It begins with strings that sound like they are dancing on a knife’s edge. A bright, bouncing piano figure, plucked strings that dart and glitter, and then a voice — unmistakable, imperious, wounded — announcing that she is walking on broken glass. When Annie Lennox released “Walking on Broken Glass” in August 1992, it sounded like a party and felt like a bruise. It was the sound of a woman who had spent a decade as half of one of the most successful duos on earth deciding, in public, to see whether she could carry a whole record on her own. She could. The story of “Walking on Broken Glass” is the story of a solo debut that had to prove itself twice over: first that its singer did not need her famous partner, and then that a song about heartbreak could make people dance without ever pretending the heartbreak was over.
To understand why the record mattered, you have to understand where Annie Lennox stood in 1992 — and, just as importantly, where she did not stand. She was not a newcomer, and she was not starting from nothing. With Dave Stewart, as Eurythmics, she had spent the 1980s building one of the defining sounds of the decade, from the cold synth pulse of “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” to the soulful sweep of “Here Comes the Rain Again.” But by 1990 the duo had been put on hold, and Lennox had stepped away from the treadmill: time out, a new baby daughter, and the unasked question that hangs over every famous partnership when it pauses — which half of the magic belonged to whom? Her answer was Diva, her debut solo album, released on April 6, 1992, and it was a deliberate change of temperature. Where Eurythmics had been sleek, electronic and often deliberately distant, Diva was warmer, more theatrical, more openly emotional: a record built around a voice rather than a sound. It went straight to number one in Britain, reached number 23 on the Billboard 200 in America, and went on to sell millions worldwide. “Walking on Broken Glass” was its third single, and it was the track that proved the solo gamble most joyfully — because it was, on its face, the least likely hit on the album: a baroque-pop song about the agony of watching an old love move on, dressed up as the brightest, bounciest tune Lennox had ever cut.
The song itself began, as Lennox’s best songs tend to, with a feeling rather than a formula. She wrote it alone — the sole songwriting credit is hers — and its subject is plain from the first line: the turbulent business of trying to carry on through the pain of a breakup, of keeping your composure in a room where your former lover is smiling at someone else. What makes the song remarkable is not the subject, which is as old as pop itself, but the mismatch Lennox builds into it. The lyric describes a woman in pieces, stepping carefully through the wreckage of a relationship, yet the music refuses to limp. A Caribbean-flavoured piano line bounces along underneath, spiccato strings prance and glitter over the top, and the chorus arrives like a dare: she is walking on broken glass, and she is doing it in time, in tune, and in public. Critics noticed the trick immediately. Pitchfork later praised the way the record takes an incredibly depressing concept — romantic abandonment — and maps it onto an irresistibly danceable tune, while Billboard’s Larry Flick, reviewing the single on release, called it a study in stylistic contrasts, a retro-soul vocal gliding over a pristine, keyboard-and-string modern-pop environment. That contrast is the whole song. Lennox is not singing about being over someone. She is singing about performing being over someone, beautifully, while the floor cuts her feet.
The recording captures that contradiction in sound, and it is worth describing carefully, because the polish is the point. “Walking on Broken Glass” was cut at Mayfair Studios in London with producer Stephen Lipson, who had worked with everyone from Paul McCartney to the Pet Shop Boys, and engineered by Heff Moraes. Lipson and Lennox built the track the way Diva as a whole was built: state-of-the-art soul pop, in Rolling Stone’s phrase, with room for the voice to breathe. The arrangement is a small marvel of tension. The piano line, Caribbean in flavour, carries the verses with a lightness that almost fools you; the strings, played short and sharp, give the chorus its glittering, slightly dangerous edge; and underneath it all, Lennox stacks her own backing vocals into what one admiring critic called a Lennox chorus, layers of her own voice wrapping around the lead until the record sounds like a whole room singing along with one woman’s pain. The album version runs 4:12; the single version, released on August 10, 1992, by RCA (with BMG and Arista handling other territories), is a tighter 3:59. Nothing on it sounds accidental. Even the brightness is deliberate: this is a woman who knows exactly how good she sounds while she is hurting, and who has decided to let you hear both things at once.
The single’s chart story is a strong one, and it deserves to be told precisely, because one detail of it has been misreported — including, at first, in the brief for this article. “Walking on Broken Glass” was a genuine worldwide hit, but it was not a Top 10 hit on America’s main singles chart. In the United States it entered the Billboard Hot 100 in the issue dated September 5, 1992, at number 96, climbed steadily through the autumn, broke into the Top 40 in early October and the Top 20 by the end of the month, and peaked at number 14 on November 14, 1992, spending 25 weeks on the chart in total. On Billboard’s format charts it went further: number 3 on Pop Airplay, number 6 on Adult Contemporary and number 7 on Alternative Airplay, and number 11 on the Cash Box Top 100. Elsewhere the record did even better. In Britain it reached number 8 on the Official Singles Chart — Lennox’s second Top 10 single from Diva, after “Why” had reached number 5 — and it also reached number 8 in Ireland, number 1 on Canada’s RPM Top Singles chart, number 1 on the UK airplay chart, and number 23 in New Zealand, with smaller showings in Australia (number 58) and Germany (number 51). It has since been certified platinum in the United Kingdom and in New Zealand. The album around it did its own quiet conquering: Diva topped the UK albums chart, won British Album at the 1993 BRIT Awards, and was certified four times platinum in Britain and twice platinum in America. For a solo debut from a singer many listeners still thought of as half of a duo, that is a remarkable return — and “Walking on Broken Glass,” the brightest song on the record, was the single that carried the news furthest.
Its afterlife began on television, in a video that understood the song’s central joke better than any literal treatment could have. Directed by Sophie Muller, who directed all of Diva’s videos, the clip is a period fantasia drawn from the 1988 film Dangerous Liaisons and from late-18th-century costume dramas like Amadeus. The setting is a salon evening at the Prince Regent’s Carlton House, all gambling, dancing and powdered wigs — and into it walks Lennox, in a royal red dress and a Turkish headdress, the only splash of colour in a room full of white. The casting is the masterstroke: John Malkovich, who had played the Vicomte de Valmont in Dangerous Liaisons, appears as the groom, newly married, while Hugh Laurie, in the early-19th-century garb of the Prince Regent he had played in Blackadder the Third, pursues Lennox’s attention. The video plays out the song’s story in miniature. Lennox’s character watches her former lover arrive on the arm of his new bride, drinks glass after glass of champagne, spurns the Prince Regent’s advances, grows ever more agitated, and finally throws herself at Malkovich’s character in front of the whole party — then flees in fury, only to be swept into his arms at the foot of the stairs. It was nominated for British Video of the Year at the 1993 BRIT Awards and for Best Female Video at the 1993 MTV Video Music Awards, and the song itself won an ASCAP award in 1994 as one of the year’s most performed songs. The video did what the record does: it made heartbreak look magnificent, and it made the audience complicit in enjoying the spectacle.
The song’s longer afterlife has been quieter than its chart run, and in some ways more impressive. It never became a nostalgia curio, because it was never really about 1992. It became a staple of Lennox compilations and of the Diva story itself: the track that proved a solo Lennox could be playful, not just profound, and that her voice, freed from the Eurythmics machine, could carry a pop record that was both stranger and more joyful than anything the duo had made. The single’s B-sides tell their own story about the moment: the CD single carried live recordings from an MTV Unplugged session in July 1992, including a version of “Here Comes the Rain Again” — the old duo’s song, sung alone, as if to underline the point that the voice had always been the thing. And the song has kept travelling in the way the best breakup songs do: not as a relic, but as a description. Anyone who has ever had to walk into a room, dressed up, smiling, while the person who hurt them stands across it with someone new, recognises the record instantly. It does not offer comfort. It offers company, and a beat to walk to.
There is a final pleasure in the story, and it belongs to the title image. Walking on broken glass is a terrible idea, literally. It is painful, reckless and undignified, and Lennox knows it. That is why the metaphor works: it describes exactly what it feels like to carry on after a breakup in public — every step careful, every step hurting, and everyone watching to see whether you will flinch. The genius of the record is that Lennox never flinches, and never pretends it does not hurt either. She sings the pain and the poise at the same time, over strings that dance and a piano that bounces, and the result is a pop song that refuses to choose between the two. Most breakup songs pick a side: the weeper or the kiss-off. “Walking on Broken Glass” is both, at once, in the same breath. That is why it outlived its moment. It is not a song about getting over someone. It is a song about the performance of getting over someone, done so well that the performance itself becomes a kind of triumph.
That is why “Walking on Broken Glass” still works, more than thirty years later, for listeners who have never bought Diva and never will. It is not a Eurythmics record — and that is the point the whole article has been making, because the distinction is the story. It is the record on which Annie Lennox, the voice of Eurythmics, proved she did not need the duo’s machinery to make a hit, only a piano line, a string arrangement, a producer who understood her, and a voice that could make heartbreak sound like a celebration. The charts gave it number 8 in Britain and Ireland, number 1 in Canada, and number 14 in America. The video gave it a ballroom, a red dress, and two of the finest comic actors of the age. And Lennox, stepping carefully across the wreckage in time to her own bounce, gave it the rest: proof that a solo career is not a consolation prize for a broken partnership, but a stage of its own — and that sometimes the bravest thing a singer can do is dance, in public, on broken glass, and not miss a step.
Watch the video below and listen for the moment the strings first prance in over the piano and Lennox’s voice arrives, cool and furious at once, in a room full of powdered wigs. It is the sound of a singer who had already conquered the world once, as half of a duo, deciding to conquer it again on her own — and of a breakup song that never asks for your pity, only for your attention, while it dances across the sharpest floor in pop.