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"It's really heartening when you have a hit record," sighs Martin Fry with more than a little relief as he sits waiting to have his photo taken. "It's like a buzz of electricity. The singles chart - the Top Ten, that is, they're the ones that matter - they're the most exciting thing of all."

And here he is in the singles chart again, though it's been a while, and he looks rather different from the suave romantic gentleman who crooned hits like Tears Are Not Enough, Poison Arrow, The Look Of Love, and All Of My Heart off their The Lexicon Of Love LP. Or indeed from the more rugged singer on their second LP, the unsuccessful Beauty Stab.

In fact these days ABC are hardly the same group at all. By the beginning of last year only Martin and Mark White remained of the original members. "We didn't fancy being a duo," says Martin, recalling how they auditioned seven hundred musicians in three weeks before deciding that they'd rather have David Yarrritu and Eden who'd make ABC look like a pop group again. A large part of this new image seems to involve the four members appearing as cartoon characters. "it's better than a video of me walking down the street through dry ice in a ten gallon trenchcoat," laughs Martin. Cartoons he reckons are a lot more important than most people imagine.

"They're larger than life," he expains with enthusiasm. "They're more direct. In a cartoon, anything can happen. They're very frivolous and entertaining, but very durable too."

He readily admits that they're not the first to come up with the idea. Animation is popping up everywhere at the moment, as in the recent Alison Moyet and Power Station videos. But he insists, that's not the point:

"It's not a trend of fashion. It's just - think of Elvis Presley and Mickey Mouse! Mickey Mouse is more attractive than Elvis Presley," he continues, getting quite excited by the idea. "He'll last forever. He'll never die. He didn't make as good records as Elvis - but he had a lot more panache."

Now Martin just can't control himself. He starts constructing a chart of The Most Famous People In The World. "There's the Pope," he says without hesitation, "then Mickey Mouse..." Who's next though? He muses for a while "... William Shakespeare? Ronald Reagan?"

And maybe ABC one day will be up there too. But not as a replacement for Mickey Mouse - Martin explains that they're already a bit worried about being typecast as cartoon characters, hence the new Be Near Me video where they appear "just as we are with nothing else - we wanted to make it look as if we were performing inside a ping pong ball." After all, he points out, "we're not cartoons. We're flesh and blood. We've realised that, in real life, we're far more exciting and glamorous to look at than drawings."

As he talks Martin emphasises the way ABC have always kept changing, have never stuck to a formula just because it's successful. All very well, but some people are saying that the reason why Be Near Me has given them their first hit for ages is exactly that it does sound like the old successful ABC of The Lexicon Of Love. Mark agrees up to a point revealing that the song is actually two years old. "I wrote it with Martin in 1983 just after we'd finished the first tour. It is the closest to the Lexicon - it's got a lot of those virtues and we're not embarrassed by that - we're very proud of it. But it's a lot more modern. It's a lot harder rhythmically, a lot barer. Even so it's not representative of what we're doing now."

What they are doing now is just putting the finishing touches to their new LP, 'Zillionaire'. "A collection of ten strong songs," says Martin confidently, which apparently have titles like 'Vanity Kills', '15 Storey Halo', 'Fear Of The World' and 'So Hip It Hurts'. You can see in his eyes that he's still thrilled by the whole thing. But then all the time he talks about pop music as someone who's still a fan, who still searches sweatily through the 'new release' racks in the local record store and gets passionately excited about really special pop records. Which is exactly how he'd like people to feel about ABC.

"The records we make are just about ABC chasing excellence, sometimes finding it, sometimes not. But we try."

As he speaks he leans towards me, obviously thrilled by the challenge of it all. "We want pop music to be more than just a mediocre nursury rhyme."  

ABC article, Spring 1985, article and questions by Chris Heath. Answers by Martin Fry & Mark White.