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Howard Jones and ABC’s Martin Fry embrace a new generation of fans since ’80s heyday
Howard Jones and Martin Fry of ABC first found stardom in the early ’80s as the United Kingdom’s new wave and synthpop scenes overtook the United States like a second British Invasion.
Like many of their peers, their careers shot to the top of the charts only to experience lulls when their music fell from favor.
But now, they’ve come back into fashion with multi-generational audiences at festivals, such as Cruel World in Pasadena, which ABC played in 2023 and their own coheadlining tour that brings Jones and Fry to the House of Blues in Anaheim on Friday, Feb. 8.
There, you’ll see not only fans who’ve still got their original vinyl and tour T-shirts, but younger fans, too, many of whom weren’t born until years after ’80s hits such as Jones’ “What Is Love?” and “Things Can Only Get Better” or ABC’s “Poison Arrow” and “The Look of Love.”
“I always celebrate silently when I see a young person in the audience or groups of young people,” Jones says recently on video call from his home in Somerset, England. “Gen Z, particularly, we’re starting to get them coming now, and that’s just really, really exciting.
“It feels to me like, ‘Oh yeah, well for them, they’re hearing this music for the first time,’” he says. “It’s brand new. It’s like, Wow, how exciting is that? It’s so great.”
Fry, who played to a large crowd at the Cruel World Festival in Pasadena in 2023, said he’s noticed the same trend.
“There’s a new generation of younger people coming through in their 30s and 20s who have researched the whole ’80s era,” Fry says from a vacation home in Barbados. “Synth freaks, people that love the fashion, the clothes, the MTV visuals, the sounds.
“The audacity and blatant entertainment of the 1980s comes through,” he says. “It was a very experimental period in music, and visually, and in the clubs. So it is wonderful to be an elder statesmen of pop now along with Simon Le Bon, Bernard from New Order, and Robert Smith.
“It feels good to be in that exalted company and, joking aside, it feels great to be out on the road playing shows where the audience is into what you’re doing.”
In separate interviews edited for length and clarity and presented here together, Jones and Fry talked about their early days in music, what it felt like when their debut albums became hits, their mutual love for Motown stars such as Smokey Robinson and Stevie Wonder, and more.
Q: Tell me what it’s like touring today whether in theaters and clubs or some of the larger festivals out there.
Howard Jones: It is a wonderful thing to be able to do, to be honest. I feel very honored and privileged to be 40 years later able to go and people want to come and see me and hear the songs and be part of their lives. Those songs have become part of the culture and we have a bond together.
It’s one of those rare occasions now in our society where people can come together and focus on one thing. Sing together and celebrate together with the music they may have grown up with or have discovered since.
Martin Fry: The great thing about festivals like Cruel World and many of the other festivals we play in Europe is you’re playing sometimes to 10,000 or 20,000 people. There’s a lot of floating voters out there you have to persuade. You have to win some of the crowd over. Your fans are there but also there are many people who are checking you out for the first time.
When we played in recent years, I realized there were people who maybe got married to ABC’s ‘The Look of Love.’ Divorced to ‘Be Near Me.’ Remarried when we did ‘When Smokey Sings.’ You’re the soundtrack to their lives, you know. There are tears and laughter when you play, you know the songs mean so much to the audience.
When I got to Cruel World, I fully understood the audience and it felt great to play with that crowd. There’s a whole new generation of people getting interested in the early new wave. For me, to be hanging with the Human League and Echo and the Bunnymen – Squeeze were there and the Gang of Four guys who I’ve known for years – it was a really fascinating festival to play.
Q: You had success with your debut albums – ABC’s ‘The Lexicon of Love’ in 1982, Jones’ ‘Human’s Lib’ two years later. Tell me what had happened before that moment.
MF: We were really quite ambitious. We had a band called Vice Versa in Sheffield. The Cabaret Voltaire and the early Human League, all these bands in Sheffield were really experimental in the late ’70s, early ’80s. Vice Versa was kind of like a proto-Depeche Mode, sort of a Soft Cell band. We played Leeds Futurama Festival and I think we were about 89th on the bill, and I think Depeche Mode were 90th. We were just starting out.
We recorded analog [after changing the name to ABC] but a lot of what we were doing was digital, with the early sampling machines, Fairlights and stuff. So the sound of the record, ‘The Lexicon of Love,’ sounds quite sort of contemporary in a funny kind of way. It doesn’t sound like it’s 40 years old. And it’s served me well all these years to be able to get on stage and sing ‘Poison Arrow,’ ‘The Look of Love’ and ‘Tears Are Not Enough,’ songs from that record.
HJ: I went out to play as an electronic one-man band with equipment that you could buy in your local music store. I didn’t have fancy computers or bespoke machinery or anything like that. I had drum machines, a few synths, you know, whatever I could afford. I think I was the first person to do that. It was a great sense of pioneering something new.
So three or four nights a week, I was out there in pubs and clubs experimenting with this idea, and working out the songs, and then coming back home and fixing things and improving things, then going out again. I realize now it was a great way to do it. It was the ultimate sort of proving that the music was going to work and that people were going to like it.
Q: I would have been anxious, I think, trying something that complicated and new.
HJ: It was terrifying. [Laughs] It was absolutely terrifying. I mean, what was I thinking of? Because when you’ve got a band, you’ve got people to turn to for moral support on the stage, but when you’re doing it on your own, you carry it all. The good side of that is that it developed my stage personality, in terms of I had to talk to the audience. I had to engage them, because I had to do a lot of tweaking with the instruments and programming.
Q: But you weren’t entirely alone. You often had a mime, Jed Hoile, performing too.
HJ: It was more like performance art, really, we were doing. I really wanted to do something original, and so Jed used to come to the shows. He used to dance in the audience, and I thought this guy is amazing, he really should be up on the stage with me. So we worked together to create all these different characters he would engage with during the show. And we had TV screens running VHS tapes. We had all kinds of costumes that he was in. I would sometimes have costumes, too.
Q: I remember seeing that on MTV, and of course ABC had great videos then, too.
HJ: It was very visual (with Hoile), and it’s funny, it’s interesting because this is just at the time when MTV was exploding, and yet we were well down the line of working visually as well. It wasn’t just about the music, it was what it looked like, and what it looked like when you went to a show. We were very comfortable with that.
MF: The power of MTV meant that the videos we made were shown all across America. With the videos, we were very ambitious. We wanted to kind of do The World of ABC. You know, there’s Lisa Vanderpump [in the ‘Poison Arrow’ and ‘Mantrap’ videos], who went on to become a big star in America. There’s Julien Temple directing ABC videos. We wanted a lot of humor in our videos and they were plainly bonkers, you know, but highly entertaining, just like all the other videos on MTV in that period of time.
They weren’t big budget. It was definitely sort of everybody was wrapped up in the creative spirit and pushed it to the limit. Your friends would make the suits for you. The lighting guy would be somebody’s cousin. It was guerrilla filmmaking, definitely, of the finest order. It wasn’t Hollywood by any stretch.
Q: ABC’s first American tour came before all those videos were all out. What was it like to still be mostly unknowns?
MF: I arrived in Phoenix on a wet Tuesday afternoon, and in my sparkling tuxedo in late ’82, I guess it would be, with the violinists and our new pop vision, I got on stage, and looked out. Like ‘The Blues Brothers,’ it had chicken wire across the front of the stage at the venue for the protection not of the audience – of the artists.
People were like, ‘What the (bleep) is this? Like, ‘Who’s this guy in his sparkling tuxedo?’ And I realized, ‘Yeah, America is very different in musical taste. There was that whole chasm between the guys in the ’70s in leather trousers and the long hair, and all the young bands that wanted to sort of change the whole pop landscape like Duran Duran and ABC and Depeche Mode, the Cure, who are all thankfully still going strong. So we were definitely there in those pioneering days getting stuff thrown at us, but gradually, the power of MTV changed things.
Q: By the mid-’90s, things had tailed off for you and your careers. What was it like to hit a lull for some years?
HJ: I think this happens to every single artist, big and small. There will be a time when you are absolutely in the spotlight. Everyone wants to know you, it’s like you’re the thing. But that will go. It may come back later, but it will go. And it is a pretty tough thing to deal with for anybody. You suddenly think, ‘Well, what am I going to do now?’
I’d had a great decade during the ’80s. I had hits. Ten hits in America, 13 hits in the U.K., hits all around the world. And course, that will stop. When the record company didn’t want to renew my contract after five albums and selling like millions and millions of records, it was a shock. I thought, ‘What? They must be crazy!’
But then another door opens, which was the internet came along. I was able to become an independent artist and sort of write my own script. It was a brilliant opportunity to carve out a new way of doing things.
MF: You know, in the late ’90s, I started playing shows and you kind of reached a point where people are going, ‘What are you still doing here?” You know what I mean? Like, ‘You had your hits back in the day, man; what’re you still doing here?’ But then people’s perception of ABC and my contemporaries definitely changed, and people realized there was still some excitement there.
Q: Howard, you played the Grammys with your hero Stevie Wonder, as well as Herbie Hancock and Thomas Dolby. Martin, your song ‘When Smokey Sings’ let to you meeting Smokey Robinson. Tell me about the excitement of those moments.
HJ: Obviously, I love Stevie Wonder and grew up with his music. But when you’re young you have a bit of youthful arrogance, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to step on that stage with those people. I think both me and Tom Dolby, we had our look, we had our music, we had our, you know, swagger. And that’s what you have to have if you’re going to be on the stage.
So it was a whirlwind. I was just enjoying every minute of it. I got to do something that people would only dream of, which was hang out in Stevie Wonder’s studio and jam with him for an afternoon. It was great.
MF: [‘When Smokey Sings’] came from a really tough period where I was 27 and got diagnosed with cancer. We were going to tour with Tina Turner and then everything stopped. I’d go home at night after hospital treatments and pick out box of 7-inch vinyl and just listen to my favorite tunes. So ‘When Smokey Sings’ is about some of those dark moments but being uplifted by hearing those songs.
We met Smokey Robinson at a TV show and handed him the record. It was great. Said, ‘Here we are, Mr. Robinson; this is about you.’ A couple of months later, Mark White [of ABC] and myself met Smokey Robinson in L.A. and he took us around to the Motown building and gave us this handwritten letter, saying how much he was moved and touched that we’d written the song about him and his contemporaries.
A lot of good things came out of that song from bad things.
ANAHEIM — It might not have been a work of art, but two vital points went into the standings rather than any museum, as the Ducks defeated the Nashville Predators, 2-1, on Friday night at Honda Center.
They moved to within six points of a wild-card playoff berth with the victory, while the Predators, now playing primarily for pride, were unable to extend their four-game winning streak.
Alex Killorn and Troy Terry scored for the Ducks. Lukáš Dostál held the hosts in a battle that saw them out-shot nearly two to one, with that proportion being even more lopsided at points in the third period, by halting 28 pucks.
Jakub Vrana scored Nashville’s only goal, and Juuse Saros had 13 saves.
“It’s a huge win because the boys really pulled together,” Dostál said. “Nashville had a push there. They’re an experienced team. They have veteran guys, but I think we held our ground. It’s important for the win and for the growth [of the team].”
A stalemate persisted for much of the evening, with transparent turning points late in the second period and in the middle of the third.
With 8:40 to play, Killorn’s 15th goal of the season came after Trevor Zegras threw an area pass into the slot, where Killorn criss-crossed with Drew Helleson, swooping on the puck and skating across the crease for the game-deciding goal, and a bit of redemption.
Leo Carlsson added a secondary assist on the goal, bringing his and Zegras’ scoring streaks to four games apiece.
“I thought Leo and Z got better in the third period, and they got rewarded with (Killorn’s) goal there,” Ducks coach Greg Cronin said.
The Ducks had been in a tie game after Killorn’s interference penalty gave Nashville a power play. Early on, Dostál made a resplendent save, once again managing to reach out and knock down a puck that was labeled to one post as he slid toward the other.
“I can’t not mention Dostál, he was unbelievable,” Terry said.
On that same power play, however, Nashville regrouped to knot up the contest at the 4:25 mark behind Vrana’s hard one-timer from inside the blue line, which hit Dostál but squibbled through him.
The Ducks spent another 2:50 shorthanded, including 1:10 with a two-man disadvantage, escaping unscathed and propelling them to Killorn’s late, tie-breaking goal.
“The five-on-three that we had to kill was either going to make or break us,” Cronin said. “It was a trigger to get us to play a little bit more on our toes. There was more energy on the bench and in the building after that.”
For almost 36 minutes of the match, there was no score and few events to speak of, but a short spurt late in the middle frame enlivened the action and left the Ducks up 1-0 at the second intermission.
Terry had been dangerous for much of the night, weaving to the net for chances of his own and creating for others, before he scored at the 15:52 mark of the second period. A minute later, all hell broke loose in the Ducks’ crease as they scrambled frantically to prevent a tying goal.
Mason McTavish and Terry applied forecheck pressure, with Vatrano recovering the puck and sliding it across to Terry at the left faceoff dot, where he launched a missile that found its target under the bar to the far side. It was Terry’s 18th goal of the season and second since Jan. 29, but it reminded the world how he was able to score 37 times in 2021-22.
“It felt good. I haven’t been short on chances,” Terry said. “When Frank got it, I knew their (defenseman) had broken his stick, so I just tried to get over to that weak side. I knew (Ryan Strome) was going to the back post, and once I saw the D slide, I tried to get it off before (the shot was blocked).”
The Predators nearly clawed that goal right back, but Jackson LaCombe was on his toes and Radko Gudas was on his back, his belly and whatever else had to touch the ice to keep the puck from reaching Dostál, who also made a save during the sequence and then nearly slid the puck into his own net.
“It was a lot of fuss, but I think the guys blocked every single one of them, so they helped me out pretty much there,” Dostál said.
Twenty minutes came and went without a goal, with the Ducks failing to capitalize on a pair of power-play opportunities. LaCombe showed off his skating on a breakout that saw him elude three Predators by himself, as well as his deception when he looked off a penalty killer to set up a one-timer for McTavish in the right circle. Dostál helped keep the period scoreles with a cat-like glove save on Michael Bunting.
“It was a strange game. There was not a lot of energy. There wasn’t a lot of ice. It was kind of a tight-checking game,” Cronin said. “They were throwing pucks out and we were trying to gap up, and it seemed to be a little of a tennis match in the first period. There was just no rhythm to it.”
The Ducks will take to the skies for a three-game journey that will open against Cam Fowler and the St. Louis Blues, before heading to Dallas and concluding against these same Predators.
DENVER — The nature of the NBA’s 82-game regular season naturally creates situations like the one the Lakers faced on Friday night against the Denver Nuggets.
On the road, down four of five starters. Without six of their top-eight rotation players. All during a stretch of six games in eight days, including three back-to-back sets, with Friday capping the first one.
When the Lakers’ injury report was released on Friday, which revealed that Luka Doncic, Dorian Finney-Smith and Gabe Vincent would join the list of the team’s unavailable players, the matchup against the Nuggets could have been viewed as a schedule loss.
The Lakers didn’t treat it that way.
Austin Reaves, Dalton Knecht and their teammates nearly pulled off an improbable victory at Ball Arena before falling to the Nuggets, 131-126, after Jamal Murray’s tiebreaking 3-pointer with 5.6 seconds left and Russell Westbrook’s exclamation point dunk that sealed the win for Denver (43-24).
“I’m proud of the group for their level of fight and resiliency,” Lakers coach JJ Redick said. “There’s a lot we could have done better. But the group competed and we gave ourselves a chance to win.”
Reaves (37 points, 13 assists, eight rebounds) and Knecht (32 points) led the short-handed Lakers (40-25), with both players making clutch plays down the stretch that kept the team in the game before eventually suffering their fourth straight loss to close an 0-4 trip.
“You always want to win,” Reaves said. “And regardless of who you take the floor with, we feel like we could win, and we went and put ourselves in a good position to do that. Losing sucks, but I’m happy with what these guys in the locker room did.”
With the Lakers trailing 124-123, Reaves stripped reigning league MVP Nikola Jokic for his third steal of the game and converted a layup on the other end to put the Lakers ahead by one with just over a minute left after they had trailed by 13 in the third.
Knecht helped add to that lead after a Murray turnover led to the rookie dunking in transition to put the visitors up by three – with Knecht cramping up on takeoff and taking a hard fall on his head/shoulders but staying in the game with the Lakers up 126-123 with 52 seconds left.
With little time to go over defensive plans during a timeout as Redick checked on Knecht after his fall, Jokic (28 points, seven rebounds, five assists, three steals) converted an and-1 floater over Christian Koloko, making the free throw to tie the score at 126 apiece with 48 seconds left.
“The play that Jokic got the and-one, I’ll take some ownership of that just because that was a short timeout and I ran on the floor to check on DK,” Redick said. “And then I ran back and I didn’t have time to really get us the right substitutions and matchups that I would have wanted. And that’s not a knock on CK, but I just kind of put him in a tough spot knowing that Jokic was going to go quick.”
After Reaves missed a jumper that would have put the Lakers up by two, Murray (26 points, five assists, four rebounds) sprung free out of a pick-and-roll with Jokic and knocked down a pull-up 3-pointer for a 129-126 Nuggets lead – just the latest big shot he has hit against the Lakers.
“[Jokic and I] were tangled up, trying to get up there when I saw Murray come up,” Knecht said of the play. “And CK told me to go out there and switch. It was kind of hard.”
Westbrook (17 points, seven assists, six rebounds) picked off Shake Milton’s inbounds pass on the Lakers’ ensuing possession, scoring the game-sealing basket.
After leading by 11 in the first and keeping the game close at halftime, trailing 71-67, the Lakers were on the cusp of being blown out before they used a 19-9 run to close the third quarter and cut a 13-point deficit to 102-99.
Knecht, starting near his hometown of Thornton, Colorado, had his highest-scoring game since mid-November.
“I told him in the huddle, I said, ‘Hey, if you want to shoot it, shoot it. I don’t care if you shoot it 35 times, we’re going to need every bucket you can get,’” Reaves said of Knecht. “So he’s a hooper.”
Milton (16 points, five rebounds, three assists) and two-way guard Jordan Goodwin (10 points, six rebounds) both scored in double figures for the Lakers with the increased playing time opportunities.
Koloko (eight points, seven rebounds) impressed with his second-half defense, altering multiple shots at the rim that didn’t end with blocks and denying Jokic the ball late.
“The spirit was great,” said Redick, whose team had an eight-game winning streak before this trip. “It’s been that and will continue to be that. And I think it was a good opportunity for a number of guys to play bigger minutes, Shake, in particular. Christian, defensively, in the second half was awesome. So happy for those guys that they played well.”
Despite feeling under the weather, Bronny James played 16 minutes and contributed five points.
LeBron James missed his third straight game with a left groin strain and returned to Los Angeles along with Rui Hachimura (left patellar tendinopathy) and Jaxson Hayes (bruised right knee) ahead of the Lakers’ game in Denver.
“We went 0-4, so it’s a pretty bad trip,” Reaves said. “But JJ said a week ago, ‘Everybody’s like Lakers in five.’ So we just don’t listen to any of it. We know when we’re fully healthy and got everybody on the team that we have a really good chance to beat anybody.
“I just see this group, coming together, locking in on one common goal and that’s to win. And [Friday] is the biggest testament to that. Very shorthanded and went and played a really good basketball team with probably the best player in the world. And went toe to toe and had an opportunity to win it. Just didn’t execute the last 50 seconds.”
Local News
Amalia Holguin dazzles but Sage Hill girls basketball falls to Carondelet in CIF state Division I final
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SACRAMENTO — It’s been just over five years since Kobe Bryant and eight others died in a tragic helicopter crash. It’s been nine months since four of Bryant’s proteges from his Mambas youth girls basketball team graduated from Sage Hill.
Yet, with his youngest apprentice — Amalia Holguin — still playing for the Lightning and coach Kerwin Walters still at the helm, the influence of the Lakers great remains immense.
“Kobe is always going to be straight in the heart for all of us,” Walters said this week, “especially for myself and Amalia. It’s just really, really a personal thing. But he’s always going to be there.”
Bryant’s vision for Sage Hill continued to unfold Friday night at the CIF State championships.
The Lightning aspired for a second state title in four seasons as they squared off against Carondelet in the Division I final at Golden 1 Center.
With Holguin wowing the crowd with her 3-point shooting and passing, Sage Hill brought the energy. Unfortunately, the Lightning struggled at the foul line, and it cost them.
Sage Hill made 4 of 14 free throws and fell to Carondelet 51-48 in its bid to become a two-time state champion.
Carondelet sank 8 of 11 foul shots, including all four of its chances in the final 45 seconds for the final points of the game.
Walters, in his 13th season, and Holguin, the youngest player on Bryant’s famed youth team, shared a long embrace after the final buzzer as the Cougars (30-6) celebrated their first state title since 2004.
“This one hurts,” said Walters, who led Sage Hill to the state Division II title in 2022. “They hit free throws, we didn’t. If you can see the numbers, that’s where it all falls right now.”
“It’s abnormal for us,” the coach added. “We’re generally in the low 70s, mid 70s in free throw percentage.”
Sage Hill (23-12) missed a 3-pointer in the closing seconds in a chance to force overtime
Holguin, a junior, hit two of her four 3-pointers in the fourth period en route to a game-high 21 points. While her long-range shooting impressed the crowd, so did her spin move and assist to Kamdyn Klamberg (13 points) to give Sage Hill a 48-47 lead with about one minute left.
The play came off one of Holguin’s four steals.
Sage Hill started two freshmen, a sophomore and two juniors.
“(Bryant) always wanted us to look in the mirror every day,” Holguin said. “I’m going to go home and probably watch some film on this and see how we can get better already for next year. … We’re always looking toward the future and I think we have a bright one.”
Carondelet led by as many as seven points in the first half before taking a 24-18 lead into intermission.
Holguin (10 points) and Klamberg (eight points) combined for all of the Lightning’s first-half points while seven players scored for Carondelet.
The Lightning received more contributions in the second half as freshman Addison Uphoff scored eight points and finished with six rebounds. Freshman center Eve Fowler scored four points to go along with four blocks and nine rebounds.
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