Waiting by Fun Boy Three

Waiting, the second and last album from Fun Boy Three, came out on Chrysalis in 1983, and it's a strange, lovely thing: the three singers who'd walked out of the Specials, Terry Hall, Neville Staple and Lynval Golding, handing the controls to David Byrne and letting him dress their gloomy new wave pop in odd, jittery colors. It opens with a cover of "Murder She Said", the theme from the Margaret Rutherford Miss Marple films of 1961 to 1964, which tells you plenty about the sense of humor at work.

The hit was "Our Lips Are Sealed", a song Hall co-wrote that the Go-Go's had already recorded, turned here into something wistful and wary. And then it was over: a band that had racked up seven UK top 20 hits since 1981 was finished by the end of 1983.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.