Our Lips Are Sealed

Go-Go's guitarist Jane Wiedlin wrote this with the British musician Terry Hall, who was lead singer of The Specials. In a Songfacts interview with Wiedlin, she told the story: "In 1980 we were playing at The Whisky on Sunset Strip, and The Specials were in town from England. They came to see us, and they really liked us and asked us if we would be their opening act on their tour. I met Terry Hall, the singer of The Specials, and ended up having kind of a romance. He sent me the lyrics to 'Our Lips Are Sealed' later in the mail, and it was kind of about our relationship, because he had a girlfriend at home and all this other stuff. So it was all very dramatic. I really liked the lyrics, so I finished the lyrics and wrote the music to it, and the rest is history. And then his band, The Fun Boy Three, ended up recording it, too - they did a really great version of it, also. It was like a lot gloomier than the Go-Go's' version." Speaking about her relationship with Terry Hall, Wiedlin adds: "Like I said, he had a girlfriend in England, and they were talking about getting married and all this stuff. So I don't know how I got in the picture. And, you know, that's something that I did as a teenager, maybe I was 20. That's something I would never do now, knowingly enter into a relationship with someone who was with someone else. I mean, it was completely screwed on my part. Although I think when people do that, you really have to look at the person who's in the relationship, and they have to take the burden of the responsibility as well. Anyways, it was one of those things with the tragic letters, 'I just can't do this.' You know, 'I'm betrothed to another.' All that kind of stuff."

This was the first hit for the Go-Go's, who started as a punk band in the late '70s, but became pop superstars with the release of their first album, Beauty And The Beat. Unlike most other female pop groups, the Go-Go's wrote their own songs and were serious musicians. Despite their pure pop sound, they had a confidence and attitude that gave them lots of credibility and set them apart from other bands on the fledgling MTV network. It was MTV that really broke the song because many radio stations were reluctant to put an all-girl band on the air.

In America, this was released as a single in the summer of 1981 around the same time as the Beauty And The Beat album. It made a very slow climb up the charts as the group toured with The Police (The Go-Go's were signed to IRS Records, managed by Miles Copeland, the brother of The Police drummer Stewart Copeland), reaching #20 in December. The next single, "We Got The Beat," caught on faster, rising to #2 in April 1982. A month earlier, Beauty And The Beat became the first album by an all-girl band to hit #1 in America, where it stayed for six weeks.