Left to My Own Devices

They wrote it because they wanted to work with the producer Trevor Horn and needed a song. The day before meeting him they made a demo at Abbey Road Studios of an instrumental by Lowe, with a line Tennant had come up with, left to my own devices I probably would. Tennant finished the lyric a few days later. He called it an exaggerated autobiography: a day in the life of someone who always did what he wanted, from getting out of bed to coming home. The toy soldiers at the back of the garden come from his childhood in Newcastle, and the party animal on the phone was his friend Jon Savage. Horn supplied the phrase Debussy to a disco beat, which Tennant paired with Che Guevara to combine revolution with beauty.

Horn and Stephen Lipson produced it. Lipson took the duo's Motown-sounding demo and added the house influence of the time. The song opens with the mezzo-soprano Sally Bradshaw singing the word house. An orchestra was recorded at Abbey Road, arranged and conducted by Richard Niles. The duo had never worked with an orchestra before and were taken aback, and Lowe felt it was too much. The arrangement was pared down but most of it stayed. The album version has a long outro in which fragments of the lyric are cut into a different order.

Release

Released in November 1988 as the second single from Introspective, in an edited form, it reached number four in Britain, three places above the lead single Domino Dancing. Pitchfork notes that it stalled at number 84 on the Billboard pop chart. Eric Watson directed the video, in which the duo and acrobats dance on an invisible glass floor, filmed from below. Miranda Sawyer of Smash Hits made it Single of the Fortnight. In 2023 Alexis Petridis ranked it third among their songs, calling it a deliriously uplifting song about loneliness.

Live

On their first tour in 1989 Tennant sang it in pyjamas and a dressing gown, a nod to the opening line. A live version with Bradshaw and the BBC Concert Orchestra is on the 2006 album Concrete. For the Super Tour they replaced the orchestra with synthesizers and percussion, and that version was released in April 2017 as a bonus track on the single Undertow.