Songfacts®:

• Immersed in lyric writing, Suede frontman Brett Anderson spent hours in London's Highgate library, looking through biographies of old film stars. This ballad was named after the 1953 Marlon Brando outlaw biker film, The Wild One.
• Lyrically, Anderson's 17-year-old girlfriend, Anick, inspired this ode to a relationship being slowly lost. The Dog Man Star tracks "The Asphalt World" and "Black or Blue" were also written about his teenage beau. "Our relationship was fiery and fractured," he recalled to Mojo, "the kind you have when you're young."
• "The Wild Ones" is Brett Anderson's favorite Suede song. He told Suede.co.uk about its musical influences: "I was listening to a lot of very 'singerly' singers; Scott Walker, Edith Piaf, Frank Sinatra, Jaques Brel, people with the emotional and musical range to transform a song into a drama. This is what I wanted for the 'Wild Ones,' for it to be a timeless slice of melodic beauty that people got married to and shared there first kisses to. Something that embedded it self-deep within the soundscape of their lives. It's unashamedly mainstream but hopefully with a depth that belies this simple ambition. It's still my favourite single moment in Suede's history and when interviewers ask me of what I am most proud I always mention this song. The main refrain was inspired by Brel's 'Ne Me Quitte Pas.'"
• Brett Anderson first heard Suede guitarist Bernard Butler playing the music that became "The Wild Ones" during a soundcheck at a small venue in America sometime in 1993. Reflecting on the moment, bassist Matt Osman told Uncut magazine, "We were experimenting with lots of bits and pieces on the road, and this was a one-guitar piece, which is quite unusual for Bernard."
• Butler originally called the song "Ken."
  
  "I thought it was because he had a guitar roadie called Ken, but later he told me it was because one of the original people who answered the ad where we found Bernard was called Ken," said Anderson. "Bernard always gave the songs very prosaic working titles because he knew they'd eventually evolve into these tortured romantic psychodramas."
• TV presenter Bamber Gascoigne's brother, Brian Gascoigne arranged the strings. "It was tricky working on the strings because Bernard had suggested them but wasn't around," producer Ed Buller said. "So, we went with this Tony Visconti-style echo effect for the strings."
• Anderson's double harmony on the vocal was something he'd never done before. "He had the idea to layer an additional harmony throughout the verse, " said Buller, "which gives it a real Simon and Garfunkel element."
• Osman reflected on the broader context of the song within the Dog Man Star album:
  
  "The album is full of songs about endings - things breaking apart and dying," he said. "'The Wild Ones' is one of the few moments that leans towards optimism because it's about what happens if they stay together. Using the song title as the final words of the chorus is very old-fashioned singer-songwriter territory. Up until then, even when we did pop, it had a twist. But this was the first time we had the confidence to just write a big romantic pop ballad."