“Lipgloss” by Pulp

"Lipgloss" kicked off the campaign for His ’n’ Hers, Pulp's fourth album, landing as its lead single on 15 November 1993, and it was the first song the band worked up after moving to Island Records. The new label brought bigger production budgets, with Ed Buller producing, and bassist Steve Mackey joked about how much money it had taken to make the song sound the way it does.

Jarvis Cocker's lyric is a breakup song with a sly sideways angle: how being half of a couple lets your social skills go rusty, with, by his own account, a dread of giant shopping malls like Sheffield's Meadowhall thrown in. It stalled at 50 on the UK singles chart, but modest as it was, it was Pulp's first real hit, and enough to talk them out of breaking up.

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