Great Songs from My Favorite Year in Music: 1985, Part 46

ABC - "Be Near Me"



(Single Release: January 1985)

"The message is perfectly simple, the meaning is clear. Don't ever stray too far, and don't disappear."

The 80s were replete with remixes. 12" singles became stock-in-trade, with anywhere from at least one extended version provided up to, sometimes, and entire album's worth of dance mixes. I was a huge sucker for them. One band in particular that lured me in with the extended singles was ABC. Having scored hits on two previous albums (and more precisely, the first album, The Lexicon of Love), ABC was an already established pop act. But, their third album, How to Be a...Zillionaire!, found main band members Martin Fry and Mark White opting for a completely different look, if not sound. With pop songwriting skills intact, Fry and White recruited two new band members more for their looks than their musical abilities. Though this wasn't the first time that fashion won out over function, it might have been the first time that band members were hired because they looked good as cartoons. Regardless, the album became one of their most commercially successful, spawning four hit singles before they would go back into the studio two years later with an album that would mark a return to the look and feel of their debut. The quotation above is how the song begins and the rest of the song follows the same template of a simple pleading Motown style love song, just without the Motown sound, or at least a more 80s pop version of Motown. It even has a call and response section (possibly my favorite part of the song) that follows, "What's your reputation? Ecstasy. What's your destination? Next to me." I love it. But, one has to wonder whether, in some scientific fashion, whether these songs would have been as successful without the cartoony flash. We would need a control group, a version of ABC without the packaging. A second question follows of whether or not this type of image would be successful outside of 1985. Regardless, "Be Near Me" was ABC's highest charting hit in the US and still a personal favorite.