Head over Heels

Will Heggie left in mid-1983 after a European tour supporting Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, and Fraser and Guthrie recorded as a duo. Head over Heels came out on 24 October 1983. Most of it was written in the studio over a short period, and John Turner engineered it at Palladium in Edinburgh. Guthrie played guitar, bass guitar, keyboards and drum machine, and Ally Gibb played saxophone on Five Ten Fiftyfold.

Guthrie described the songs as love songs. As he put it, Garlands contained a lot of religious imagery while the new record was more concerned with love imagery. John Peel played the entire album on his show, and Sounds ranked it seventh in its 1983 end-of-year list. Not everyone agreed: NME's Barney Hoskins found most of it hollow and vaporous. Mojo named it one of the most eccentric British albums in 2003. Pitchfork's Sunday Review noted that, like all their later records, it was written in the studio with no tunes or titles brought in, and that the tracks were built first, with Fraser threading her vocal melodies through them. Sugar Hiccup was the single, and it was heard over the end titles of an episode of Two Doors Down in 2022.