You expose the film in me
We're drawing rings around the world
Sooner or later we will melt together
And draw rings around the world
With all those meteoric stones
And all those sheep they never cloned
Okay!

I am glowing radioactive
We draw beams around the world
Wish you could see us when we're at our best now
We draw rings around the world
With cans of Post Water in tow
We're gonna vaporize your soul
Ha-ha!

Earth will become Saturn II
We're drawing those rings around the world
Tetsuo II became me and you
With all those rings around the world
And all those body hammer blows
We're drawing rings around the world
Ha-ha!

Ring! Ring!
(Hello?)
Ring! Ring!
(Hello?)
Rings around the world
(Rings around the world) (X7)

Quote (1) (Gruff on ringsaroundtheworld.co.uk):
"At the time we were really fancying ourselves as a vocal band, so there's me and Bunf and Cian and Daf harmonising away on top of a rock 'n' roll pop song. It's a recurring communicative theme – the air that we breathe is full of people talking crap. It's one of my girlfriend's dad's theories, because there's radio waves everywhere, and if you visualised all these waves then the earth would be surrounded by this network of rings and pollution and junk. We spent a night phoning around the world. We'd get the national code and then try random numbers. We thought we'd make this amazing collage but it's just a collection of these irate people being woken up at four o'clock in the morning. The American Embassy in Madagascar, a record shop in Osaka, a record company in Australia..."
Quote (2) (Gruff):
"Again it is about the earth around the millennium and how we'll have this space debris of satellites, so we'll have rings around like Saturn but they'll be TV sets and bits of satellite."
Where:
Monnow Valley Studios/Bearsville Studios
When:
2001
Source:
Track 12 (Songbook): 3 minutes, 33 seconds
Track 3 (Rings Around The World): 3 minutes, 30 seconds
A-side ((Drawing) Rings Around The World): 3 minutes, 30 seconds
Status:
Complete!
Video director:
Pedro Romhanyi
DVD director:
Sean Hillen - The album's namesake (Drawing) Rings Around the World gets the Star Wars treatment with buckets of Pylon destruction thrown in for good measure! The theme behind RATW is based on the premise that our planet is constantly leaking electronic waste into space, where it finally condenses into a field of rings encircling the Earth! Sean used a mixture of traditional stop frame animation and frame tweaking in Adobe Premiere for the ominous Pylon men. Other props used in the video included a lump of pure silicone, a FIMO UFO model, a toy rocket, a box of fireworks and a pencil sharpener globe! After much hard work and effort to meet the DVD deadlines he and his fellow craftsman John had a well-deserved cup of tea in the Victory Cafe. Assisted by John Hickey with thanks to Miriam Duffy and Erner Murphy. A graduate of Belfast College Of Art and The London College Of Printing and The Slade School London, Sean is best known for his satirical photomontages and his visionary collages of Irelantis. He was also a prizewinner at the UK Design Council 1991 (Year Of Invention Award). Text in the DVD was added by SFA.
Remixed by:
Llwybr Llaethog - Rings Around The World DVD: 3 minutes, 33 seconds
Notes:
The spoken bits at the end of this song are quite simply too complex (and too foreign) to attempt to document here. It's all either fairly obvious or impossible to understand unless you can speak these languages! Tetsuo II is a 1992 Japanese science fiction/horror film directed by Shinya Tsukamoto.