“Coils” is one of the band's instrumentals, so in place of lyrics, here is what was in the news the month it was recorded—an operation whose Allied code name was, fittingly, Corkscrew.

Pantelleria is a small volcanic island halfway between Tunisia and Sicily, and Mussolini had fortified it as his answer to Malta. With North Africa won in May, the Allies wanted it out of the way before they went into Sicily. Bombers flying from Tunisia hit it through May and, from June 6, very nearly around the clock—something over 6,000 tons of bombs in all, about 1,400 of them on June 10 alone. On June 11, 1943, as troops of the British 1st Infantry Division came ashore, the garrison of some 11,000 men ran up white flags, and Admiral Gino Pavesi signed the surrender that afternoon.

It was hailed at the time as the first defended position ever conquered by air power alone. That isn't quite so—warships shelled it too, and the invasion force was already landing—but it was close enough to make the airmen insufferable for a while. Churchill later wrote that there were no casualties “except, according to sailors' stories, one soldier bitten by a mule.”