About The Song
“2 Minutes to Midnight” is a song by the English heavy metal band Iron Maiden, featured on their fifth studio album, Powerslave (1984). It was released as the band’s tenth single, and first from the album on 6 August 1984. It rose to number 11 on the UK Singles Chart and number 25 on Billboard Top Album Tracks. The band’s first single to exceed five minutes in length, it remained their longest until the release of “Infinite Dreams” in November 1989.
A protest song about nuclear war and the nuclear arms race, “2 Minutes to Midnight” was written by Adrian Smith and Bruce Dickinson. The song attacks the commercialisation of war and how it is used to fuel the global economy (“The golden goose is on the loose and never out of season”), how rich politicians profit directly from it (“as the reasons for the carnage cut their meat and lick the gravy”) and how after a war concludes, the world is left in a far worse condition than before the war began, resulting in future wars and the development of more powerful weaponry (“to the tune of starving millions to make a better kind of gun”).
The song title references the Doomsday Clock, the symbolic clock used by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which represents a countdown to potential global catastrophe. In September 1953 the clock reached two minutes to midnight, the closest it ever got to midnight in the 20th century, when the United States and Soviet Union tested H-bombs within nine months of one another. The atomic clock, set at 12 minutes to midnight in 1972, regressed thereafter among US–Soviet tensions, reaching three minutes to midnight in 1984 – the year this track was released – and at that time the most dangerous clock reading since 1953. According to Dickinson, the song critically addresses “the romance of war” in general rather than the Cold War in particular.
Coincidentally, the song, which fundamentally criticises the atomic-weapon-age – was released 39 years to the day after the first use of the atomic bomb, on 6th August 1945, at Hiroshima.
Video
Lyrics
Kill for gain or shoot to maim
But we don’t need a reason
The golden goose is on the loose
And never out of season
Blackened pride still burns inside
This shell of bloody treason
Here’s my gun for a barrel of fun
For the love of living death
The killer’s breed or the demon’s seed
The glamour, the fortune, the pain
Go to war again, blood is freedom’s stain
Don’t you pray for my soul anymore
2 minutes to midnight
The hands that threaten doom
2 minutes to midnight
To kill the unborn in the womb
The blind men shout, “Let the creatures out!
We’ll show the unbelievers”
Napalm screams of human flames
For a prime-time Belsen feast, yeah
As the reasons for the carnage cut
Their meat and lick the gravy
We oil the jaws of the war machine
And feed it with our babies
The killer’s breed or the demon’s seed
The glamour, the fortune, the pain
Go to war again, blood is freedom’s stain
Don’t you pray for my soul anymore
2 minutes to midnight
The hands that threaten doom
2 minutes to midnight
To kill the unborn in the womb
The body bags and little rags
Of children torn in two
And the jellied brains of those who remain
To put the finger right on you
As the mad men play on words
And make us all dance to their song
To the tune of starving millions
To make a better kind of gun
The killer’s breed or the demon’s seed
The glamour, the fortune, the pain
Go to war again, blood is freedom’s stain
Don’t you pray for my soul anymore
2 minutes to midnight
The hands that threaten doom
2 minutes to midnight
To kill the unborn in the womb
Midnight
Midnight
Midnight
It’s all night
Midnight
Midnight
Midnight
It’s all night
Midnight, all night