In an interview with the Dutch website FaceCulture, Biff Byford said this track was written atmospherically, while the band were playing; "[He] sang it at full volume," he said. Usually, Biff, who tends to write the lyrics to the band's songs by himself, sits down in his own studio by candlelight to work things out. "When I wrote 'Valley of the Kings'," recalled Byford, "I had to get it right with the pharaohs and stuff, or else some wiseass would go, 'Hey, you got the wrong Rameses!'"
The Valley of the Kings is a real place in Egypt and contains over 60 tombs of its illustrious rulers of times long since past. For a period in Egypt of nearly 500 years from the Eighteenth Dynasty to the Twentieth Dynasty, rock-cut tombs were excavated for pharaohs and powerful nobles under the New Kingdom of ancient Egypt. The fascination with Ancient Egypt - its history and its mythology - continues to this day, and this grandiose track is a typical serving from Saxon, leading distinctly towards the mythological rather than the historical.
In an interview with the Dutch website FaceCulture, Biff Byford said this track was written atmospherically, while the band were playing; "[He] sang it at full volume," he said. Usually, Biff, who tends to write the lyrics to the band's songs by himself, sits down in his own studio by candlelight to work things out. "When I wrote 'Valley of the Kings'," recalled Byford, "I had to get it right with the pharaohs and stuff, or else some wiseass would go, 'Hey, you got the wrong Rameses!'"
The Valley of the Kings is a real place in Egypt and contains over 60 tombs of its illustrious rulers of times long since past. For a period in Egypt of nearly 500 years from the Eighteenth Dynasty to the Twentieth Dynasty, rock-cut tombs were excavated for pharaohs and powerful nobles under the New Kingdom of ancient Egypt. The fascination with Ancient Egypt - its history and its mythology - continues to this day, and this grandiose track is a typical serving from Saxon, leading distinctly towards the mythological rather than the historical.
[Edit: more info added]