Robyn talked about this song on the promo record SPECTRE, on which he explains each of the songs on RESPECT:

"There are different versions of 'When I Was Dead' floating around.
There's a dubbed version which has got a lot more space in it. Morris
is shaking a bag full of rats' feet -- rats' toenails, I think --
and that's what the percussion is, it's all these things going 'shhhk-
a-shhhk-a-shhhk.' It's not a wide-open space, this song. Death could
equally well be the wide-open spaces -- I mean we've made it sound very
claustrophobic. You know, when the Devil asks him to supper, and then
God says he's got all his records, this is obviously happening in a small
room, in a cave, by candelight. The corpse is still in a small room lit
by candles. They've put some perfume on the corpse to stop its smelling.
The mourners are standing around, and they can't communicate with the
dead person, and the dead person can't communicate with the mourners.
All the dead person can see is God and the Devil who've turned up instead
while Aunt Edith and Cousin Aileen are standing there, weeping pitiously
by the corpse and strewing the ground with lilies. So, again there's a
communication gap between the living and the dead. Given the existence
of a universe, all the molecules in it, nuclear fission apart, and black
holes, have been here for ... for billenia or something. They just
keep juggling around so, you know, you've got three of Shakespeare's
molecules and you've got two of Himmler's or whatever it is. Part of
your fingernail was part of St. Joseph of Arimathea's frontal lobe or
something. And large parts of you were once a daffodil in ... Novia
Scotia or something. And [chuckling] your feet used to be Winston
Churchill or whatever it is. The same things keep getting recycled.
It could be that when we pass away, our psyches dissolve into lots of
sort of strips of feeling. All the things that comprise us that are
held together by our bodies dissolve hence 'I wasn't me to speak of /
Just a thousand ancient feelings,' feelings that have been around
since the beginning of human time."