Life's What You Make It

It was one of the last songs written for The Colour of Spring, after the management worried there was no obvious single. Friese-Greene started with a drum pattern loosely inspired by Kate Bush's Running Up That Hill, Hollis played a heavy, repetitive piano figure over it, and David Rhodes, Peter Gabriel's guitarist, added the hook. Hollis told Oor that the lyric drew on A Streetcar Named Desire and was about optimism; to Record Mirror he said dryly that it was chosen as the single because, apart from a two-minute horn quartet, it was the shortest thing on the album.

It reached sixteen in Britain and the top twenty across Europe. Tim Pope's video, shot at night on Wimbledon Common, barely shows the band: it is full of owls, foxes and insects, because, Hollis said, animals are beautiful and look better than they did. The band played it twenty-nine times on the 1986 tour. Covers include The Divine Comedy, Rowland S. Howard, Duncan Sheik with Rachael Yamagata for the 2012 tribute album, and Placebo, whose 2016 version and video borrowed the original's concept.