ABC : Beauty Stab (1983-2023) 40th anniversary review

For the latest retrospective anniversary reappraisal, it’s Martin Gray vs Martin Fry! A look back at – and a detailed re-examination of – ABC’s second album Beauty Stab, which was released in late 1983 and divided fans and critics alike with its decidedly stripped down, unadorned and more aggressive rock sound and more politically aware lyrics.

The Difficult Second Album Syndrome?

Mention The Lexicon Of Love to most people of a certain age and they will readily nod their heads in acknowledgement and name the band who recorded it. In fact such was the impact of that debut album from Sheffield’s purveyors of fine product (according to the strapline of their own label imprint Neutron Records!) that it became a brand in itself – one which, even after all this time, has never diminished one bit as one of the great pop masterpieces of the 1980s.

Now, ask the same people to name ABC’s second album which followed barely 18 months later, and you will be greeted with a few quizzical nonplussed looks, which is hardly surprising, given by that point the album in question – Beauty Stab – had barely made anything like the same impact of its illustrious predecessor.

This was not helped by lukewarm reviews from music critics either, nor by its relatively disappointing chart performance – entering the UK album top 20 at number 12 before dropping swiftly like a stone to number 33 the following week (a shock back in those days when chart longevity was a given with many bands of ABC’s stature and popularity). A week later it was floundering even further down in the recesses in the mid-40s to 50s placings!

It was a far cry from Lexicon’s sterling run in the listings which saw it debut *at* number one in the LP charts in early summer and remain in the charts for just two weeks shy of a full year. (In fact, not many know this but Lexicon shared a quite unique distinction of being the ONLY UK number one album ever that shared pole position with another – The Kids From Fame – which incredibly chalked up identical sales figures that week meaning, for all its absurdity, BOTH ABC and TKFF were simultaneous number 1 albums. This is a remarkable feat which has never recurred to this day!)

For Beauty Stab however, it was deemed the album that cost ABC their previously commanding place in many people’s hearts, as well as their commercial momentum. Such was its critical reception that the band swiftly ceased to be the regular top 10 presence that they were thanks to the previous album and its big hit singles.

Even the album’s sleeve art was indicative in more ways than one at what to expect: the depiction of a matador engaged at the point of conflict, coupled with the garish and decidedly less subtle typography (note the only instance of the band name accompanied by just a single star instead of the customary three that has featured on almost every other album).

That Was Then……

The album was trailed by the first single – and album opener – That Was Then But This Is Now, which appeared a few weeks beforehand. Unlike their previous few singles, this one gatecrashed one’s unsuspecting senses a bit like the bull on the cover after the initial cascade of descending piano that opens the song.

Hard hitting drums and guitars were the order of the day, instead of lush symphonic strings and twinkling synths. Combined with Martin Fry’s more withering opening lines (‘Why make your past your sacred cow? /I guess you’ve changed, you’ve changed and how…!’) which could almost be self-referential given the band’s startling change of direction here, this was the sound of a band who were reluctant to simply play things safe.

Yes, it was a complete shock to the system for many, and it wasn’t helped when in the second stanza Fry comes out with one of his signature non-sequitur rhyming couplets: ‘Can’t complain, mustn’t grumble / Help yourself to another piece of apple crumble’, which for sheer clod-hopping clumsiness surpasses a previous gem that occurs within the otherwise impeccable The Look Of Love (‘If you judge a book by the cover / then you judge the look by the lover’).

That aside, there had also been personnel changes in the band : drummer David Palmer had quit after Lexicon’s mammoth world tour and before this second album’s sessions started, and ABC were down to a trio of Fry, Mark White and Steve Singleton. For Beauty Stab they were augmented by a rhythm section from the last recording/touring line up of Roxy Music: Alan Spenner on bass and Andy Newmark on drums.

This single too did not do as well as the previous three mega hits – stalling at number 17 and dropping out soon afterwards. ABC’s glory moment, it seemed, had passed.

Lukewarm critical reception

The music press were almost unanimous in expressing their bafflement and even displeasure at the complete volte face in ABC’s sound for this sophomore release. Record Mirror’s Jim Reid (not the Mary Chain member by the way), memorably, signed off his review by lamenting that – whilst paraphrasing the single’s title – ‘That was then…but this is 1972 revisited.’

To be fair, he had a point, because other critics had also noticed that the band had deployed this distinctly outdated retrograde guitar sound that really did hark back to the rock behemoths of the early 1970s like Nazareth, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin et al.

Another reviewer elsewhere hit the nail right on the head too when describing Bite The Hand (side two, track three) on the album as making out exactly like ‘an unholy collision between Isaac Hayes and Deep Purple’. And it does! The creeping bass and eerie strings that adorn the song as it tentatively builds up tension before the whole thing erupts into a stampede of furious metal guitars and floor-shaking drums is spine tingling to say the least. I actually think the track is excellent – one of many ‘WTF?’ moments on this album that make it so astonishing and thrillingly enjoyable to this day.

Beauty Stab: from art-rock to heavy rock and various points in between

Of the dozen tracks that make up Beauty Stab, only four are slow downtempo numbers that hark back – in part – to the ABC of yore: the rest being a variety of pile-driving guitar-dominated tracks and more intriguing and genre-melding art-rock numbers shot through with dollops of healthy cynicism throughout, though there are still nevertheless moments of subtlety and finesse among the clamour and tumult that dominates the album.

Love’s A Dangerous Language – side one, track two – is one such example. From the unexpected and disquieting flurry of electric guitar which opens it, there are dynamic shifts here between the strident Roxy Music-esque art-rock (circa Manifesto / Flesh And Blood) which form the bulk of the song before it then abruptly, without warning, gives way to a bridge played in waltz time, with Fry intoning his lines in a hushed deadpan voice, before the song bursts back into life.

This happens twice and after the second time it’s followed with atonal rock guitar squawks which distinctly recall Robert Fripp’s axework on Bowie’s Scary Monsters (think Fashion and the title track). The incongruity is quite startling and I can see how this would confuse the hell out of many fans who thought ABC had well and truly lost their way. It’s one of the best songs on the album.

The tempo drops a bit for track three, the quite lovely, more reflective and understated If I Ever Thought You’d Be Lonely, which this time recalls Roxy’s Avalon phase (definitely a subconscious nod here due to Newmark and Spenner being part of the musical tapestry) – before the eye-opening metal stomp of next number The Power Of Persuasion ushers in ABC’s most shamelessly retro ‘heavy 1970s rock’ track of them all. This is then swiftly succeeded by the title track, a hard hitting instrumental that tears along at a relentless pace but later became familiar to many who didn’t even know of the composers as the adopted theme music for the Monterey Rock Festival.

Fry has opted to eschew his previous ruminations on affairs of the heart and soul and, on Beauty Stab, head straight for the jugular by way of a more overtly political / socially-conscious lyrical approach – deemed necessary due in part to the fact that Thatcher had just won a landslide victory for a second term in the General Election a few months before. Thus on many of these tracks he has coupled his musings decrying the state of 80’s Britain with more muscular and confrontational arrangements.

Producer Gary Langan (who, along with previous Lexicon-era collaborators Anne Dudley and Trevor Horn would later comprise The Art Of Noise) has played a pivotal role here in ensuring the overall sound of the album is more direct and less embellished, resulting in a recording that dispenses completely with the glossy 80s trickery that soon became so commonplace everywhere else to the point of cliche. Many of the tracks are rawer, more visceral, but still sound truly majestic even when cranked up (the quiet/loud dynamics of the sinuous Bite The Hand being particularly arresting).

The stately string arrangement (by renowned composer David Bedford) that backs side one’s closer By Default By Design, for example, is especially impressive if a little ominous and foreboding. They lack the warmth and lushness of anything on Lexicon of Love but that’s probably intentional, mirroring this album’s starker sentiments rather than the unabashed romanticism that underpinned everything on that landmark debut.

Metaphorically speaking, ABC are doing their growing up in public and it is almost as if this album has sprouted many unsightly scars and fault lines in deliberate defiance of people’s expectations. Everything is mired in a veneer of gritty realism and it isn’t always pretty, but that is what constitutes this album’s main strengths in more ways than one.

The initial pairing of Hey Citizen! and King Money which open side two feature an utterly genius segue between both which – at the risk of citing them yet again in the space of another such review – actually pre-empts by three years the seamless transition between Summer’s Cauldron and Grass on XTC’s classic Skylarking album. It’s so imperceptible that it sounds like a continuation of the same track…..but there the comparison with XTC ends.

The nagging guitar figure which surfaces at regular intervals on Hey Citizen! is full of rancour and menace, but then right at the death it drops straight into the languid, almost Nile Rodgers-esque, arpeggios that open King Money (there you have it – the Chic obsession finally reappears on this, the most unconventional ABC album of them all!), an anti-capitalism tirade of sorts 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 Enough.

Unzip which follows the aforementioned Bite The Hand is a spikier affair but no less engaging if only for another of those immortal Fry couplets contained within: ‘She’s vegetarian except when it comes to sex / He’s strictly ad lib except when he consults the text’. However, it’s actually the least memorable of the rockier tracks on show here.

After all the preceding turmoil, Beauty Stab finally winds down with two guitar- and drum-free slow-burners. S.O.S. was the second single released and was – sadly – a flop, only scraping the top forty at no. 39 before swiftly disappearing. This was a cruelly undeserved fate for easily one of the most gorgeous ABC singles ever. Comprised entirely of piano and a gentle patter of TR-808 with woodwind and synth flourishes, coupled with the most minimalist set of lyrics so far, it is the most tender and tranquil track on the album and the easiest on the ear.

Most notably, its concluding refrain / coda features none other than Frankie Goes To Hollywood on wordless ‘ba, ba-ba-la-ba…’ chorus backing vocals. It is thought that they were roped in to do these as the previous producer Trevor Horn was working on overseeing FGTH’s own debut album (Welcome To The Pleasure Dome – released the following year in 1984) at the same studios – Sarm in London, and the lads just happened to be knocking around at the time.

Album closer United Kingdom is the valedictory tour de force, performed as a stripped down grandiose piano ballad with Fry’s cutting lyrics lamenting the ‘busted, rusted, upper-crusted, bankrupted done and dusted, no-man-to-be-trusted’ state that dear old Blighty had descended into. His tone is resigned but nevertheless defiant. Depressingly, forty years on, the sentiments expressed within the words are still as relevant now as they were then.

Commercial hari-kiri? Career suicide? Not a bit of it!

It has to be said that Beauty Stab is not alone among examples of albums  which initially divided or alienated a whole fanbase on their release. Only eight months earlier, OMD achieved exactly the same thing with their more experimental and fragmented Dazzle Ships album which followed their commercial watershed that was 1981’s platinum-selling Architecture & Morality.

The parallels between these respective ‘difficult’ albums are intriguing to say the least – both Dazzle Ships and Beauty Stab’s worldwide sales were just a tenth of their respective predecessors. Each also spent just 13 weeks in the UK album charts apiece. Fast forward a matter of twenty, thirty – and now forty – years on and these two records, on re-evaluation, are now regarded as not just brave undertakings demonstrating both bands’ willingness to not simply repeat a successful formula, but also impressively intriguing albums in their own right which have clearly stood the test of time.

In ABC’s case, there was probably also a desire to break away from the opulence of what came before, and instead make a record that more accurately reflected the zeitgeist. Out went the artifice and decadence and in came unadorned starkness (reflecting the reality of life in Britain at least). Besides, whether it was intentional or not, ABC certainly pre-empted a few of their contemporaries in introducing loud rock guitars to replace the over-reliance on synths and 80’s production values with this second effort.

Other bands who soon took a similar cue include Simple Minds (from the cool European modern rock shimmer of 1982’s New Gold Dream to the less subtle 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 Electric).

Even Spandau Ballet, who excelled in being pleasant but exceptionally bland between 1983 and 1984, later decided to add a bit of six-string fervour and a dash of the de rigueur social conscience for their 1986 album Through The Barricades. The more cynical among us would wager they too chanced a bit of an earful of Beauty Stab and decided that ‘yeah, let’s have a bit of that shall we eh, lads?’ and flex a bit of fret-muscle once again….

An initially misunderstood album belatedly getting its due

It appears that the passage of time has indeed become kinder and more charitable to Beauty Stab, for so long regarded as the poor relative or even unwanted sibling, as many now consider it as good as, if not better than, The Lexicon Of Love, given that it comes across as a hell of a lot more ‘real’ in its execution, and more accurately representative of the era it was released in. This clearly makes it, in my eyes, a masterpiece on a par with its predecessor.

Those expecting the band to release Lexicon Pt.2 were of course hugely disappointed, deflated even. But ABC had no predilection for sentimentality – just yet – as their next album (1985’s How To Be A Zillionaire!) moved even further away from both the debut and their second into the electro beatbox synthetic pop territory – coupled with yet another adroit image shift into Hanna-Barbera style cartoon characters.

It wasn’t until 1987 and their fourth album Alphabet City that they returned to more familiar territory with a polished pop/soul set that married their Lexicon-era string-enhanced smoothness with their post-punk and Chic (them again!) influences, and another 28 years in 2015 before Martin Fry decided that plentiful time had elapsed, and fans had waited long enough, for him to resurrect his biggest seller and finally deliver a much-anticipated and long overdue sequel to the winning brand, titled Lexicon Of Love II.

Martin Fry has later admitted that the band’s initial desire to come up with something completely removed from what people expected resulted in an album that was perhaps a drastic change too far in light of how it was eventually received. Showing admirable lack of hubris, he cited the enormity of the task in following Lexicon, and not wanting to replicate it, as the key motivation for taking a giant risk and creative sidestep by conceiving what would become this album’s more sonically-challenging approach.

That said, Beauty Stab remains defiantly in a class of its own. Hard hitting, spiky, decidedly contrary, coupled with a devil-may-care attitude brought about by the weight of the world on its shoulders. Flawed but magnificent. Very few albums released in 1983 raised quite so many eyebrows. It still sounds splendidly indignant and visceral to this day – and more crucially, the passing years have not diminished its power and might one iota.

Postscript:
ABC are also touring the UK in February 2024 with an orchestra to perform the Lexicon Of Love album in [belated] celebration of its 40th Anniversary in 2022. It would be interesting to see whether if any tracks from Beauty Stab will be given an airing likewise within this orchestral set up. 

For all news of upcoming tours, follow ABC and Martin Fry on their official website

Martin Fry/ABC can also be followed on Facebook

All words by Martin Gray

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