Songfacts®:

• There is a devil inside all of us, but some wear it outward, like the woman in the song "raised on leather with flesh on her mind." We also meet a man "fed on nothing but full of pride," one of the seven deadly sins.
  
  "I was on a God and the Devil phase there," INXS lead singer Michael Hutchence said of the lyric in the book Classic Albums. "I suppose it's to do with the chaos of everything, you know? And we can put it into religious terms, I suppose. The Devil is chaotic. So that every time you think something's right, he comes in and changes everything."
• For the Kick album, Michael Hutchence and Andrew Farriss did all of the songwriting. Farriss, who played keyboards, guitar and other instruments in the group, got "Devil Inside" started with a sinister guitar riff he came up with in 1985 when he was cooped up in the Kenilworth Hotel in London. Hutchence added the lyrics to complete the song.
• This was the second single from Kick, the album that elevated the group to international stardom. Their previous five albums made them household names in their native Australia, but in the rest of the world they were mainly known for the song "What You Need" from their previous album, Listen Like Thieves. Kick was far from a sure thing - their record label, Atlantic, didn't like it at all. INXS manager Chris Murphy reported that executives complained there was "no way they could get this music on rock radio."
  
  But with a push in America starting with a tour of colleges, the first single, "Need You Tonight," took off, climbing to #1 in January 1988, four months after the album was released. That song cleared a path for "Devil Inside," which was warmly welcomed on radio and MTV. It rose to #2 in April, behind "Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car" by Billy Ocean. Kick stayed on the US albums chart for all of 1988 and much of 1989, with "New Sensation," and "Never Tear Us Apart" also charting as singles.
• The video was directed by Joel Schumacher, an A-list moviemaker whose films include St. Elmo's Fire and Falling Down. He also did a vampire movie called The Lost Boys that was released in 1987 and featured two INXS songs from 1986 they recorded with singer Jimmy Barnes: "Good Times" (a cover of an Easybeats song from 1968) and "Laying Down The Law." Returning the favor, Schumacher made the "Devil Inside" video in the same style, shooting it in Balboa, California, a ritzy part of Newport Beach. The band is seen performing at a club where lots of beautiful people come in and out of the shadows. It was a new look for the band, whose previous videos took place in studio settings with the camera trained on Hutchence.
  
  It was Schumacher's first music video. He later shot Seal's "Kiss From A Rose" as a tie-in with his film Batman Forever.
• It was only a matter of time before this song was used in a TV show about a demon. It finally happened in 2016 when it appeared on the "Pops" episode of Lucifer. "Devil Inside" also shows up in the 2001 movie Rock Star and the 2007 Samantha Who? episode "The Car."
• Michael Hutchence used to love "Devil Inside," but Andrew Farriss wasn't so enthusiastic. "I used to struggle with the song a little bit, because I didn't write the lyric," he admitted to The Tennessean in 2022. "He wrote the lyric and I, you know, I have some beliefs about life and the afterlife."
  
  Though Farriss questioned Hutchence's lyric, he took the view of "Well, that's art."