As many of you know, or will have guessed by now, I'm more or less finished writing album reviews. I've done this for about seven years, on and off now, often going into great detail (perhaps too much for some people) and I think that, in general, I may have said all I have to say about the music I listen to. These days, I'm tending to concentrate on my history series of journals. That said, I would like to tackle what I see as a fundamental flaw in one of my favourite bands, something I'm sure most if not all of you will have noticed, whether you agree with me or not that it is a flaw.
When Maiden began they were a raw, young metal band, skating (it is said) on the edges of punk, but fairly quickly they legitimised themselves and almost in a single year became one of the top-selling metal acts in the world, bringing, almost literally, metal to the masses. Over the next few years they really could do no wrong, and albums like
The Number of the Beast, Piece of Mind and
Powerslave yielded them hit singles, chart and radio airtime, and new hordes of fans. Maiden scaled very quickly the summit of the metal mountain, and they've been sitting there, in a pretty unassailable spot, for nearly four decades now.
But have they rested on their laurels too much?
This forms the basis of the question which will inform this new journal. I prefaced it by asking if forty years in the business is too much, and of course, no, it isn't: bands like Hawkwind and The Rolling Stones have been going for fifty, sixty years even. But the point in my question is perhaps a little more subtle. Really, what I'm asking is have Maiden, certainly over the course of the last ten years or so, lost their edge?
Or, to put it another way...
There was a marked change in their output even as far back as 1990, when the last two albums to feature Bruce Dickinson were, to be fair, relatively lacklustre. It seemed like the boys were getting tired, going through the motions, out of ideas. Even the usually creative spring that is Steve Harris looked to be having trouble coming up with compelling ideas for songs. I mean, “Mother Russia”? Really? Those last two albums –
No Prayer for the Dying and
Fear of the Dark – aren't ones I regularly play, and there's a good reason for that. They're not sh
it, not compared to what was to come, but they are very poor relations to the ones that preceded them, and I think it's a matter of record, or at least agreed among fans that the years 1982-1988 were really the band's golden period, and after that they seemed to enter something of a slump.
Adrian Smith had seen the writing on the wall earlier than Bruce had, or at least was the first to make a move,
Seventh Son of a Seventh Son being the last album he would be involved in during the twentieth century. By the time they had completed
Fear of the Dark, Bruce too had had enough, and made his exit in 1992, leaving the remaining members to carry on as best they could. Which general opinion agrees was not very well, as they produced two very sub-par albums which are almost best forgotten about.
Now, here I'm not going to take the easy way out and blame new singer Blaze Bayley for the poor quality of those albums. Bruce had not been there from the beginning, true, but his was the first voice I had heard when experiencing the music of Iron Maiden, so for me he was the original. After I learned he wasn't on the first two albums I wasn't that happy but I wasn't too bothered: after all, this was merely the Guy Before, and he was done by 1980 and we would not be hearing from him again. Besides, I've said before that Paul Di'Anno's rough, husky voice suited better the material on the debut and
Killers, and that Bruce's versions of songs from those albums have never, for me, measured up to the visceral energy and rawness of the former singer's performance. But anyway, for me, and for a lot of people, Bruce
was Iron Maiden, and to ask someone to replace him seemed like losing your best friend and then trying to get someone to take his place. It was the same with Genesis: Ray Wilson had no chance of replacing Phil Collins, while by contrast Steve Hogarth did make a lot of Marillion fans forget about Fish. Sometimes it works, often it does not, and in Maiden it did not. But Bayley gave it his best. He was up against it from the start.
Let's not forget though – Adrian was gone, Bruce was gone, but Dave, Nicko and most importantly Steve remained. Notwithstanding what I just said about Bruce being Iron Maiden, it might be more accurate to say he was the
voice of Iron Maiden, but Steve Harris had always been its heart. The founder of the band, the main lyricist, and a man who made playing bass cool, Steve had and has always had a firm control over the band, and while he may not be a dictator in the way Roger Waters was, everyone knows who's in charge. So in many ways, Bruce's departure could have been seen as a challenge to Harris. Could he hold the world's favourite metal band together after losing two of its most influential members?
The answer was yes, but barely. I envisage Maiden struggling through a decade of what must have been a wilderness of ideas, a desert of creativity, a long dark night of the soul for them that lasted eight years. Whether they were anxiously awaiting/hoping for the return of Bruce is something I don't know, but they must have been happy when he did come back, as the appropriately-titled
Brave New World, which kicked off a new Maiden for the new millennium, blew all previous efforts away, reaching all the way back to the glory days of the eighties and rekindling the fire that had used to characterise and drive the band. The good times were back.
Or were they?
After the initial euphoria of
Brave New World, it seemed Maiden all but vanished. Yes, they put out albums – another four since that one – but as far as I was concerned, though I bought them and looked forward to them, they have mostly disappointed. I can't say I don't like them, as I played each maybe once and left it at that. The previous album had been played to death, and prior to that (skipping nimbly over the Bayley years) I had regularly played every album right back to the debut. So why is it that even now, I feel no real compulsion to spin one of the new ones?
That's what I aim to find out in this journal. I'll be listening to the weaker albums and trying to decide was I unfair not to give them a chance, or have I been justified in largely ignoring them? I'll be exploring the changes Maiden have gone through, both in lineup and musical direction, and asking the question I asked at the start: after forty (one) years, is it enough? Is it time to call a halt to this? Are we looking forward to a new Maiden album, or dreading it?
So two questions come to mind: one, why am I doing this? Well, apart from being the usual pain in the arse you all know and, well, know, I'm genuinely curious. I want to know why it is that one of my favourite bands is now, not quite no longer that, but that the music I listen to from them comes from their early period almost exclusively. I mean, I can still sing any song from most of the albums from
Iron Maiden up to
Seventh Son, but after that, hell, I'd be hard pressed to even tell you the track listing. How and why did that happen? I want to know, even if you don't.
Two: how am I going to approach it? Well, I'm going to walk right back to the end of the room, grab a pole vault, take a run at it and... nah. I'm too lazy for that. My plan is to spew out an annoyingly large amount of boring essays on this and that, why I think Maiden have changed, how they've changed, where they're going, what made them one of my favourite bands and why they are not as big a favourite with me now as they were, and also to do a deep scan on every album after, well, after
Powerslave really. That might surprise/annoy some people, to whom albums such as
Seventh Son are sacrosanct, but while I can enjoy both that one and
Somewhere in Time, I do see signs of the rot beginning to set in during those years. Only slightly, and more with
Somewhere in Time than
Seventh Son, but I believe that's where it began.
For my money, the holy trinity is
The Number of the Beast, Piece of Mind and
Powerslave. I'm not suggesting those albums are perfect – none of them are. There are weak tracks on all of them. However the strength and quality of the other tracks makes their weakness much less a drain on the albums. Whereas later albums tend, I feel, to suffer from more and more poor tracks and less what the consumer world calls “hero products”, tracks that can hold together an album by sheer force of their quality. I mean, no album with “Run to the Hills”, “Flight of Icarus” or “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is going to be considered weak, is it? So those three, plus the original two, as they're not really relevant to what I'm doing here, will be left alone. It's also a good point that I've reviewed those extensively, so there's probably not much point in going over old ground.
Each of the other albums will be taken apart in detail, and I'll be trying to examine and work out what each track either contributes to the decline of Iron Maiden or helps try to keep their legacy afloat. Maiden embarked on a tour in 2018 called “The Legacy of the Beast Tour” (which, due to Covid, is scheduled to resume in 2022) touted as a “history/hits tour”. I bet we all can guess where the vast bulk of the setlist is going to be drawn from. There's a reason for this, and it's the one that inspired the creation of this journal: twenty-first century Maiden looks like a tired, lumbering old beast desperately trying to remain relevant in a changing world of metal and rock, no longer the lean, mean metal machine it once was, taking on the world and giving the charts the finger. Of course, Maiden have probably as many fans now as they did in the eighties, probably more, but the hardcore fans have got to be a little disappointed at least at the path their high priests have led them down.
I'm not saying they should disband, nor do I expect them to when they're still as commercially popular as they ever were, and I wouldn't want to deprive anyone of seeing them live. But I wonder if a long hiatus before the next album – if there even is one – might not be a good thing? They have, after all, four decades of music to draw on, so they could conceivably tour the world playing their hits until they reach retirement age. I used to look forward to a new Maiden album when it was released, but now I'm not so sure I want to see another one. I mean, I listened to
The Book of Souls just the once, and I have no particular desire to do so again.
Could it be time to chain up the Beast?