Poison Arrow

"Poison Arrow" is the sound of heartbreak dressed in couture. Martin Fry stalks through Trevor Horn's lavish production like a man narrating his own humiliation to an orchestra that keeps interrupting him — that famous spoken exchange, the woman's flat "I don't think so," is the sharpest cut on a record made almost entirely of sharp cuts. The arrangement is absurdly rich for a song this bitter: snapping funk bass, brittle guitar stabs, a horn section that punches in and vanishes, strings that swell like a Bacharach ballad crashing a nightclub. Fry's vocal is a crooner's, but with a curled lip; he's playing the wounded sophisticate, aware that his own vanity is part of the joke, and the gold lamé suit was never irony-free camouflage. Lyrically it's Cupid's arrow rewritten as an assassination — love as a toxin administered by someone who knew exactly what they were doing. It captures a specific 1982 British ambition: post-punk kids deciding that opulence, not austerity, was the true rebellion. Best heard loud in a taxi at 1 a.m., or on headphones while composing a text you won't send. The song's genius is that it dances harder the more it hurts, refusing to let you sit down with your grief.