Songfacts®:

• The subject matter of this song is a night out with Hitler. Bush explained in Q magazine, November 1989: "Years ago this friend of mine went to a dinner and spent the whole evening chatting to this fascinating guy, incredibly charming, witty, well-read, but never found out his name. The next day he asked someone else who'd been there who it was. 'Oh, didn't you know? That's Oppenheimer, the man who invented the atomic bomb.' My friend was horrified because he thought he should have given the guy hell, attacked him, he didn't know what.
  
  But the point was one moment this person is charming, then when you find out who he is, he's completely different. So I thought, Who's the worst person you could possibly meet in those circumstances? Hitler! And the story developed. A woman at a dance before the war and this guy comes up to her tossing a coin with this cocky chat-up line. Heads we're dancing. She doesn't recognise him until she sees his face in the paper later on and then she's devastated. She thinks that if she'd known she might have been able to get him and change the course of history. But he was a person who fooled a tremendous number of people and I don't think they can be blamed. It worries me a bit that this song could be received wrongly, though."
• This features bass work from Mick Karn, formerly of the English new wave band Japan. Bush met the bassist in 1981 at a charity concert, where Karn played during her performance of "The Wedding List." She thought his distinct playing of the fretless bass would be perfect for this track. "So he came along with a part that he'd worked out - I'd sent him a cassette. It was fabulous. He understood the whole story line. I hadn't sent any lyrics or anything, and he just kind of played this part," Bush explained in a 1989 radio interview with Boston's WFNX.