Pet Shop Boys - Left To My Own Devices (12" The Disco Mix)
- 12 INCH VINYL
- Apr 19
- 4 min read
Updated: May 6
Left to My Own Devices was released in November 1988, almost exactly three years since Pet Shop Boys first entered the UK Top 40 with West End Girls. In total, they'd released 10 singles, four of which had reached number one.
Singer Neil Tennant coined the term "imperial phase" to describe a period when an artist has "the secret of pop music".
“Our imperial period was specifically 1988,” he says. “The album Introspective was very imperial; we had this idea of doing six 12-inch tracks rather than a conventional album, and it was lavishly orchestrated.”
Left to My Own Devices was perhaps the most lavish of all – a grandiose opening track for a grandiose album.
Pet Shop Boys had decided they should finally work with Trevor Horn and his team at Sarm West in Notting Hill, London, and wrote Left to My Own Devices specifically for their session with him.
Their demo, recorded at Abbey Road, had a Motown feel, but engineer Stephen Lipson felt a very current house-style 4/4 beat would be more interesting, so prepared a new version.
“Steve Lipson came up with the bass riff,” says Horn. “It really did change quite a bit from the way it was originally. I think the string arrangement is one of the best on any record I’ve ever done. It’s so good.”
The strings were arranged by Richard Niles, who had previously arranged Grace Jones’ Slave to the Rhythm.
Lipson also speaks highly of the arrangement: “It was always a shock hearing what Richard had done. It was always outrageous, too much. Brilliant, really brilliant, but absolutely out of control. He’s extraordinary really.”
He particularly loves the arrangement in the third verse (starting at 7'13" here), which he describes as “inappropriately brilliant... the second half of it... there’s this weird tension, it’s like a Hammer Horror, or Hitchcock, or something”.
Neil Tennant says the lyrics are an exaggerated autobiography: “I liked the idea of writing a really up pop song about being left alone. When we were children we each had a corner of the garden. I used to sit there for hours playing with my toy soldiers. My mother used to say she worried that I wouldn’t have any friends because I’d sit there and live in a fantasy world. When she heard this song she said she was worried by the line ‘I was a lonely boy, no strength no joy’, but in fact I wasn’t remotely lonely.”
Broadly, the lyrics chronologically narrate a day in the life of the character. Trevor Horn had told Neil he was working on a project that sounded like “Claude Debussy to a disco beat”, so Neil added this in the middle eight, adding a mention of Che Guevara to bring an image of revolution to the interlude. “The party animal”, quoted in the lyrics, meanwhile refers to Neil’s friend, the writer Jon Savage, who would often call him in the morning.
Introspective, Pet Shop Boys’ album of 12-inch-style compositions, was released on 10 October 1988, and is Pet Shop Boys’ most successful album of all time. Five of its six tracks made the UK Top 10 (including I’m Not Scared, which they had written for Patsy Kensit’s Eighth Wonder, and which reached number 7 in the UK). The album sold over 2 million copies in total.
The original Introspective version of Left to My Own Devices clocks in at 8'16", with its gradual orchestral intro and extended outro featuring chopped-up spoken lyrics expanding on the imagery in the verses. "The last section is meant to be a dream," Neil explains. "That's why everything is jumbled up - Che Guevara is drinking tea and takes to the stage in a secret life. Che Guevara becomes a drag queen in the dream; that's what I always imagined."
A remixed 7" edit peaked at number four in the UK chart in December 1988, and may have peaked higher if a second 12" single had been released – as had been the case with most other Pet Shop Boys singles – and if the video had been a little less dark, arty and moody. Additional remixes by Frankie Knuckles and Shep Pettibone were produced but not commercially released.
The 7", 12", CD and cassette single releases featured photos of Pet Shop Boys in surreal scenes on the cover. Their designer Mark Farrow disliked these enough to create plain yellow outer sleeves for the initial runs, to hide the images from public view. The 12" features a different image than the other formats.
This version then, is The Disco Mix, created by Robin Hancock, Stephen Lipson and Trevor Horn at Sarm West.
Fittingly, it’s an even longer, more experimental, and in parts more ridiculous version than the Introspective original, timed at 11'27", with a gradual build in a range of styles which explodes into a triumphant finale at around 8'15".
A perfect example then, of the ambition of Pet Shop Boys writing at the peak of their imperial phase, and of Trevor Horn’s Sarm West team at work at the peak of theirs.
Year: 1988 Label: Parlophone Cat no: 12RS 6198