Songfacts®:

• Vocalist Brett Anderson told NME about this portrait of secret lovers living for the moment. "I was thinking about my parents when I was writing that, drifting away and trying to make a life for themselves in the early '60s," he said. "I had a romantic vision of them."
• Keyboard player Neil Codling commented to Uncut: "We've always drawn people who share that outsider culture. Outsiders is a simple statement of what we are, along the lines of 'Trash' and 'Beautiful Ones,' a rallying cry for the excluded."
• The song was a turning point for Suede while they were working on Night Thoughts. There was a moment when Brett Anderson feared the sessions weren't working and that the group might stop making albums altogether. That changed when they wrote "Outsiders."
  
  "That was the song that saved the band," Anderson told Uncut magazine. "Every Suede album needs an anchor."