Empire of the Clouds story of the R101 airship, which crashed on its maiden voyage in northern France on 5 October 1930. The song was written entirely by the band's lead vocalist, Bruce Dickinson, who initially intended it to be about "World War I fighter airplanes;" Dickinson abandoned the idea after using the same theme for the song "Death or Glory," also from "The Book of Souls". At the time of recording, Dickinson was reading "a big, sort of encyclopedic crash report" of the R101, entitled "To Ride the Storm", which gave him the idea for the song's eventual subject. Dickinson describes it as
48 Crash States she had already released two singles with all-female band The Pleasure Seekers. The song "48 Crash" was written and produced by Mike Chapman and Nicky Chinn. The song "Little Bitch Blue" was written by Quatro and Len Tuckey and produced by Mike Chapman and Nicky Chinn. The song has long been assumed to be about male menopause. However, according to the British writer D. J. Taylor, one alternative theory is that, having boasted of their ability to write "a song about anything", Chapman and Chinn were issued with the challenge to come up with a treatment of the 1848