“It follows pretty closely the movie Falling Down with Michael Douglas. A lot of things happened in that movie. One of the key lyrics is “cannibal state,” where the system of government consumes the individual and the materialistic society consumes the individual and digests him and spits him out, so his identity is completely gone. In that film, Michael Douglas goes to work every day, because he’s lost. But he is not going to work: He’s pretending to go to work. He’s getting dressed, packing his bag, making his sandwiches, and leaving the house the same time every day and coming home at the same time, because he’s too ashamed to tell his family that he’s lost his job. And the only reason he’s lost his job is because it was a government job where he was designing missiles, and they don’t want any more missiles. That’s the tragedy of it: He’s a geeky oddball kind of guy that finds it difficult to communicate, but he finds himself trapped in this situation where he can’t tell the truth because he can’t even tell the truth to himself. He can’t face up to the fact that he’s redundant and unnecessary, which, obviously, is so unpleasant.”Blaze Bayley (170)

“”The Aftermath,” I was reading a lot of poetry from the first World War. And around the same time, my father gave me a picture of my great-grandfather. He died in the first World War. These two things seemed to connect, and when I was searching for lyrical ideas for The X Factor album, I had this photo of my grandfather in my notebook, and it just seemed to strike a chord. That was where “The Aftermath” came from, really.”Blaze Bayley (170)

“”Futureal” is that feeling of paranoia. At the time when we were working on the Virtual XI album, there was a lot of conspiracy theories that I was listening to. I’m very interested in physics and cosmology and life on other planets. And the question, “Do aliens exist?” Because of research into quantum physics and quantum fluctuations, the possibilities of people or beings coming from another dimension.”Blaze Bayley (170)

“”Two Worlds Collide” works on two levels, really. It’s a metaphor in many ways for two cultures colliding. I remember going to Japan for the first time, a country that I’d dreamed of going. But I had culture shock. Very much like the time I first visited Los Angeles years ago. I just was shocked at their way of doing things, the culture, the people. It was alien to the way that I’d been born to, and to most things that you’re used to in the Western world. That’s not bad. That’s just different, and you’ve got to get used to it. I found that many of the things in Japanese culture that I didn’t like the first time I got there, on my second visit were the things I liked the most. So it works on that level. It’s two worlds collide, two cultures, and also it’s about the comets and the asteroids. Only a tiny proportion of the asteroids are mapped. It’s a lot more now, but really, there is no program. Bruce Willis cannot get into a spaceship with movie stars and go blow up an asteroid. It’s just not viable at the moment.  So Armageddon really will happen, because these things are so big. They come out of the asteroid belt, these massive things that will destroy life on Earth.”Blaze Bayley (170)

“‘2 Minutes To Midnight’ deals with a very gory subject (possibility of nuclear war through the arms race) and some of the lyrics there are distinctly unpleasant, but that’s just as it should be, because it’s a very unpleasant subject.”Bruce Dickinson (702)