This song is about a bunker that was destroyed during the first Gulf War that ended up being a bomb shelter full of women and children.
From Thom:
"You said it’s the angriest thing you’ve ever written." Thom: "Yes. Well yeah, I guess it is. I mean… It’s quite simple really, I had an extremely unhealthy obsession, that ran through the ‘Kid A’ thing, about the first Gulf War. When they started it up they did that lovely thing of putting the camera on the end of the missile, and you got to see the wonders of modern military technology blow up this bunker. And then sometime afterwards in the back pages it was announced, that that bunker was not full of weapons at all, but women and children. And it was actually a bomb shelter. And so everybody… we all got to witness the wonders of modern technology. And it ran through so much stuff for so long for me. I just could not get it out of my head. It was so sick. And so that’s where the anger comes from. We did the most dreadful version of it. It was all that programmed… just a disaster. But interestingly something good came out, because we turned the tape over and it became ‘Spinning Plates’." (XFM, spring 2003)
This song is about a bunker that was destroyed during the first Gulf War that ended up being a bomb shelter full of women and children. From Thom:
"You said it’s the angriest thing you’ve ever written." Thom: "Yes. Well yeah, I guess it is. I mean… It’s quite simple really, I had an extremely unhealthy obsession, that ran through the ‘Kid A’ thing, about the first Gulf War. When they started it up they did that lovely thing of putting the camera on the end of the missile, and you got to see the wonders of modern military technology blow up this bunker. And then sometime afterwards in the back pages it was announced, that that bunker was not full of weapons at all, but women and children. And it was actually a bomb shelter. And so everybody… we all got to witness the wonders of modern technology. And it ran through so much stuff for so long for me. I just could not get it out of my head. It was so sick. And so that’s where the anger comes from. We did the most dreadful version of it. It was all that programmed… just a disaster. But interestingly something good came out, because we turned the tape over and it became ‘Spinning Plates’." (XFM, spring 2003)