Perfect Skin

Cole wrote and demoed it in 1983 in his room at the Glasgow Golf Club, where his parents lived and worked, on a Portastudio with a Yamaha DX7 and a drum machine. He wrote it and Forest Fire over one weekend, and the band had a record deal within a month. Early in 1984 they recorded it with Paul Hardiman at The Garden in Shoreditch. It was the band's first single, backed with The Sea and the Sand, and reached 26 in the UK over ten weeks in the chart, though Cole remembered it taking a while to climb into the top 40. It opened Rattlesnakes. In North America the Geffen LP used a remix by Ric Ocasek.

Cole told Melody Maker in 1984 that it was "just a few ideas linked by a title", more about atmosphere than meaning, and told Sounds he had taken a cue from Bob Dylan's Subterranean Homesick Blues and made its imagery deliberately Dylanesque. Record Mirror heard the avant-garde meeting country and western, and Music Week linked it to Aztec Camera and Orange Juice. Writing in 2017, Jim Connelly credited Neil Clark's jangling guitar hooks, and a guitar passage that stands where a solo would be.

Live

Cole wrote that the band's Top of the Pops performance of it was probably the most fun he ever had on a stage. It is the Commotions song played most often on setlist.fm, with 54 logged band performances and 279 more from Cole solo, and it appears six times across the band's BBC releases. They played it at Hammersmith in 2004, on the released live album, and Cole played it again with Cowan and Clark in Glasgow in 2025. A demo is on the 2004 deluxe Rattlesnakes. The upload in the hypersongs web is the UK album version, not the Ocasek remix.