Poison Arrow

The second single from the album was released in Britain on 15 February 1982 on 7-inch and 12-inch and reached number six. In the US it peaked at 25 on the Billboard Hot 100. The UK B-side, Theme from Mantrap, was a lounge version of the song. A US 12-inch remix, known as the Jazz Remix, appears on compilations and on reissues of the album.

Recording

It was the first record Trevor Horn made with the band. They rehearsed it in a rehearsal room, where Horn said it needed something like a middle eight. Fry came up with the passage in which he sings that he thought you loved me but it seems you don't care, answered by the spoken line from Karen Clayton that she cares enough to know she can never love him. At RAK Studios the band ran through it as a live take, and Horn then asked if that was what they wanted. He programmed Palmer's drum part into his Roland 808, sequenced the bass on a Minimoog and had Palmer play along to the machine, which Horn compared to tracing. The programming took about eight hours. Anne Dudley's counter melodies are on the track.

Afterlife

In the video Fry plays three parts: a haughty upper-class opera patron, a messenger boy at the opera and a bandleader in a 1960s-style nightspot. In each he fails to win the leading lady, played by Lisa Vanderpump. Julien Temple, who also made Mantrap, worked on the video. Pitchfork's Jess Harvell described the song as stop-start dynamics on a Wagnerian scale. It appears in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (2002) on the fictional station Wave 103, and an Australian football television programme used it to introduce its Caro's Arrow segment until that ended after 2024. At the Royal Albert Hall in 2009 the Guardian found the crowd's response to it and The Look of Love so tumultuous that it might need a water cannon to restore order.