Songfacts®:

• This shimmering disco song is about the pressure Roxy Music were under while making their fifth album, Siren. The band recorded the album in the summer of 1975, having recently completed a world tour in support of Country Life (1974). In an interview with The Mail on Sunday in 2009, Bryan Ferry remembered: "It was a punishing schedule and there were a lot of late nights in order to get this record finished on time. I guess this was the true to life inspiration behind the song title and lyric."
• "Both Ends Burning" was one of the final songs completed for Siren because Ferry was struggling to write lyrics at the time. "Toward the end of recording, we were compromised as we had been on Stranded (1973) and other albums by Bryan not having finished lyrics so that tracks got overworked as instrumentals while we were working as it were in the dark," saxophonist Andy Mackay told The Quietus on September 28, 2015. "'Both Ends Burning' is a case in point. It has always been better live because we know where the singing comes in!"
• John Gustafson based his bassline for this song on "Dancing in the Street" by Martha & the Vandellas. Written by Motown songwriters Marvin Gaye, Ivy Jo Hunter, and William "Mickey" Stevenson, "Dancing in the Street" was later covered by Van Halen and David Bowie and Mick Jagger.
• The music video was shot at Wembley Arena in London on October 18, 1975. Ferry is seen performing in the G.I. Joe outfit he wore throughout The Siren tour. Designed by British fashion innovator Anthony Price, the outfit was inspired by Elvis Presley's tank crewman character in the 1960 film G.I. Blues.
• The Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr declared this was one of his favorite songs in an interview with MusicRadar on April 1, 2022: "You listen to 'Both Ends Burning,' that was a pop single! And the attitude of the singer and what he is saying, and the way he is putting his voice across, and just the start of it... That is the best kind of avant-garde."
• In the UK, an edited-down version of "Both Ends Burning" was released as the second single from Siren after "Love Is the Drug." It reached #25 and remained on the chart for seven weeks. In the US, meanwhile, "Both Ends Burning" was released as the B-side to "Love Is the Drug," Roxy Music's biggest-selling and highest-charting single in America.
• Jerry Hall appears on the front cover of Siren. Shot in Anglesey in Wales, the cover depicts the American actress and supermodel as a mythological mermaid figure. As part of her costume, Hall was coated in blue paint, a substance she struggled to remove after the photoshoot. "I went to the bathroom on the train to try and towel it off but I couldn't get it all off," Hall recalls in her 1985 memoir, Tall Tales. "So when we got to London, Bryan asked me back to his place to take a bath. He had a nice house in Holland Park. And when I came out of the bathroom wearing a robe, he said, 'Why don't you just stay here? I have a guest room.' So, since it was late, I stayed there."
  
  The pair formed a relationship soon after, although their union came to an abrupt end in 1977 when Hall left Ferry for The Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger.