Songfacts®:

• Mark McEntee of the Divinyls wrote "Human On The Inside" with the American songwriter Shelly Peiken, who came up with the lyric. In the song, Divinyls frontwoman Christina Amphlett sings about a guy who stomped on her heart as if she didn't feel pain. She reminds him that she's human on the inside, with real blood in her veins.
  
  Peiken was truly heartsore when she wrote the lyric. In a Songfacts interview, she told the story: "My most successful songs were written about things that had happened. Real-life feelings, things that I didn't make up in order to get on a record. Somebody had hurt my feelings the day before and I scribbled these feelings, these hurt feelings, on a napkin. The next day when I was with Mark it went really well with the major 7s he was playing on the guitar."
• The song reached #59 in the Divinyls' native Australia but had little impact elsewhere, so McEntee and Peiken pitched it to Chrissie Hynde, who recorded it with her band The Pretenders in 1998 as the theme song to the TV series Cupid, which starred Jeremy Piven as a guy tasked with connecting couples. It lasted just one season, but in 1999, The Pretenders released the song as a single and included it on their album Viva El Amor. Their version, which was produced by Stephen Hauge, fared better than the original, reaching #33 in the UK.
• The Pretenders version was used in the 1999 Charmed episode "Love Hurts" and in the 2000 movie Saving Grace.
• The song's co-writer Shelly Peiken released her own version on her 2020 album 2.0 etc... with background vocals from Chrissie Hynde.