Album · ABC
The Lexicon of Love by ABC
The Lexicon of Love is an album by ABC, released in 1982. 3 songs from it have charted on rock radio countdowns, with 23 countdown appearances in total. The biggest is “Poison Arrow”, on 19 lists with a best position of #63.
The Lexicon of Love was ABC's 1982 debut, the grand opening statement of a Sheffield group that had grown out of the electronic outfit Vice Versa and thrown itself headlong into the new pop. Trevor Horn produced, and the record is pure ambition: synth-pop cut with disco strut and rock muscle, lush and glossy, with Martin Fry crooning like a jilted matinee idol over the guitars and keyboards of Mark White, the saxophone of Stephen Singleton and David Palmer's drums.
It plays like a string of lovelorn melodramas, every one of them built as a single, and four of them, "Tears Are Not Enough", "Poison Arrow", "The Look of Love" and "All of My Heart", went top 20 in Britain. The album went straight in at number one on the UK chart, topped the lists in New Zealand and Finland too, and Fry thought enough of it to make a sequel, The Lexicon of Love II, in 2016.
Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.
Songs from The Lexicon of Love on radio countdowns
| # | Song | Strength | Lists | Best | #1s | Years |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Poison Arrow | 19 | #63 | – | 1988–2023 | |
| 2 | All of My Heart | 3 | #755 | – | 1999–2003 | |
| 3 | Tears are Not Enough | 1 | #1827 | – | 2003 |
Only songs that appear on at least one countdown are listed. Release data from MusicBrainz.