ABC - Beauty Stab/How To Be A… Zillionaire!/Alphabet City/Up (Universal)

We all know that The Lexicon Of Love was pop perfection. Why else would it have been reissued and remastered so many times in the last few years? But it’s the flawed masterpieces – where beauty meets brutality – that make ABC excel. Like 1983’s Beauty Stab - which replaced strings with guitars and romance with political angst - a masterpiece black and white documentary of Sheffield life. Stark contrast to Lexicon’s Technicolor fantasy.

In hindsight its songs stand up better than ever, the remastering is strong and it’s only the sleeve notes - and several barrel-scraping bonus tracks - that stop this reissue getting a full five stars. 1985’s How To Be A Zillionaire, though, has everything. A proper set of bonus tracks – there were just so many studio experiments in this period. Ocean Blue’s hitherto unavailable Single Mix is amazing, despite remaining bizarrely absent from Martin Fry’s on-going live work.

Alphabet City - Martin Fry and Mark White’s 1987 attempt to remake Lexicon - showed increasing prowess as producers. In fact if the ABC catalogue is to be truly marketed, the next reissue needs to be a compilation of their work as a production unit, for the likes of Paul Rutherford and Lizzie Tear.

By 1989’s Up, Keith Breeden’s glorious sleeve art was being downplayed and ABC would have shuffled into banality were it not for Fry and White’s spirit of adventure –which pulled them into rave culture, fusing Strings of Life with UK pop. Like all the others in this set, the bonus tracks seem to have been bolted on in a completely random order. So you might need some finger work to on your CD player’s programme function to get the most out of them.