Noel has said:

It was inspired by Richard (Ashcroft) from The Verve, he wasn’t very happy for a while so I wrote it for him and about three weeks later he quit the band. It’s about songwriters in general who are desperately trying to say something.

To Select Magazine in 1995, Noel said:

I played him the song, and he nearly started crying. I was like, ‘Come on, hold yourself together, son! Easy now.’ In a way, it’s about all my friends who are in groups. We are bound with the weight of all the words we have to say. We’re always looking for more.

To NME:

I don’t believe people can go into a studio and record B-sides. It’s either a good song or a bad song. And I never intend to write a bad song! The only time I’ve really sat down to write a B-side I wrote “Cast No Shadow”, which was supposed to be a B-side but it ended up really good. There’s a bit at the end of “Cast No Shadow” when someone says down the mic really quietly, ‘Tha’ll do for a B-side’. So we had to take that out when it came to put it on the album.