ABC frontman Martin Fry tends to hear a lot of confessions about his fans’ romantic histories. Such things will happen when your classic album is called “The Lexicon of Love.”

“People got married to ‘The Look of Love,’ divorced to ‘That Was Then But This is Now’ and then maybe they got remarried to ‘When Smokey Sings’,” the debonair singer said this week. “When I look at the audience, I can see the tears of joy and ecstasy that people have when they hear certain songs. Occasionally someone sends me a long letter saying this or that song was playing when they were born in the hospital. That’s the wonderful thing about songs, they belong to the audience as soon as you finish them. Those pivotal moments are there in their lives, and we’re just the soundtrack.”

Founded in 1980, ABC took British new wave in a more romantic direction, picking up where Bowie and Roxy Music left off. “When you’re young and in a rehearsal room with your band, you want to be as radically different from everyone else as possible,” Fry said. “You always say ‘Everything else is old fashioned now, we’re the new thing’ — Everybody does that, or at least the pioneers do. And that maverick take is important because let’s face it, there’s only a certain number of chords you can play. It’s all about the attitude, the strut and the swagger.”

ABC had enough of that to rule the UK charts through the early ‘80s, and MTV loved them from the get-go. “We broke just as the whole video world was developing. Before MTV, all the bands coming through Britain were looking like gangs. But when you take people like Annie Lennox and Robert Smith, they looked more like film stars. We weren’t into underlining that we were authentic — We wanted to create the world of ABC and draw you into it.”

He says the band was always something of an antidote to punk. “I loved the Sex Pistols, but the attitude at that time was pretty bleak. My generation wanted to come out shiny with an upbeat, optimistic worldview. And we wanted to make records that would compare with the best American ones at the time — We wanted to be as good as the Jackson Five.” In fact ABC’s biggest US hit was their third album, “How to Be a Zillionaire,” which may well be the quirkiest. “That album was meant to be an animated cartoon— we were thinking that Mickey Mouse was bigger than Elvis. And it was one of the first digital albums. I could never work out if we were ten minutes ahead of the game, or an hour behind.”

There will be plenty of ‘80s hits when ABC hits the Boch Center with Howard Jones on Tuesday. But he’ll also get in some of the new music that’s been recorded since Fry revived ABC around the millennium (he’s the one consistent member). The most recent album in 2017 was a sequel to the hit debut, “The Lexicon of Love II”. Says Fry, “The original title was ‘The Lexicon of a Lost Ideal’. But the label was saying for years that they wanted another record like ‘Lexicon of Love.’ So it’s definitely a sequel, as seen through the prism of the original. When I look at Netflix and see shows going on for six seasons, I see no shame in us doing that.”