Last Night on Earth Trivia Quiz

Answer: Gimme Shelter

Mick Jagger has declared this an apocalypse song. Keith Richard states that he was inspired to write it while watching a crowd of people escaping a storm. From the opening licks of Keith's guitar you get a sense of dread, like something malevolent this way comes.

The piano kicks in and then Jagger's voice starts to filter through. It sounds like he's far away but pressing forward like a storm cloud full of menace with darkness dripping from every ambiguous lyric. Then comes the band's master stroke, a female voice, that of Merry Clayton, cuts through Jagger's distinctive voice with a higher pitch, bleeding out the words "Rape, murder; It's just a shot away, It's just a shot away". "Gimme Shelter" was released as a single on December 5, 1969.

In some respects the doom that the song seemed to foreshadow occurred the very next day when Meredith Hunter was gunned down at the Rolling Stone's free concert at Altamont.

Answer: 1999

As if looking to drive home his point Prince then continues the above mentioned lyric with "so tonight we're gonna party like it's 1999". In his own inimitable fashion Prince has created such a great party tune we fail to notice that it comes with an underlying prophecy of doom. Or perhaps he's laughing at us and this is all a giant hoax with the "Purple One" merely spinning out an elaborate pick-up line "we're going to die tonight, this could be our last chance, why don't you and me ..." The song is also the title track of Prince's 1982 album and whilst it is one of the pivotal tracks on the record it failed to make the Top Forty in both the US and UK charts during its initial release. Three years later it would be re-released on the back of the success of "Little Red Corvette" and it rose to number twelve on Billboard's Hot 100.

Answer: Sunday

"Every Day is Like Sunday" is Morrissey's second single from his debut solo album "Viva Hate" released in 1988. As a single the song got to number nine on the UK charts and remains one of Morrissey's more recognisable numbers. There is however, some tenuity when it comes to calling this a true "end of the world" song. Whilst Morrissey calls for Armageddon in the lyrics he also appears to be talking about some seaside resort that somebody should have but forgot to bomb. Staring at his lyrical resort town waiting for it to vaporise draws a parallel to Neville Shute's group standing on the beaches of Melbourne waiting for the nuclear bombs to come and wipe out their city. Shute, himself, drew inspiration for the book's title from the lines
"In this last of meeting places
we grope together
and avoid speech
gathered on this beach of the tumid river"
in T.S. Eliot's poem "The Hollow Men". This poem is notable for its famous closing lines
"This is the way the world ends
not with a bang but a whimper".

Answer: Metallica

The album "Kill 'Em All" was released in 1983 and it represents the debut offering by the band. The entire album is a stream of relentless malevolence, driven by the power, precision and dexterity of the band's playing, likely to shake the foundations of the Horsemen themselves. "The Four Horsemen" calls forward the Biblical riders of the apocalypse to spread their message to the four corners of the globe. However, unlike the riders in the Bible (Conquest, War, Famine and Death) ,the quartet in this number come in the guise of Time, Famine, Pestilence and Death.
David Mustaine receives a writing credit for this number having originally worked on it with James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich before being fired from the band. Mustaine would later release his own version of the song, "The Mechanix" with his new group Megadeth.

Answer: Russians

"Believe me when I say to you
I hope the Russians love their children too".

"Russians" appears on Sting's debut solo album "The Dreams of the Blue Turtle" (1985) and it soaks itself in the paranoia of the Cold War, taking a mighty swipe at the doctrine of mutually assured destruction that existed between the USA and the USSR as well as the protective subscriptions put forth by President Reagan and the rhetoric of President Krushchev.

"There's no such thing as a winnable war
It's a lie we don't believe anymore".

The album was a huge success for Sting spawning five top selling singles. "Russians" would reach number sixteen on Billboard's Hot 100 and number twelve on the UK charts.

Answer: 99 Luftballons

This song, by German pop rock band Nena, tells how two children release 99 red balloons near the Berlin Wall as a sign of goodwill. Unfortunately the radars on both sides of the wall cannot separate the balloons, see one blip on their screens , each thinks that the other side has launched a first strike and simultaneously launch what they consider to a counter. Whilst the premise may seem outlandish with the paranoia that existed at the time you could almost seeing it coming true.

The song proved to be a huge hit for Nena, topping the charts in the UK, Australia, Japan, Canada and Germany.

It peaked at number two on Billboard's Hot 100.

Answer: Talkin' World War III Blues

Woody Guthrie, who was a major influence on the young Bob Dylan, didn't invent the "talkin' blues" style but he did use it successfully and was responsible in taking it to a new level of public acceptance. It also had a lasting impact on Dylan as it provided him with a medium in which he could create a set of lyrics that were virtually written as a "stream of consciousness".

It allowed him to set aside the seriousness that had been a feature of his writing to this point and, instead, employ humour as a means to rail against nuclear war.

As a jester (as Don McLean would later observe) rather than the finger pointing evangelist he was being made out to be. This is very evident in lines where he invites a girl to "let's go play Adam and Eve" and describing a Cadillac as a "good car to drive after a war". "Freewheelin'" was only Dylan's second album but it arrived at a point where his songwriting had reached a new level of depth and complexity. Even more remarkable was his prolificacy without the loss of quality. "Freewheelin'" also captures some of Dylan's best protest era songs such as "Blowin' in the Wind" and "Oxford Town". Armageddon was also a strong theme in tracks such as "A Hard Rains a-Gonna Fall", the scathing "Masters of War" and the subject track of this question.

It was during this period that Dylan wrote the haunting "Let Me Die in My Footsteps", a song about fallout shelters, which unfortunately didn't make it onto this album.

Answer: Apocalypse Please

The lyrics in this song deliver the premise of religious fanatics walking out among the chaos and ruin that represents the world coming to an end and loudly proclaiming that all their work in promoting their religion had been justified and that their religion was the one true religion.

The ludicrousness of this concept drove the band's songwriter, Matt Bellamy, to make the sound as over the top and epic as he could possibly make it. The version released as a digital single, which would reach the top ten of the UK's first official downloads chart, was recorded live at the 2004 Glastonbury festival.

The track appears on the band's third studio album "Absolution" (2003) which, in itself, is a recording driven by the fear of the apocalypse. This is evidenced in titles such as "Running Out of Time", which comes with a video clip that contains strong overtones of the 1964 movie "Dr Strangelove", "Sing For Absolution" and "Hysteria".

Answer: Two Tribes

"Two Tribes" is introduced by an air raid siren and its lyrics clearly indicate that in the battle about to ensue there will be no winners. The lines however, do not attest to a second coming of Christ unless you can glean it from "listen to the voice sayin' follow me".

A more realistic view, that has been expressed, is that Holly Johnston took his inspiration from the 1981 movie "Mad Max 2 - The Road Warrior" in which the narrator opens the film with the line "For reasons long forgotten, two mighty warrior tribes went to war and touched off a blaze that engulfed them all". The single, which was the band's second, was a massive success, reaching the top spot in the UK charts in 1984 where it sat for nine consecutive weeks.

Its prolonged success sparked renewed interest in the band's first single "Relax", propelling it back up the charts to the number two spot.

This made Frankie Goes to Hollywood the third act (behind The Beatles and John Lennon) to have two songs holding the top spots on the UK charts at the same time.

Answer: London Calling

"This is London calling ..." was used by the BBC as its radio station ID during World War II. Joe Strummer and Mick Jones, the writers of the song "London Calling", have used this as a banner to bring together a range of world events, that were topical at the time, as a conspiracy to deliver the world to Armageddon. Lines such as "the ice age is coming, the sun's zooming in" served to build paranoia while "a nuclear error" referenced an incident at Three Mile Island's nuclear reactor plant. All the while this is fueling a sense of helplessness among the population, which is spelled out in "we ain't got no swing" and "we ain't got no high".
However, the real cleverness in this song, that prevents it from descending into a quagmire of doom, is the humour that is delivered by Strummer as he snarls out lines such as "to the zombies of death, quit holding out and draw another breath".
A final touch of genius is not allowing the song to come to a sudden stop but to eerily fade out while Morse code staccatos a solitary message in the background ... S.O.S.