Pop wasn’t all doom, gloom and cheesy ghastliness in 1982: in the same month that ABC released their second single, Poison Arrow, both the Jam (Town Called Malice) and Kraftwerk (The Model) topped the charts. Yet the pervading atmosphere was undoubtedly bleak, with punk and new wave’s promise of cleaning out the stables unfulfilled, and acts such as Shakin’ Stevens and Bucks Fizz reigning supreme. The Sheffield band’s debut single, Tears Are Not Enough, was a jagged funk affair, stylised and buffed to a sheen, certainly, but very much of a piece with the new-romantic hallmarks — brass stabs, synth drums — being peddled by the likes of Spandau Ballet further south. Crucially, it offered no indication of what was to come. So, when Poison Arrow sashayed onto the airwaves in February that year, its huge, Trevor Horn-produced histrionics and unimpeachable pop perfection took the breath away.

Balancing a love for art and artifice, for flippancy and melancholy, Martin Fry spearheaded the band’s assault on the charts, his gold lamé suits, provocative music-mag utterances and willingness to risk looking absurd striking a note that was at once jarring and thrilling. Two months before Poison Arrow, his fellow Steel City pioneers Human League had spent five weeks at No 1 with the equally audacious Don’t You Want Me. And Heaven 17 were forging a fascinating link between ice-cold electro and declamatory polemic. Something was undoubtedly stirring in South Yorkshire. This was pop, unashamedly so, but with a grittiness that manifested itself in the boldly-go courage of its makers’ who-you-calling-camp? convictions.

With Horn chucking everything at the song, and Fry glorying in its melodrama, Poison Arrow was an appropriately over-the-top introduction to the band’s first album, The Lexicon of Love, which remains one of the most extraordinary debuts ever released by a British act. Two more singles (The Look of Love and All of My Heart) followed the song into the Top 10. But it was Poison Arrow that, in repackaging pop and disco for the modern age at a time when Britain seemed unremittingly grey, struck the loudest, and strangest, chord.

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