“Lips Like Sugar” by Echo and the Bunnymen

"Lips Like Sugar" was the second single from Echo & the Bunnymen's self-titled fifth album in 1987, and Ian McCulloch at first waved it away as too commercial. He had a point, and it's the best thing about it: this is the Bunnymen letting the gloom lift just enough to let a big, glittering chorus through.

McCulloch wrote the words and sings them in that moody, crooning swagger of his, and plays guitar alongside Will Sergeant, whose shimmering, chiming lines do most of the heavy lifting. Les Pattinson's bass rolls underneath and Pete de Freitas keeps the drums steady and propulsive, and the music is credited to all four. Laurie Latham produced it, Stuart Barry and Paul Gomersall engineered, and Bruce Lampcov mixed it into something lush and widescreen, post-punk in a velvet jacket.

It charted in the UK, Ireland and New Zealand, and though it never made the American charts, it became one of the band's best-known songs over there anyway, carried by college radio and by Anton Corbijn's video, a regular on MTV's 120 Minutes. Critics have been kind to it since, and plenty of other acts have covered it.

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