ABC – How To Be A Zillionaire | 1985 – 4

After striking out on a massive commercial level with their second album, “Beauty Stab” as well as losing a third of the remaining band when saxophonist Stephen Singleton departed the group, remaining members Martin Fry and Mark White spun yet another radical change of image and sound for their third album. I vividly remember spotting the UK 12″ for “How To Be A Zillionaire” on its late 1984 release. The 12″ art presented Fry and White as cartoon characters riding a very long car on the cover with two additional members in tow. It screamed: a) “this is a radically different ABC on this record” so loudly that I didn’t bite at the time. I had that same b) “this could be great” or c) “this could be awful”ambiguous feeling that I’d previously had while staring at the B-52s debut album cover long months before I ever heard its contents. I waited until a second single appeared. As it turned out, a and b were what the band was offering this time.

“Be Near Me” next hit the shops in a spiffy 2×7″ import variant with a bonus disc in a PVC wallet featuring the US 12″ mixes of “Poison Arrow” and “The Look Of Love” so I bit. I figured that even if the new stuff was lame, at least I’d be getting some vintage material I didn’t have at the time of known quality. Mea culpa! When the needle hit “Be Near Me” it was clear that ABC were revisiting their strengths, albeit through a funhouse mirror lens. The track was a sweet love song with an ecstatic melody; the first really happy song ABC had released, at that point. And it was more than just happy. It had a cartoon giddiness that was downright infectious. The sounds were a revisit of the lush neo-Motown dance pop tropes of “Lexicon” as executed with completely digital technology. This was a Fairlight construction abetted with brash beatbox that made no attempt to sound “natural.”

The B-side, “From A To Z” was an outrageous, near instrumental, digital cartoon of a track with each band member having a brief step to the mic to say a line or two. It was way over the top in both sound and content. Some people I knew actually preferred the B-side, which ended up on several mix tapes of the time. I wasted no time in also getting the Uk 12″ of this single and eagerly awaited the album itself as I snatched up the previous “Zillionaire” 12″ single. It was a scathing attack on Thatcherism that took the vaguish dissatisfaction and unrest of the “Beauty Stab” songs and focused the lyrical vitriol like a laser. The song came right out and attacked the hyper-materialism of the times that were spreading like a plague. And it did so not without a generous slathering of wit and arch cynicism previously directed only at ex-girlfriends!

The sound of the record is almost like a Roy Thomas Baker production; Fry and White produced this album themselves and like Baker, they eschewed midrange frequencies much of the time. This is an album with a lot of booming bottom end and some shrieking highs with midrange sounds largely relegated to the vocals. Mark White arranged the whole thing brilliantly as he played Emulators and Fairlights throughout the album. Don Snow of Squeeze played piano and synths with Gary Moberly guesting on Fairlight as well. The killer ingredient to this concoction was securing Keith LeBlanc on beatbox and drums. The Sugar Hill house band/Tackhead genius made certain that this album was utterly in your face, rhythmically. He was more than matched by the cattiest and most scathing lyrics of Martin Fry’s career.

The album opened with “Fear Of The World” as booming “drums” that sounded more like explosions heralded a troubling world where “There’s so much panic in this world, but we are living in the best of all possible worlds.” Suuuuure we are. The anxiety and malaise of “Beauty Stab” had now ratcheted up to levels of abject paranoia. And why not? The bastard sons of Friedman were busy dismantling UK society at an alarming rate. Whole swaths of British society were being privatized or dismantled outright. The world seemed to be in the hands of looters and pillagers who were telling us you can’t trust the government even as they were scrambling to tightly control all of its reins to better bleed the country dry.

The tone of most of the songs are bitterly sarcastic or at the least, catty as all get out. “Vanity Kills” was the third single and a cutting riposte that managed to best Carly Simon on the same topic. White’s arrangements featured a great live brass section that contrasted nicely with the busy beatbox programming. To show that they still had a great quote left in them, the “vain, vain, vain, vain” refrain was a clever Bowie lift from “Fame.”

The cutting sarcasm peaks with the side one closer, “15 Storey Halo;” an unbelievably acerbic song that sounds for all the world like a track by Yello to my ears. Sampled brass this time, vies with Krupa-esque beatbox rhythms marking this as the band’s own “Lust For Life”as Martin lets loose with his most caustic lyrics ever. On side two, the mood is furthered by the astringent “Tower Of London,” while ratcheting back the vitriol for the merely satirical look at fashion, “So Hip It Hurts.”

The album has two nods toward gentility with the sumptuous ballads “Ocean Blue” and “Between You And Me.” which forgo the cartoon hip-hop electro of much of this album for what might be called a “classic” ABC sound. “Ocean Blue,” in particular, was the [unsuccessful] fourth single from the album that is nonetheless a breathtaking confection of inventive, sweeping arrangements and sweet sentiments that are a hallmark of this group for the first time. If the entire program were as cutting as much of the material here, it might have become overbearing instead of skirting the edge as it does, thanks to tracks like this.

Strangely enough this album, this album flopped in the UK where apparently ABC’s former audience was still holding out for “The Lexicon Of Love Revisited.” According to reader Jeremy Kennedy’s interview with Martin Fry here, ABC’s UK label also hated the record. In a gratifying turn of events, this became ABC’s best selling album in America, where the magnificent “Be Near Me” went top ten and even the bracing “How To Be A Millionaire” with its great cartoon video managed a respectable showing at number 20.

Quite frankly, when I grab an ABC album off of the tottering racks in my Record Cell, more often than not, it’s this one. The catty and vicious tone is like a balm to my ears and the hyperactive arrangements and production never cease to amuse me. Dated? Sure, the Fairlight/Emulator sound is as dated as all hell. But I never let that stop me from enjoying an album! Each note of this album provides me with reams of entertainment and satisfaction. Some of it humorous and some of it quite politically pointed; with all of it [apart from the two ballads and “Be Near Me”] packed with Martin Fry’s wit at its most trenchant. This album managed to polish and focus the mood of the preceding record into a more sweeping and coherent artistic statement while fashioning an album that was sonic worlds away from both “Lexicon of Love” and “Beauty Stab.” I have to love such an audacious undertaking, particularly when it positively drips with the sound of success to these ears. Your mileage may vary.

Next: ABC go back… to the future