It was Heart which made the rundown of my 45 45s at 45 but I reckon now that of all the Pet Shop Boys singles, my favourite is Left To My Own Devices. My first exposure to this particular track was the LP version at just over 8 minutes:-
mp3 : Pet Shop Boys – Left To My Own Devices (album version)
It would become the second 45 to be lifted from the LP Introspective which itself was an unusual album for the fact that it was far removed from the normal process for pop/dance acts to release as singles with it being made up of lengthy songs and the versions issued singles had to be heavily edited for radio play.
I was quite bemused when I read it was going to be issued as a single given it was such a strange and almost surreal lyric. OK, the word love was contained within the chorus but it wasn’t quite boy meets girl or boy meets boy or girl meets girl material what with it also wittering on about Che Guevara drinking tea and setting the sounds of classical composer Claude Debussy to a disco beat. But somehow the madcap approach worked as it reached #4 in the UK singles chart when it was released in November 1988 and climbed all the way to #4 in the UK singles chart.
mp3 : Pet Shop Boys – Left To My Own Devices (single edit)
But it turns out that the album version wasn’t the one that they had also thrown in the kitchen sink. Nope, for that you had to get the 12″ version which extended out to an incredible eleven and a half minutes, beginning with an unlikely drumroll before incorporating house, disco, brass, strings, operatic backing vocals and a more deliberate spoken rap from Neil. What’s not to love?
mp3 : Pet Shop Boys – Left To My Own Devices (disco mix)
The b-side is a bonkers sounding bit of music, the sort of thing that seems to accompany a character in a film having a drugs-induced breakdown or panic attack. And in the typically perverse way the boys were behaving at the time, the short version was put on the CD and 12″ releases with the full version only on the flip side of the 7″:-
mp3 : Pet Shop Boys – The Sound Of The Atom Splitting (extended version)
Enjoy.
THE NEW VINYL VILLAIN 
Wonderful-you continue to do God’s work, if God was a DJ.
The Sound of The Atom Splitting – magic!
This one was the true fruit of PSB’s collaboration with Trevor Horn. This could have gone oh so wrong, but it went just the way it was likely meant to, knowing the standards of those involved.
One of the great singles of the 1980s.
iIRC “The Sound of the Atom Splitting” is crediting in the Further Listening release of Introspective as being part of a studio jam that was intended to be part of the song around the great line about Che and Claude.