Songfacts®:

• This was one of the first songs that Wild Beasts wrote for their Boy King album. Bassist Tom Fleming told Artist Direct it was also, "probably the first where we really hit upon the sonic template - synth bass, sequencers, rude guitars, minimal drums, swaggering songs with Hayden (Thorpe) singing about his pain.
  
  Fleming added: "The track represents to us a kind of nihilistic strut; you'll take what's yours, and hang the consequences (until, as they always do, they find their way back to you...)"
• The video was shot in Catalonia, Spain over two days and nights and was directed by Barcelona-based filmmaker and photographer Pablo Maestres. Fleming explained: "His idea was to put us in a world where we were being constantly pursued, constantly hunted, constantly harassed. He wanted to put over a real unease and paranoia, after all, it's lonely at the top, and everyone wants a piece of you."
  
  Fleming added: "The shoot seemed to have a shadow over it from the start - not only did a once in a lifetime storm curtail shooting and destroy a load of equipment, but we also had explosions, burns, serious illnesses and malfunctioning tech to contend with. Some kind of forest spirits having their fun at our expense, some kind of cloud that we brought over from London with us."
• Asked by Billboard magazine where the "Big Cat" imagery came from, Hayden Thorpe replied: "It has to do with my own romantic notions of what this would entail - although it's very different to my boyhood notions of what being in a band was about, I think I kind of held it in as high esteem as being an astronaut or a firefighter.
  
  I was at a barbeque the other night, and there was a little boy there. There was music playing and for some reason there was a mic stand and a mic. And he quite intuitively went up to it, leaned down the mic stand and started singing down the mic. And I said to the guy next to me, 'That's my job. That's unbelievable. I do a job that five-year-olds dream about doing.'"
• Speaking about Boy King, Hayden Thorpe said: "Every song has a built-in clause, which is the emotional hinge. And it normally falls in the middle eight of every track. So a song like 'Big Cat', a song about sexual prowess and domination, the middle eight talks about how it 'takes all of me' - sort of aware of what I'm giving for this."