Songfacts®:

• The team of Stock, Aitken & Waterman came up with this when Peter Waterman was telling Mike Stock that Kylie had stopped going out with her Neighbours co-star Jason Donovan, who was also on SAW's artist roster. Instead she was seeing INXS lead singer Michael Hutchence. He then commented how it was better the devil you know as they feared their lives were going to be hell as a consequence.
  
  Stock, however, disputed Waterman's version of events, saying he wasn't aware of the singer's private life at the time and was inspired to write the song just by hearing the title alone.
• In an interview with the UK magazine Songwriting, Waterman explained the benefit of a tight deadline. "The best songs we ever wrote were written literally when somebody said, 'We've just had a call from Kylie, she's on her way in and trying to avoid the paparazzi, so you've got a two-hour wait.' And we thought, 's--t, we haven't even got a song yet!' But somebody said, 'Better the devil you know' and we all went, 'That's the song.' Bang! In one hour the song was written and in three hours it was recorded. It was just a great title and it tells you what the story is."
• After Minogue's meteoric rise to fame with her first two albums, she wanted to put more of herself into her music with edgier fare than SAW was providing, but the producers didn't see the point in messing with a winning formula. In response - with the blessing of Gary Ashley, whose Mushroom Records released the album in conjunction with SAW's PWL label - Minogue went to LA to work with other songwriters and producers who'd give her what she wanted. SAW responded by capitulating to Minogue's wishes and changing up her style while staying true to their own.
  
  Her longtime manager, Terry Blamey, told the Chart Beats podcast on their 2023 A Journey Through Saw series: "The songs we recorded in LA, it was an excellent thing to do, because it scared them. They thought, Well, maybe she can go on without us. And maybe they might lose the goose that lays the golden egg. It was a very successful strategy. They really knuckled down and wrote amazing songs on that album."
• Matt Aitken told Chart Beats how the team navigated writing songs for Minogue that would give her the grown-up image she wanted without sacrificing the commercial appeal.
  
  "She wanted to be serious. She wanted to be Madonna. She didn't want to do pop songs anymore, but obviously she did because she wanted commercial success," he explained. "It's easy to write something that's trite and bubblegum. What isn't easy to do is write something that is commercial but that has just enough depth to it that people buy into the emotional content of it, lyrically. And that's what I think we did very, very well. And she wanted to be more grown up and all those things… so we decided to get more grown up about the music. Where do we go? Do we do rock 'n roll or indie? No, let's do something that is a little bit more grown up, let's go back to the club sound, and that's really what drove that third album."
• The team took inspiration from a few other tunes, including the rhythm section from the 1989 single "That's The Way Love Is" by the Chicago dance trio Ten City, and SAW's own 1987 song "Roadblock," which, according to Waterman, was rewritten to create the track. Minogue also brought "C'Mon And Get My Love" to the table, a 1989 song by the British dance producer D-Mob (with Cathy Dennis on vocals). The tune's club influence is especially prominent on early iterations of "Better The Devil You Know."
• Minogue hated the original ideas that director Paul Goldman sent her for the music video, which were in line with the good girl image she was trying to shed. When he came up with a sexier concept involving the scantily-clad singer dancing the night away with muscled backup dancers, she enthusiastically approved - but her producers didn't. Goldman felt the wrath of Stock Aitken Waterman, who were worried the provocative clip would irreparably damage Minogue's career, when he was summoned to their offices in London.
  
  "They wanted to strongarm me, there were a lot of politics and it was very condescending," Goldman told the Australian news site News.com.au. "They said they understood Kylie was trying to exercise some power, they said they were happy to play along with that but Kylie didn't understand what was at stake here. They wanted her to know they'd created this persona and image for her and she could damage it with this video and they might not be able to undo it. They gave me a lecture, it was very patronizing. I flew back to Australia to make the video, we pushed it even harder."
• According to Goldman, the producers also worried that the intimate scenes between Minogue and one of the Black dancers were pushing the envelope too far. Interracial relationships were nothing new to TV audiences by 1990, but in some contexts they still made headlines (like Madonna kissing a Black saint in her "Like A Prayer" video a year earlier).
  
  "They were really upset about her being in the arms of the Black guy, where she was kinda topless," Goldman recalled. "That made the front page of one of the daily papers there. Just to annoy them we did one take of her singing the entire video in the arms of the Black guy and sent it to them saying it was the B-side."
• In the video, Minogue wears a ring with a large silver M - but it stands for Michael rather than Minogue. She borrowed the jewelry from her then-boyfriend Michael Hutchence.
• This was used on the TV series Derry Girls in the 2019 episode "The Concert." It was also used in the 1991 movie If Looks Could Kill, starring Richard Grieco as a student who's mistaken for a spy during a class trip to France. It's featured in a scene when Grieco tries to get lucky with a dangerous femme fatale.