So it's almost time for me to cash in on an old half-joke of mine: for my 60th birthday I want a horn section, for my 70th a string section. (Never got further in the time line than that, but perhaps for my 80th, a single bugler playing "Taps"?) That's not to say even young me didn't get suckered in by the strength of strings, for there's this, ABC's debut album Lexicon of Love, which, in 1982, when I was all of 19, delineated how perfectly ridiculous and profound coexist. At that point I'd teen love-and-lost a couple of times, but those heartbreaks are the most stinging because you can't imagine anyone has ever felt as raw as you have, as even you haven't yet. And strings, dammit, they make that hurt so gorgeous.
How lovely is it, then, for much much older me to find this 2017 live version of the band, with a Martin Fry five years older than me (that's all?), still tuxedo-clad and immeasurably sad, leading the band in front of a whole orchestra. As the swell builds, there are so many versions of me to cry for. I'm sort of pleased this particular video never zooms in for a close up--it might be too much. Or even more, the too much is the wide shot, the panorama, the whole world winging its strings for you. (And who wouldn't want that?)
Speaking of want, I never got to see ABC live myself. Despite having not only tickets, but the opportunity to interview Fry himself as a novice radio DJ before a show in DC in 1982, it didn't happen. Fry was sick, it was the last gig of the US tour, the show was cancelled. And my love was unrequited. How perfect is that? If that's the trash aesthetic I suggest that we forget it....
Which, of course, gets me to the fourth to last C-90! Go! radio show on KCSB in March of 2021. I'm an old fuck now. I'm more deeply in love than I ever could have imagined at 19 (well, let's sure as hell hope so, no?). But I feel all the ages of my aches when the simple, stupid, lovely, so much of everything songs on a mixtape like 1990s' "Only the Lorn-ly" play. And especially when the strings come in.
You can listen to the show on Spinitron for two weeks from the post.
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