Songfacts®:

• This was the first single from Pulp's largely unsuccessful second album Freaks, released in 1987 during an unhappy relationship with Fire Records. By this point the core of the band that would achieve 1990s fame - Cocker, guitarist Russell Senior and keyboardist Candida Doyle - were in place, with only the rhythm section of bassist Steve MacKay and drummer Nick Banks to come.
• The band were not in a happy place at all during Freaks, as Cocker explained in a 1994 Record Mirror interview. Said Cocker: "In June '86, we started the Freaks album. It was recorded for £600 - in one week. The producer disowned it: he didn't want his name on it! This was the low point, emotionally, of my life. It's such a depressing album. There's some decent songs but they're badly done. 'I Want You' is good, but there's a better version as a demo. The violin's miles out of tune - it's supposed to be a big ballad. 'Don't You Know' came out on a Record Mirror compilation 'Fruit Cakes And Furry Collars' - it's the same version.
  
  It was called 'Freaks' because I'd been out of school four years and lived this marginal life with no success. I was living in a factory building, a drop in center for all the freaks and misfits of Sheffield. We'd been doing something worthwhile and original and yet nobody seemed interested. This was the dark days of the mid-'80s: 'we're heading for a boom time, let's be happy.'
  
  'Aye aye aye aye moosey' was in the charts. We were nowhere near the mainstream. Also, I was in the middle of the first proper relationship I'd had. I'd gone into this terrible depression of finding out what relationships were really like, but not knowing how to deal with it - you go out with somebody for six months and spend another eighteen trying to split up. All in all, I was not a happy person."
• Proof of how unhappy things had got was when a music video was attempted to be recorded for "They Suffocate At Night" - the band split up on set! Cocker noted in the same Record Mirror interview: "Russell was extremely disciplinarian, I was quite puritanical, but Pete (Mansell, bass) and Mag (Magnus Doyle, drums) just messed around. It got to a head and everybody had a fight. It wasn't worth the aggro anymore."
  
  It would be after this split that the band would reform with the classic 1990s lineup, after a few trials with other members.