Chapter VI: Not Quite a Blaze of Glory: No-one at the Bridge
It’s been very well documented how Iron Maiden’s sound changed significantly following the departure of Bruce Dickinson, the second main member to leave the band after Adrian Smith’s exit a year and an album previous. The first thing the remaining members had to do of course was replace their singer, and after auditioning hundreds of applicants (or at least listening to hundreds of tapes) they settled on Blaze Bayley, vocalist with Wolfsbane. The band was unable to weather the departure of Bayley and so split up. For about four years then, over two albums and two tours, Bayley would become the new voice of Iron Maiden. However it would be completely unfair and indeed untrue to blame the band’s sudden - and thankfully, only temporary - fall from grace on the singer.
The fact is, Maiden had been hit with a couple of bombshells. Two of their longtime and most important members leaving within a year of each other, coupled with the hanging up of his headphones of producer Martin Birch, who had helmed every album since
Killers surely must have shown the guys there was trouble ahead, and when you add in Steve Harris’s divorce, which led to the album having a more depressing, darker tone, well, it wasn’t hard to see this was going to be a hard slog. And it was. This, and the next album, charted the lowest of any in Maiden’s career, and received mostly negative reviews from critics as well as the thumbs-down from the majority of the fans. Perhaps naively, new producer Nigel Green gushed excitedly
"We all felt that the way things were progressing – the songs, Blaze's new involvement, the sound, the commitment – the new album really would have that extra quality, that bit of magic, that 'X Factor'. This became the working title for the album and we liked it, so we kept it. It is also very apt as this is our tenth studio album and "X" can bring up many images.”
It certainly can, including eXcruciatingly bad, eXtremely poor and even eXcrement. It would, as I intimate above, be easy to blame the lack of interest on the new singer; people had certainly grown up on Bruce, listening to him, going to see him, considering him the face of Maiden, and not having him there was going to be a tough sell. But Bayley performed admirably well, I believe, during his tenure with them, and can’t really be blamed for the rot that set in. That was, probably, mostly down to Harris, who wasn’t exactly in a mood to write punchy rock songs, and opted instead for long-drawn-out, over-complicated, dense and often hard to understand epic tracks, this being the first album since 1986’s
Somewhere in Time to feature three tracks over seven minutes, and one of those was eleven! Although he only writes three songs solo he’s involved in the writing of all but one, and the opener is that big eleven-minute borefest, one of his solo efforts, so it’s hard not to lump much of the blame for this on his shoulders.
Even had he not written all the songs bar one, Harris has always been the creative and driving force behind Maiden, and you’d have to assume that he has final say on what goes on the album, so the responsibility would still really be his. The addition of keyboards and, um, Gregorian chants surely only serves to show how this album was headed for trouble. Maiden had always been a guitar band, had little or no use for keys, but now they were slowly beginning to play a part, until by the next album they would be front and centre, perhaps serving as evidence of a betrayal by the band of their core principles and their promise never to use synthesisers, proudly displayed on the back of 1982’s classic
The Number of the Beast.
I feel personally that the first order of business should have been to reassure the fans. Here we are, Maiden should have been saying: Bruce is gone, but we’re still the same band. We’re not going to insult you, and his memory by saying “Bruce who?” but we want you to know we can continue on without him. Had they launched into a fast, short rocker in the vein of “Aces High”, “Run to the Hills” or “Flash of the Blade” even, I think nerves might have been settled. Instead, they seem to have chosen to try to reinvent themselves, or maybe that’s just how it appeared to me.
Either way, intentional or not, it didn’t work.
The X Factor (1995)
In the interests of clarity, it should be understood that this album was released long before Cowell’s show was even dreamed of, so they were not taking his copyright or allying themselves in any way with the music so-called talent show. That came much later; but the phrase “the X factor” has been in the English language for a long time, perhaps best expressed by, of all people, the French, when they say someone has a “je ne sais quoi” - literally, I don’t know what - to indicate there is something special, different, even unique about them. I guess the band could also have been using it to represent the unknown, a new and perhaps (sorry) brave new world into which they were going, or it could even have referred to Harris’s divorce, I don’t know. All I do know is that from then on the majority of Iron Maiden fans would equate it with a rubbish album which preceded another one, and a desperate holding pattern until Dickinson returned in triumph as the twenty-first century began.
Incidentally, I’ve used the “further away” cover, not because the original is more graphic, but simply because that’s the one I have on my copy, and so it’s more familiar to me. It does the job, certainly - Eddie being torn apart as a metaphor for Harris’s world being ripped asunder by his divorce. I don’t know the details, how acrimonious or vicious the separation was, but I guess we can assume it was not an amicable split, given the tone of the album. I suppose divorce is never easy, and Phil Collins went the same path when he recorded his debut solo album
Face Value. Can’t imagine anyone is too happy about splitting up from the person with whom they have spent some of their life, and possible expected to spend all of it.
Sign of the Cross (11:16)
As I said above, kicking off this album with a short, snappy tune from the golden age would have been my preference. Get the fans on side with a singalong headbanger before, if you must, you hit them with the slow, doomy, crunching epics. But no: Harris decided (I assume it was him, unless we can blame the running order on the label) to open with their longest song since “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, one that in my opinion is not fit to lick the bare, sun-scorched toes of that song, and right away we’re bogged down in over eleven minutes of claustrophobic, crushing, indulgent self-pity. I think it’s the first Maiden album to open so darkly, slowly, morosely and take a fu
ck of a long time to get going. Gregorian chants? Do me a favour! I think Eddie would rather take vivisection!
It’s almost a minute before we hear Harris’s bass, and our first introduction to Blaze Bayley’s voice is a low, muttered mumble that can hardly be distinguished, while Harris slowly goes about his business, surely making a new listener wonder if he or she has put on the right album? There are a few flashes of guitar around the edges but it’s not until the fu
cking THIRD MINUTE that the song gets going in any sort of appreciable way and becomes something vaguely resembling an Iron Maiden one. Even then, it’s more in the slower vein of songs like - well, I don’t know to be honest: it’s almost unlike any Maiden song I’ve ever heard. And not in a good way, of course. We’re five minutes in and still no solo you could talk about, the drumming is slow and pedestrian, the bass thick and moody, the whole mood a downer, man. This ain’t the Iron Maiden I’ve known and tried to continue to love!
Now it all stops as Harris executes a moody bass solo, similar to and yet nothing like the one in the midsection of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, while what sounds like strings and may in fact be a synthesiser come into the - still plodding - melody. It’s kind of like listening to some old Biblical movie soundtrack or something. The words GET THE FU
CK ON WITH IT! Are leaping from my angry lips, and finally - finally - at the seventh minute there’s a solo, but it’s a poor, weak, almost apologetic one. At last the tempo picks up and the guitars seem to gain a little confidence and break out almost as we expect them to. Getting better, but we’ve had to wait over three-quarters of the length of the song for this to happen?
At one point - with about a minute to go - you can hear the melody develop to the point where you can anticipate the “Woh-oh-oh!”’s, but they never materialise, instead the guitar takes the tune just about to the end, with one more chorus, bringing to an end a very unsatisfactory opening to what will prove to be far less than a satisfactory album. Harris can’t even resist twiddling a bit of dark bass at the end, as if the song wasn’t already bad enough. Luckily - or not, depending on which way you look at it I guess - there’s a serious upswing for the next song, but to my mind it is the only decent song on the album, something that might not have been out of place on
Somewhere in Time or even
Seventh Son of a Seventh Son, and you certainly could not say that about the rest of the tracks!
Lord of the Flies (5:02)
The thing that sets “Lord of the Flies” apart from the rest of the dros - sorry, tracks on this album is something Maiden have built a career on: the hook. There’s not a single song here - “Sign of the Cross” very definitely included - that I could even envision singing or hell, even remembering after the album ends. Most, I will be thankful to forget, and that is primarily because they are all s
hit but also because not one of them has a decent hook. The reason you remember a song, the reason it sticks in your head is the hook, be it in the chorus, bridge or even verses. It taps out its rhythm, melody or lyric - a really good song will impress you with all three - onto your synapses and you sing it to yourself, or hum it, or tap the rhythm with your fingers or toes. Look at songs like “The Trooper”: from the galloping drumbeat to the stop/start verse and the whoa-oh-ohs, everyone remembers that song. And it didn’t really even have a chorus! Or how about “Two Minutes to Midnight”? Or “Fear of the Dark” even. Songs you can sing in your head.
“Lord of the Flies” isn’t one of those, but the chorus does stick in the brain and it has at least a rocky opening on choppy guitar and thumping percussion, gets right to the point, no faffing around and definitely no f
ucking Gregorian chants! Based on the book by William Golding, it shows Harris’s love of both literature and somewhat of the macabre, and it’s a song you can nod your head to, if not actually bang it. I can’t say Blaze is as good as Bruce - his voice is more restrained - but he does a decent job on it. I’d be interested to see how Bruce handled this on stage, though I believe they perform few if any songs from this era these days, both they and the fans preferring to draw a discreet curtain over this period in Maiden history.
There’s a decent solo, but I mean let’s be honest here, it’s basically using the melody of the chorus, but there are at least “Woh-oh-oh”s so it seems much more a Maiden song than the previous one was. It’s also very simple, which is something you kind of expect from Iron Maiden, or did, up to this. Nowadays they’ve gone all prog and it’s hard to get a decent straight forward rocker out of them. Ah, salad days!
Man on the Edge (4:10)
Another decent song, and unsurprisingly selected as the lead single from the album, this has the chugging guitar, galloping percussion and sense of exuberance we’ve come to expect from this band. Another simple chorus, a half reasonable hook, but it’s not a song I ever remember, or probably ever will. At least the boys get to cut loose on the guitars here, and the song does suit Bayley’s voice a little better. Building up to a solo? Yes. Finally, the kind of fret-burning we want to hear from Dave and, to a lesser extent, Janick. Sails a little close to “Gangland” for my tastes, but the only one in which Harris has no input, so maybe it’s just coincidence, as it’s written by Gers and Bayley, the latter of whom does, to be fair, make a respectable contribution to the songwriting here, collaborating on five of the eleven tracks.
Fortunes of War (7:25)
We’re back to the long epic plodders though, as Harris takes sole writing credit for this one, another muttered vocal to start off with, then Nicko McBrain’s drums punch in hard, but then drop back out of the mix before the guitars whine in, and to be fair they’re not bad but this is still way way below standard for a Maiden album. Bayley’s voice is strained here; I can’t help thinking that Dickinson would have taken this in his stride, but I guess we’ll never know. Now it begins to pick up speed, thank fu
ck, and some energy is injected into the song. Can’t argue with the solos here, pretty special, though lyrically there’s virtually nothing here. Come on Steve: you can do better than this.
Look for the Truth (5:10)
Now the opening of this one has “Children of the Damned” stamped all over it, with its introspective guitar and soft bass, and once again we have a barely-audible vocal from Blaze, like he’s whispering or something. Come on guys! Where’s the punch in the face? Where’s the kick in the balls? Musically speaking, I mean, of course. Where’s the guitar riffs and thundering drums that set your teeth shaking in your head? It’s come to life now, but again it’s a slowburner, something we haven’t up to now been used to with Maiden, though they will continue to follow this practice on later albums. This song gives me the impression it’s just waiting to burst into life, but sadly it never gets the chance.
The Aftermath (6:20)
And another long introduction, though it does at least have a little punch to it. There’s certainly a theme of war going through this album, which I suppose Harris sees as a metaphor for his struggle with his marriage, and a theme which will surface again on later albums, particularly 2008’s
A Matter of Life and Death. The imagery here is pretty visceral, and seems to reference World War I, and when Blaze sings “What are we fighting for? Is it worth the pain?” you have to nod and think these thoughts must be going through Harris’s head as he reads letter after letter from his and his wife’s lawyers, and wonders what it’s all about? Again, it sounds like the boys are trying to let loose on the frets but are held back till almost the end of the song when they do get to go into action, and it’s pretty good, but a little too late I fear.