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    Howard Jones and ABC’s Martin Fry embrace a new generation of fans since ’80s heyday
    • February 6, 2025

    Howard Jones and Martin Fry of ABC first found stardom in the early ’80s as the United Kingdom’s new wave and synthpop scenes overtook the United States like a second British Invasion.

    Like many of their peers, their careers shot to the top of the charts only to experience lulls when their music fell from favor.

    But now, they’ve come back into fashion with multi-generational audiences at festivals, such as Cruel World in Pasadena, which ABC played in 2023 and their own coheadlining tour that brings Jones and Fry to the House of Blues in Anaheim on Friday, Feb. 8.

    There, you’ll see not only fans who’ve still got their original vinyl and tour T-shirts, but younger fans, too, many of whom weren’t born until years after ’80s hits such as Jones’ “What Is Love?” and “Things Can Only Get Better” or ABC’s “Poison Arrow” and “The Look of Love.”

    • Martin Fry and ABC will coheadline the House of Blues...

      Martin Fry and ABC will coheadline the House of Blues in Anaheim with Howard Jones on Friday, Feb. 7, 2025. (Photo by Sam Neill)

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    Martin Fry and ABC will coheadline the House of Blues in Anaheim with Howard Jones on Friday, Feb. 7, 2025. (Photo by Sam Neill)

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    “I always celebrate silently when I see a young person in the audience or groups of young people,” Jones says recently on video call from his home in Somerset, England. “Gen Z, particularly, we’re starting to get them coming now, and that’s just really, really exciting.

    “It feels to me like, ‘Oh yeah, well for them, they’re hearing this music for the first time,’” he says. “It’s brand new. It’s like, Wow, how exciting is that? It’s so great.”

    Fry, who played to a large crowd at the Cruel World Festival in Pasadena in 2023, said he’s noticed the same trend.

    “There’s a new generation of younger people coming through in their 30s and 20s who have researched the whole ’80s era,” Fry says from a vacation home in Barbados. “Synth freaks, people that love the fashion, the clothes, the MTV visuals, the sounds.

    “The audacity and blatant entertainment of the 1980s comes through,” he says. “It was a very experimental period in music, and visually, and in the clubs. So it is wonderful to be an elder statesmen of pop now along with Simon Le Bon, Bernard from New Order, and Robert Smith.

    “It feels good to be in that exalted company and, joking aside, it feels great to be out on the road playing shows where the audience is into what you’re doing.”

    In separate interviews edited for length and clarity and presented here together, Jones and Fry talked about their early days in music, what it felt like when their debut albums became hits, their mutual love for Motown stars such as Smokey Robinson and Stevie Wonder, and more.

    Q: Tell me what it’s like touring today whether in theaters and clubs or some of the larger festivals out there.

    Howard Jones: It is a wonderful thing to be able to do, to be honest. I feel very honored and privileged to be 40 years later able to go and people want to come and see me and hear the songs and be part of their lives. Those songs have become part of the culture and we have a bond together.

    It’s one of those rare occasions now in our society where people can come together and focus on one thing. Sing together and celebrate together with the music they may have grown up with or have discovered since.

    Martin Fry: The great thing about festivals like Cruel World and many of the other festivals we play in Europe is you’re playing sometimes to 10,000 or 20,000 people. There’s a lot of floating voters out there you have to persuade. You have to win some of the crowd over. Your fans are there but also there are many people who are checking you out for the first time.

    When we played in recent years, I realized there were people who maybe got married to ABC’s ‘The Look of Love.’ Divorced to ‘Be Near Me.’ Remarried when we did ‘When Smokey Sings.’ You’re the soundtrack to their lives, you know. There are tears and laughter when you play, you know the songs mean so much to the audience.

    When I got to Cruel World, I fully understood the audience and it felt great to play with that crowd. There’s a whole new generation of people getting interested in the early new wave. For me, to be hanging with the Human League and Echo and the Bunnymen – Squeeze were there and the Gang of Four guys who I’ve known for years – it was a really fascinating festival to play.

    Q: You had success with your debut albums – ABC’s ‘The Lexicon of Love’ in 1982, Jones’ ‘Human’s Lib’ two years later. Tell me what had happened before that moment.

    MF: We were really quite ambitious. We had a band called Vice Versa in Sheffield. The Cabaret Voltaire and the early Human League, all these bands in Sheffield were really experimental in the late ’70s, early ’80s. Vice Versa was kind of like a proto-Depeche Mode, sort of a Soft Cell band. We played Leeds Futurama Festival and I think we were about 89th on the bill, and I think Depeche Mode were 90th. We were just starting out.

    We recorded analog [after changing the name to ABC] but a lot of what we were doing was digital, with the early sampling machines, Fairlights and stuff. So the sound of the record, ‘The Lexicon of Love,’ sounds quite sort of contemporary in a funny kind of way. It doesn’t sound like it’s 40 years old. And it’s served me well all these years to be able to get on stage and sing ‘Poison Arrow,’ ‘The Look of Love’ and ‘Tears Are Not Enough,’ songs from that record.

    HJ: I went out to play as an electronic one-man band with equipment that you could buy in your local music store. I didn’t have fancy computers or bespoke machinery or anything like that. I had drum machines, a few synths, you know, whatever I could afford. I think I was the first person to do that. It was a great sense of pioneering something new.

    So three or four nights a week, I was out there in pubs and clubs experimenting with this idea, and working out the songs, and then coming back home and fixing things and improving things, then going out again. I realize now it was a great way to do it. It was the ultimate sort of proving that the music was going to work and that people were going to like it.

    Q: I would have been anxious, I think, trying something that complicated and new.

    HJ: It was terrifying. [Laughs] It was absolutely terrifying. I mean, what was I thinking of? Because when you’ve got a band, you’ve got people to turn to for moral support on the stage, but when you’re doing it on your own, you carry it all. The good side of that is that it developed my stage personality, in terms of I had to talk to the audience. I had to engage them, because I had to do a lot of tweaking with the instruments and programming.

    Q: But you weren’t entirely alone. You often had a mime, Jed Hoile, performing too.

    HJ: It was more like performance art, really, we were doing. I really wanted to do something original, and so Jed used to come to the shows. He used to dance in the audience, and I thought this guy is amazing, he really should be up on the stage with me. So we worked together to create all these different characters he would engage with during the show. And we had TV screens running VHS tapes. We had all kinds of costumes that he was in. I would sometimes have costumes, too.

    Q: I remember seeing that on MTV, and of course ABC had great videos then, too.

    HJ: It was very visual (with Hoile), and it’s funny, it’s interesting because this is just at the time when MTV was exploding, and yet we were well down the line of working visually as well. It wasn’t just about the music, it was what it looked like, and what it looked like when you went to a show. We were very comfortable with that.

    MF: The power of MTV meant that the videos we made were shown all across America. With the videos, we were very ambitious. We wanted to kind of do The World of ABC. You know, there’s Lisa Vanderpump [in the ‘Poison Arrow’ and ‘Mantrap’ videos], who went on to become a big star in America. There’s Julien Temple directing ABC videos. We wanted a lot of humor in our videos and they were plainly bonkers, you know, but highly entertaining, just like all the other videos on MTV in that period of time.

    They weren’t big budget. It was definitely sort of everybody was wrapped up in the creative spirit and pushed it to the limit. Your friends would make the suits for you. The lighting guy would be somebody’s cousin. It was guerrilla filmmaking, definitely, of the finest order. It wasn’t Hollywood by any stretch.

    Q: ABC’s first American tour came before all those videos were all out. What was it like to still be mostly unknowns?

    MF: I arrived in Phoenix on a wet Tuesday afternoon, and in my sparkling tuxedo in late ’82, I guess it would be, with the violinists and our new pop vision, I got on stage, and looked out. Like ‘The Blues Brothers,’ it had chicken wire across the front of the stage at the venue for the protection not of the audience – of the artists.

    People were like, ‘What the (bleep) is this? Like, ‘Who’s this guy in his sparkling tuxedo?’ And I realized, ‘Yeah, America is very different in musical taste. There was that whole chasm between the guys in the ’70s in leather trousers and the long hair, and all the young bands that wanted to sort of change the whole pop landscape like Duran Duran and ABC and Depeche Mode, the Cure, who are all thankfully still going strong. So we were definitely there in those pioneering days getting stuff thrown at us, but gradually, the power of MTV changed things.

    Q: By the mid-’90s, things had tailed off for you and your careers. What was it like to hit a lull for some years?

    HJ: I think this happens to every single artist, big and small. There will be a time when you are absolutely in the spotlight. Everyone wants to know you, it’s like you’re the thing. But that will go. It may come back later, but it will go. And it is a pretty tough thing to deal with for anybody. You suddenly think, ‘Well, what am I going to do now?’

    I’d had a great decade during the ’80s. I had hits. Ten hits in America, 13 hits in the U.K., hits all around the world. And course, that will stop. When the record company didn’t want to renew my contract after five albums and selling like millions and millions of records, it was a shock. I thought, ‘What? They must be crazy!’

    But then another door opens, which was the internet came along. I was able to become an independent artist and sort of write my own script. It was a brilliant opportunity to carve out a new way of doing things.

    MF: You know, in the late ’90s, I started playing shows and you kind of reached a point where people are going, ‘What are you still doing here?” You know what I mean? Like, ‘You had your hits back in the day, man; what’re you still doing here?’ But then people’s perception of ABC and my contemporaries definitely changed, and people realized there was still some excitement there.

    Q: Howard, you played the Grammys with your hero Stevie Wonder, as well as Herbie Hancock and Thomas Dolby. Martin, your song ‘When Smokey Sings’ let to you meeting Smokey Robinson. Tell me about the excitement of those moments.

    HJ: Obviously, I love Stevie Wonder and grew up with his music. But when you’re young you have a bit of youthful arrogance, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to step on that stage with those people. I think both me and Tom Dolby, we had our look, we had our music, we had our, you know, swagger. And that’s what you have to have if you’re going to be on the stage.

    So it was a whirlwind. I was just enjoying every minute of it. I got to do something that people would only dream of, which was hang out in Stevie Wonder’s studio and jam with him for an afternoon. It was great.

    MF: [‘When Smokey Sings’] came from a really tough period where I was 27 and got diagnosed with cancer. We were going to tour with Tina Turner and then everything stopped. I’d go home at night after hospital treatments and pick out box of 7-inch vinyl and just listen to my favorite tunes. So ‘When Smokey Sings’ is about some of those dark moments but being uplifted by hearing those songs.

    We met Smokey Robinson at a TV show and handed him the record. It was great. Said, ‘Here we are, Mr. Robinson; this is about you.’ A couple of months later, Mark White [of ABC] and myself met Smokey Robinson in L.A. and he took us around to the Motown building and gave us this handwritten letter, saying how much he was moved and touched that we’d written the song about him and his contemporaries.

    A lot of good things came out of that song from bad things.

    ​ Orange County Register 

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