Left to My Own Devices

Lyricist Neil Tennant explained the meaning of the track:

That's when I realised what the song was about - that this person goes through life always doing what he wanted to do. I liked the idea of writing a really up pop song about being left alone.^[4]

He continued:

The song is a day in the life of someone, so it starts off with getting out of bed and being on the phone and drinking tea and all the rest of it, and it ends up with coming home. ... By this time I was making the words very exaggerated and camp, though writing a book and going on stage were both things I had wanted to do when I was young.^[5]

As with the other tracks on Introspective, it has a longer version on the album and was edited down to become more radio-friendly when released as a single. This is mainly due to the Pet Shop Boys wanting to be different from every other artist at the time. Tennant stated:

It was quite exciting to plan the songs as long because we had been so disciplined at making four-minute pop singles, with the exception of "It's a Sin", which is five minutes. The idea also was to have an album where every track was a single.^[6]

The album version includes a long outro in which fragments of the main song lyrics are cut into a different order, such as "Che Guevara's drinking tea".

Miranda Sawyer from Smash Hits named "Left to My Own Devices" Single of the Fortnight, writing, "Pop perfection from the winsome twosome. Complete with swank orchestra, this massive stomper galumphs away at a breakneck pace into all sorts of dramatic twists and turns, over which Neil's deadpan vocals sound brilliantly menacing. [...] A storming chorus plus! — plus! — one of those superbly pretentious talking bits Neil does, rounded off with a breathtaking violin swoosh, must ensure that this soars to the top of the charts and stays there for weeks and weeks. A truly awe-inspiring Single of the Fortnight."^[7]

The accompanying music video for "Left to My Own Devices", directed by longtime Pet Shop Boys director Eric Watson, primarily consists of Tennant and Lowe dancing on an invisible glass floor, with the camera angle facing upwards. Tennant and Lowe are joined by several acrobats who are also seen from the same camera angle. At one point, balloons are also visible. MTV declined to show the video due to its dimly-lit nature.^{[citation needed]}

Turkey's longest-running weekly video-music programme Pop Saati (lit. Pop Hour) begins with the intro of the song, which continues from 1987 until today on TRT.^[8]

In 2024, the song was used in a television commercial titled "Clocking Off" for the British telecommunications company EE, depicting people leaving a drab workplace for a vibrant home life.^[9]