The Look of Love

The third single from the album reached number four in Britain for two weeks in June 1982, the band's highest UK placing, and was the 29th best-selling single of the year according to the Official Charts Company. It spent 11 weeks on the chart and re-entered in early 1983 for three more. In the US it reached 18 on the Billboard Hot 100 and nine on the Cash Box Top 100, and it topped the Billboard dance chart and the Canadian singles chart. The 12-inch has four parts: the album version, an instrumental, a vocal version without the orchestral overdubs and a short acoustic coda of strings, horns, harp and xylophone. Fry's lyrics came from a break-up, and the spoken goodbye in the second verse is by the woman who had left him. Horn said he insisted on it, because if you do things like that you have to make them real.

Making it

Horn said he thought of it as Chic with Bob Dylan over it. Palmer had bought a LinnDrum and programmed the beat before the sessions, and the band already had the Minimoog bass line and most of the song. Tracking was at Good Earth Studios in Soho and the mix at Sarm East, on one of the first SSL 4000E consoles in the country, the first track Horn mixed with a computer. Stephen Singleton's saxophone was swathed in AMS delay and Lexicon 224 reverb. Dudley's first orchestrations for the band are here. Fry recalled pizzicato arrangements over a Moog bass line, and Dudley recalled a 30-piece string section at Abbey Road and her surprise at how loud Horn made them. Horn made a US 12-inch remix using the Fairlight to bend and scratch elements, and called it the best 12-inch he ever did.

Afterlife

The video is a studio recreation of an Edwardian park, with cameos from Paul Morley and Horn. BBC Radio 1 DJ Gary Davies used the last crescendo of Part Four as the closing theme of his lunchtime programme The Bit in the Middle through the 1980s. A 1990 remix by Paul Staveley O'Duffy, released to promote the compilation Absolutely without the band's involvement, borrowed part of the melody of Kraftwerk's Computer Love. VH1 ranked the song 43 in its 100 Greatest Songs of the 80's in 2006. Pitchfork's Jess Harvell called it modern classicism at its most overwrought. At the Birmingham show in 2019 the band played it twice, and the audience sang along the second time.