Karma Chameleon

Released in the UK in September 1983, Karma Chameleon was the band's second UK number one after Do You Really Want to Hurt Me. It stayed on top for six weeks and sold 955,000 copies in 1983, the best of any single that year. In the US it spent three weeks at number one in early 1984 and remains the band's only US number one. It won Best British Single at the 1984 Brit Awards, and producer Steve Levine won a Brit as well.

George described the song as being about the fear of alienation and of standing up for one thing: if you do not act the way you feel, he said, karma pays you back. He has said he wrote it on a holiday in Egypt, and that the rest of the band were at first hesitant to record it because it sounded like a country song. In mid-1983 the group were still calling the next single Cameo Chameleon. Judd Lander played the harmonica. Jimmy Jones claimed that it copied his song Handy Man, and George said he might have heard that song once but never sat down intending to copy it, adding that they gave Jones ten pence and an apple.

The video, directed by Peter Sinclair, was filmed at Desborough Island in Weybridge. It is set in Mississippi in 1870 and ends on a riverboat called The Chameleon. The band performed the song as the finale of a 1986 episode of The A-Team, played it at Edinburgh Castle in July 2014, and released a new ballad version featuring Mila during their December 2020 livestream.