ABC‘s sophisticated pop masterpiece The Lexicon of Love is still beguiling ears and sending dance floors a flutter to this day. One of the finest examples of 80s pop, ‘The Look of Love’ is a superlative stone cold classic. Martin Fry’s superb bittersweet vocal performance (complete with witty call and responses) is laced in his arch style, wanton soulful heartbreak and in the final portion heady release while the accompanying lushly assembled instrumentals are effortlessly elegant funky basslines, pianos, insistent beat and playful horns.
Trevor Horn‘s masterful and luxurious wide-screen production adds the extra ingredients to this heady concoction of masterfully clever pop music that elegantly tip toes across the lines marked new romanticism, synth-pop, soul and disco, consisting of four parts in all, it’s representative of The Lexicon of Love‘s oeuvre a knowing brand of starry-eyed Motown-infused, glitterball pop: that painted pictures of entire cinematic tear stained narratives, it was such a successful formula that it had David Bowie wanting to hang out with the Sheffield group in the early 1980s presumably to crib just what their secrets were. And here’s the final reason why this is a classic, when some people criticise 80s records for sounding ‘dated’ at times, ‘The Look of Love’ still sounds utterly timeless.
