Songfacts®:

• Ash lead singer Tim Wheeler wrote this song about a girl he had broken up with - she was the first girlfriend he lived with. He took it hard:
  
  This is slow suicide
  Feelings that I can't disguise
  Never will be reconciled
  Something inside has died
• This was written for the band's 1998 album Nu-Clear Sounds, but when they started recording it, they felt the chorus wasn't up to standard, so they put it aside. Wheeler came up with a new chorus when he was driving to his parents' house in Northern Ireland. When he got there, he wrote it down and realized it would fit with the rest of the song, which the band then recorded for their 2001 album Free All Angels.
• "Burn Baby Burn" ended up being one of Ash's most popular songs, but Tim Wheeler wasn't keen on it. "I think because it had been over a long time, quite a long labor, I wasn't very excited about it," he said in a Songfacts interview. "I thought it was really good, but I thought it was just a good song on the album. But then, when we got to the record label, they were all like, 'Oh, this is a single. This has to be a single.' And, I was surprised that it turned out to be a really successful single for us because I thought it was a good song, but I didn't think it was amazing."
• The video features cheerleaders from The London Towers of the British Basketball League. Shot at a high school gym, the band performs the song as cheerleading and basketball go on around them.
  
  It was directed by Jeff T. Thomas, who did seven more videos for the band. The cheerleaders joined the band again when they performed the song on Top of the Pops.