ABC will perform their classic album, The Lexicon Of Love, in full at a special concert in London later this month.
The show will see the Sheffield band team up with the Southbank Sinfonia for the performance, which will be conducted by Anne Dudley.
According to a poster for the gig, it will be filmed by Sky Arts, suggesting a broadcast version of the event at a later date. ABC will host the performance at The London Palladium on November 22. Tickets are available to purchase from the band’s official website.
Released in 1982, The Lexicon Of Love was ABC’s debut record and scored them their first No.1 album in the UK, with the album later going platinum. It featured the singles “Poison Arrow” and the massive hit “The Look Of Love” and was produced by renowned producer Trevor Horn.
The album borrowed the rich orchestration of the Norrie Paramor records of great British 60s pop and spun it through Horn’s crisp production cycle to create something effortlessly modern but somehow classical as well. On “Poison Arrow,” Horn fashioned the band’s tinny MOR sound into something that leaped powerfully from transistors belting out Radio 1’s daytime AM broadcasts, while “Mirror Mirror (Mon Amour)” and “Hand Held In Black And White” sounded like perfect modern pop, with frontman Martin Fry later billing the work as “widescreen.”
In 2016, Fry followed up The Lexicon Of Love with The Lexicon Of Love II, the band’s ninth studio album. On it, he reunited with Oscar-winning composer-arranger Anne Dudley, who provided the orchestral arrangements just as she did for the first album. Dudley also co-wrote “The Love Inside The Love” and “Brighter Than The Sun” with Fry.
“We performed a show at the Albert Hall a couple of years ago to mark the 30th anniversary of The Lexicon of Love,” Fry said at the time. “It struck me there and then that it was time to make a sequel. To explore those themes once again and to look at love through the eyes of a man in later life. Now the years have passed, my perspective on life and love has changed. I wanted to make an album that reflected that.”