Songfacts®:

• The title track to Saxon's 22nd album, "Thunderbolt" depicts the battle waged between the gods and Olympians in Greek mythology.
  
  "Zeus was very vain and used his power wrong," Saxon lead singer Biff Byford said in a Songfacts interview. "People stopped worshipping the gods of Olympus because they were too vain basically. So, that's what it means: 'Vanity that comes through power.' I suppose a lot of dictators have gone that way as well in the past."
• This is one of many Saxon songs that depict a battle of some kind. The band doesn't take on politics, but Byford hopes an antiwar message comes through. "A lot of the war lyrics that I write are basically saying that when governments go to war with other countries, it's the common people, the working-class people, who die for their inabilities to compromise or to negotiate things without a war," he told Songfacts. "Generally it's the common man that dies and it's always the families that lose their sons and daughters for the sake of a prime minister or a president or a dictator sending young men to war."