When your world is full of strange arrangements (3/2/14)

Listening to ABC's Lexicon of Love, sorting out the dishes, contemplating a bit more breakfast and considering the inherent problems encountered in time travel.

I said quite repeatedly that I wasn't going to run out of things to do, wasn't going to/couldn't possibly get bored and I've every intention of sticking to that ideal.

There were a couple of minutes this morning though. A couple of minutes where I lay awake thinking of things that I should have completed before finishing work, thinking of the fact that there is a world that carries on without me in the same manner that it always has with very little difference for the fact that I'm no longer there.

As mindsets go this was quite a depressing one, fairly emotional and a first step to debilitating. There was an easy solution. I dropped Matty at school, came home, went to bed and slept the damn thing off. Woke up, composed a brief work related e-mail to my old boss and reoriented myself.

I had two ideas (three if you count the one about starting to clear out the loft so that I can clear out the under stair cupboard so that I  can move my very bloody expensive guitars out of the coldest room in the world);

I would start writing my way through my entire record/CD/iPod contents collection in alphabetical order reviewing the work itself and the associated memories.

I would write the greatest time travel story ever. In the space of four pages as a submission for 2000AD (I've always wanted to be published there). And yes, I am aware that Herbert George Wells may have claim to this one at the moment but he didn't do it as a comic so it doesn't count.

Anyway. The Lexicon of Love. Possibly the most demonstratively 'eighties' album in the world but one that somehow singularly fails to date. One would imagine that the very 'of the moment' production work of ex Buggle and (at that moment) Dollar producer would root the album firmly in 1982 but it achieves the direct opposite.

You know ABC, you know The Look of Love, you know the gold lame suit, you believe in all this as artificial pop when it's actually the most honest pop music that you could imagine. I have many friends whose tastes lean toward the 'indie', toward the jangling guitar, the My Bloody Valentine wall of noise, friends that you would expect to frown on ABC and their ilk. They love this album. And the reason  that  they love this? It's a record for classicists by classicists, everything on it is a nod to greatness, it's the string swells of Bacharach and David, the big ballads of the sixties, the heartbeat of Motown and a nice dash of funk. It's people who understand timeless pop making timeless pop. ABC were never this good again (very few pop acts were), they needed Trevor Horn to dress their material in splendour, to give it form (listen to the demos and remixes on any of the CD versions, they have dated appallingly) but Horn was only ever as good as the artists that he worked with (see also Frankie Goes To Hollywood). Lexicon...is about as perfect as collaboration gets, it's an album that understands broken hearts.

The original version of Tears Are Not Enough though, the funkier version, that's the sound of a sixth form disco in (probably) late 81/early 82. We were in upper sixth, Ste was dancing with a girl from lower sixth called Kirsten. He'd just split up with a girl called Kirsten, the coincidence was too good for him not to try and use it to his benefit. A date was arranged. I was dancing with her mate, a girl called Karen I think. Karen was the sister of a lad who had been a mate of mine in junior school before deciding that bullying me through senior school was much more fun. His name I remember extremely clearly. And I'm not telling you it.

Despite the fact that my crippling shyness meant that I was barely speaking to my dancing partner I somehow became entrenched in a double date. I was a little uncomfortable about seeing the sister of a lad that I no longer had any time for but allowed myself to be convinced. It was a date, these things didn't happen to me.

Arrangements were made for the four of us to meet at the bus stop on the corner where Emmanuel church stood/still stands (meeting at bus stops? Ah youth) so Ste and I stood and waited. And stood and waited. And stood. And waited. We gave it about an hour before giving up. The moment was never spoken of again.

And that, I suppose, is all within the Lexicon of Love.