder and extra charitable to Magnificence Stab, for thus lengthy considered the poor relative and even undesirable sibling, as many now think about it pretty much as good as, if not higher than, The Lexicon Of Love, provided that it comes throughout as a hell of much more ‘actual’ in its execution, and extra precisely consultant of the period it was launched in. This clearly makes it, in my eyes, a masterpiece on a par with its predecessor.

These anticipating the band to launch Lexicon Pt.2 have been in fact vastly upset, deflated even. However ABC had no predilection for sentimentality – simply but – as their subsequent album (1985’s How To Be A Zillionaire!) moved even additional away from each the debut and their second into the electro beatbox artificial pop territory – coupled with one more adroit picture shift into Hanna-Barbera type cartoon characters.

It wasn’t till 1987 and their fourth album Alphabet Metropolis that they returned to extra acquainted territory with a refined pop/soul set that married their Lexicon-era string-enhanced smoothness with their post-punk and Stylish (them once more!) influences, and one other 28 years in 2015 earlier than Martin Fry determined that plentiful time had elapsed, and followers had waited lengthy sufficient, for him to resurrect his largest vendor and at last ship a much-anticipated and lengthy overdue sequel to the successful model, titled Lexicon Of Love II.

Martin Fry has later admitted that the band’s preliminary want to provide you with one thing utterly faraway from what folks anticipated resulted in an album that was maybe a drastic change too far in gentle of the way it was ultimately obtained. Displaying admirable lack of hubris, he cited the enormity of the duty in following Lexicon, and never wanting to duplicate it, as the important thing motivation for taking an enormous danger and inventive sidestep by conceiving what would turn into this album’s extra sonically-challenging method.

That stated, Magnificence Stab stays defiantly in a category of its personal. Exhausting hitting, spiky, decidedly opposite, coupled with a devil-may-care angle led to by the burden of the world on its shoulders. Flawed however magnificent. Only a few albums launched in 1983 raised fairly so many eyebrows. It nonetheless sounds splendidly indignant and visceral to this present day – and extra crucially, the passing years haven’t diminished its energy and would possibly one iota.

Postscript:
ABC are additionally touring the UK in February 2024 with an orchestra to carry out the Lexicon Of Love album in [belated] celebration of its fortieth Anniversary in 2022. It will be fascinating to see whether or not if any tracks from Magnificence Stab will likely be given an airing likewise inside this orchestral arrange. 

For all information of upcoming excursions, comply with ABC and Martin Fry on their official web site

Martin Fry/ABC will also be adopted on Fb

All phrases by Martin Grey

Extra evaluations and articles written by Martin Grey might be discovered right here