Co-written with Scott Richardson, it was on Ronson's 1974 debut solo album Slaughter on 10th Avenue, released shortly after leaving David Bowie's backing band The Spiders from Mars.

It was the B-side to Ronson's second solo single "Love Me Tender"; a song made famous by Elvis Presley.

[2] The song was pressed as a single by Virgin Records following the release of the Travelogue album, but it was then decided to re-release the song "Empire State Human" (from the band's first album) instead and include "Only After Dark" as a free single to be given away with the first 15,000 copies of "Empire State Human".

This was perceived by the band as a total lack of faith in their newer material, causing great resentment and anger,[3] and would be one of the issues that contributed to the split of this line-up of The Human League some months later.

As a free single it was not included in the UK chart mechanism, though the re-release of "Empire State Human" to which it belonged peaked at No.