Truth was, they'd been around for a number of years. They even had a massive hit album, The Hurting (1983), under their belt in England. But, here in the States, we were late to the party. Nothing new.
Their breakthrough in the US, Songs from the Big Chair (1985), was a refreshing change for the pop landscape at the time: there were touches of New Wave and synth pop, but the moment you expected them to go full-on Kajagoogoo, their crunchy/funky rock side would come through, setting them squarely in Bowie Scary Monsters territory. They also brought a cerebral approach to pop lyric writing that signaled they were thinking about more than living in the material world, which definitely set them apart from the all-that-glitters world of 80s pop.
Although it wasn't the first song I'd heard by the band, "Head Over Heels" was my fast favorite. It had a confident groove and that classic "Hey Jude"-esque singalong portion that made it stick squarely in the brain.
The song actually began its life as a link between the two parts of an earlier song, "Broken," which uses the same piano riff as "Head Over Heels." The band debuted the "Head Over Heels/Broken" medley, live at London's Hammersmith Odeon (a.k.a. Hammersmith Apollo), in 1983. In fact, the coda at the end of the 1985 album-version was taken from this 1983 live show. (I'd always assumed that the "live" cheering at the end was the product of studio trickery and canned sound effects. But it really is genuine crowd reaction to hearing the song for the first time.)
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