Songfacts®:

• The first single from Dog Man Star announced the darker tone that the band had taken, which contrasted heavily with their debut record. It depicted frontman and lyricist Brett Anderson's visions of civil rebellion and riots in the streets. He said of the song in 2011 on Suede.co.uk: "I suppose this was my comment on an age of excess; a portent of doom; the guilty realisation that this grotesque house of cards that we had built around ourselves could at any point come tumbling down and that the only way to deal with that was to embrace and celebrate it's destruction and to dance around the bonfire. I'd always been fascinated by animal imagery, the whole man-as-animal animagus thing."
  
  "There was a bit of Lord of the Flies in there as well with the innocent but chilling children's voices chanting at the end," Anderson added. "I suppose my vision was of some sort of post-apocalyptic landscape where society has crumbled and man is reduced to his primal childlike, animalistic form picking at the rubble."
• The song title was inspired by an old schoolboy band of Anderson's called The Pigs.
• He told Mojo it described, "a cloud of fear I saw over life, realizing this grotesque house of cards we'd built could come tumbling down."