Living in Another World

Living in Another World was released by EMI on 3 March 1986 as the second single from The Colour of Spring. It reached the top forty in Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Flanders. Steve Winwood played the Hammond organ and Mark Feltham the harmonica. Hollis said he was inspired by the modal jazz of Miles Davis. In a 1987 interview on Italian television he said that the studies of Jean-Paul Sartre inspired the lyrics. The singer King Creosote called it "a musical version of that famous Escher staircase."

James Marsh's single sleeve continued the moth theme of the album artwork and was the only painting in the series that already existed, having been made for his first book, where it appeared opposite a verse called Tiger Moth. Tim Pope directed the video, in which the band hang onto a grand piano suspended twenty feet in the air while a wind machine blows in their faces. Graeme Thomson of the Guardian called it "a surging, seven-minute tour de force" and wrote that "nothing signalled the transition quite as magnificently as Living in Another World." The song was chosen to promote the 1991 remix album History Revisited, and Lights with Darkstars covered it on the 2012 tribute album Spirit of Talk Talk.