[8] The original demo of the song was recorded at musician Ian Stanley's home studio in Bath, after a chance meeting led to a working relationship with the duo.

In an effort to sound more commercial, and because Lord was busy recording Peter Gabriel's fourth album, Mike Howlett was brought in to produce.

Although both recordings of the song open with a sample played in reverse, on the original, it is an extra lyric spoken by Orzabal, while on the album cut, it is a brief piano lick.

Both formats featured the B-side "The Prisoner", a noisy, electronic piece inspired by the Peter Gabriel song "Intruder", which showed off the duo's early experiments with synthesizers and sampling.

To provide a chart push the second time around, Mercury took full advantage of the picture disc and coloured vinyl gimmicks that were popular throughout the 1970s and early 1980s.

Aided by aggressive promotion and the duo's coinciding British concerts (at many of which the song was played twice), "Pale Shelter" finally became a chart success, peaking at No.

[15] The video, which features a number of odd juxtapositions (including a police officer directing traffic and a live alligator in a swimming pool), is notable for the scene of an imprint of a giant iron on a runway at Los Angeles International Airport, with steam apparently coming off the tarmac, onto which Smith and Orzabal walk, and another scene in which the pair walk into a sea of flying paper aeroplanes, with one of them hitting Orzabal directly in the eye.