Chapter VII: Play the game, lads! Cheer up: it might never 'appen! On the ‘ed, son!
And so we come to the second and final album on which Blaze Bayley takes vocals, their last before the triumphant return of both Bruce Dickinson and Adrian Smith as a new millennium dawned, both literally for the world and figuratively for the band. Whether it’s intentional or not, it seems to me a lot has changed. Gone is the dark, doomy, smothering and claustrophobic album cover, so dark that it could be easily mistaken for being an offering from a band in the atmospheric black metal genre. Hell, even Eddie smiling! Well, grinning, but it’s a major improvement on the painful grimace he wore on the previous album, perhaps indicative at the time of how many Maiden fans, including myself, felt on listening to that dark slab of metal boredom. This cover returns to the bright blue (and red) background we haven’t seen since
Seventh Son of a Seventh Son ten years previously. It wouldn’t of course be fair to level the usage of dark covers at
The X Factor alone - Maiden’s first four albums all either show scenes taking place at night or in some sort of darkness - but somehow it works better with them. Even after
Seventh Son, when they went back to the dark covers, it was justified:
No Prayer for the Dying is set in a graveyard while
Fear of the Dark, well, you don’t need
that explained to you, now do you?
But whether it was the absence of Derek Riggs, their longtime artist on such iconic covers as
The Number of the Beast and
Powerslave (though in fairness he did not create the cover for Dickinson’s last hurrah at the time,
Fear of the Dark) or even later Melvyn Grant, who had worked on that cover, and here returns, there was something just, I don’t know, depressing about the cover for
The X Factor. Given that it could be seen as a visual representation of Steve Harris’s life and marriage being torn apart (Eddie is literally being vivisected) as he went through his divorce, maybe it was just too dark. One thing you could, and pretty much still can, say about Maiden is that there was always a sense of fun about them. Certainly, they took their music seriously and often wrote about serious topics, but never with any real sense that they were trying to change the world. If it happened, then yeah, great, but mostly they were just out to do what all metal bands use as a mantra, have a good time. Nothing wrong with that.
Virtual XI sees something of a return to that easy camaraderie (even if forced or feigned), with a much more cartoonish cover and a cheerful shrug. The very title of the album tips the wink to football fans, and gamers, as Steve explains:
"We figure our fans are pretty much the same as we are, with pretty much the same interests, so we thought, 'It's World Cup year in '98. Let's get the football involved in the new album.' And we were already working on a computer game at that time, so we thought, 'Well, let's bring that element into things, too.'" And no bad thing. Your average Iron Maiden fan, I would venture to suggest, is really not that interested in your personal feelings and sufferings, Steve - sorry to be brutal, but I do believe it’s true - they just want to enjoy themselves, and this album showed them, maybe, that the dark days were over and they could get back to having a laugh.
The cover is bright and garish, perhaps the most cartoonish (as I said already, but it’s worth repeating) of any of their albums and certainly the brightest since
Seventh Son or
Powerslave, the title is tongue-in-cheek, sort of an in-joke, and the overall mood is much more cheerful. The cover, to me anyway, says let’s not take ourselves too seriously boys (yes, and girls, if you must) - life’s too f
ucking short. Whose round is it? And it’s not just the cover where there are major changes, though this is often where a record buyer will begin, making his or her choice. Of course, in the case of a Maiden fan, they’ve already made that choice. I must just mention though, before I move on from the cover, the smart little poke at the religious right as the band possibly remember how
The Number of the Beast was burned in churches probably when released in the US of A. That little circle at the bottom right, wherein the numbers XI are, does look awfully like a pentagram! Oh ho ho!
Note: for those who somehow don’t know, the title is pronounced “Virtual Eleven”, and refers to the eleven members of a football team, or soccer to you.
The music has changed, too. Gone are the long, droning, epic trac - what? They’re
not gone? There’s an almost ten-minuter, a nine and an eight? Well, you can’t have everything. But at least the dour, doomy, black and pessimistic mood of the previous album has been exorcised and none of the darkness from those songs carry over to this one. That said, it should not be forgotten that in a general way, this album is still s
hit. I may seem to be bigging it up and praising it here in this introduction: I’m not. It’s still terrible, just not quite as terrible as the previous one, as if anything could be. But they did try, and you have to give them that. While the songs may not be all short and snappy, they’re more, what’s the word? Happy? Maybe. Upbeat? Definitely. Enjoyable? Debatable that one now, son, but were you to put a gun to my head and force me to choose one of the two albums to listen to, I would go for this one every time.
Some of this lifting of the pall of darkness has of course to do with Harris sorting his divorce and getting it out of his system. It quite often happens that the relief of getting it over and done with can result in a much happier album to follow - witness Phil Collins on
Hello, I Must Be Going - but it could also be down to the fact that this time Harris shares out some of the songwriting duties. Blame for
The X Factor has to be laid pretty squarely on his shoulders, as he wrote all but one of the songs, so it follows that if he collaborated with other band members - in one actually staying out of it altogether - the songs could be more varied and, well, better. And that’s what happens here.
Not really. The songs are still generally pretty sh
ite. I want to again make it clear that the only reason I’m talking positively about
Virtual XI is in a sort of Bush/Trump comparison. It’s still awful, but it’s not as awful as the other one. It has its moments, as we’ll see, but like
The X Factor it was also panned, and actually did worse in the charts than its miserable predecessor, not even scraping into the top ten in the UK, though it did slightly - slightly! - better in the USA, both albums remaining well short of the Hot 100. This gives
Virtual XI the dubious distinction of being both the lowest-charting Iron Maiden album in the UK and the second-lowest of their releases to chart in the USA. Normal service would be resumed after this, but this can only be seen as the nadir of Maiden’s chart performance.
Fans and critics united in their disappointment in the album. The main issue at least one critic had was that the songs were just forgettable, and while I wouldn’t entirely agree with this - there are at least two songs I can remember from this whereas there’s only one on
The X Factor - of all the Maiden albums I’ve heard, it certainly has the least catchy songs, always assuming the caveat of its predecessor. It is perhaps telling that four other tracks written during the sessions for
Virtual XI never made it onto the final product, but would resurface two years later on
Brave New World. They are "Blood Brothers", "Dream of Mirrors", "The Nomad" and "The Mercenary". Maybe if they had been included this album would have been a better one, but they weren’t and it isn’t.
Virtual XI (1998)
On the surface, there’s nothing really wrong with this album, to quote Steven Thomas Erlewine of
Allmusic: it’s just that there’s nothing really great about it either. It starts off well - Maiden had obviously learned some lessons, among them the idea that you do NOT kick off an album with an eleven-minute plodder, particularly when you’re trying to win back or retain fans after your talisman has left - and we get a short, punchy all-out Maiden rocker, and in fact the next one is one of my few favourites on the album. But the problem is that, all through this release you’re waiting. Waiting for the kick, waiting for the killer riff, the screaming solo, the stunning lyric - waiting for the standout track. And, well, it just never happens. I suppose, to stretch the metaphor the lads used to title it, this is like waiting for a game that promises goals and incidents galore, and ends up as a boring nil-nil draw with few chances for either side. One of those games, maybe, where you begin wondering if you’re supporting the right side.
Futureal (3:00)
Three minutes is a decent length for an opener. You want a taste, and you want the immediacy of a starter that might end up being a single (it was, for all the good it did them) and you don’t want to have to slog your way through over ten minutes of dark, doomy drivel. So “Futureal” kicks off the album well, and is an unapologetic, no-frills and no-nonsense rocker with which Maiden, I believe, try to blow away the cobwebs from the previous album and (to mix the metaphor a little) cut and hack their way through the choking jungle darkness towards light, sun and air. And it works. Mostly. I think Maiden fans were at this point both nervous and also putting the band on notice that they were not going to stand for another self-indulgent piece of crap like they had had to suffer through three years ago. We get it, Steve: you’re sad, and angry, and confused. Happens to us all. Don’t take it out on us.
Let’s be honest here: this is nothing special, but at least it does have the familiar Maiden riffs, and as the shortest song on
The X Factor was over four minutes, and the only one that short, it’s a welcome relief from the epics on the previous album. But you’d have to say it owes a lot to fare from
The Number of the Beast to
Seventh Son, really. Nothing new here, but sometimes the familiar is more welcome.
The Angel and the Gambler (9:51)
While I will freely admit this is one of my favourite tracks on the album - that list isn’t long - it pisses me off because of the unnecessary length of it. I’ve written about this before, but for a song which just falls short of ten minutes (and so hovers dangerously around
X Factor territory, especially being the second track) it’s basically repetition for about half of the song. There’s not a lot in it, with the chorus repeated an incredible twenty-two times, most of these over a five-minute period that closes the song and really, just gives Harris (who wrote the song solo) a chance to indulge (there’s that word again) himself on something that Maiden once trumpeted they would never use, keyboards.
I mean, I do love the song, but I’m not blind or biased enough to fail to see its major shortcoming, as addressed above. There’s a guitar solo but it seems almost tacked on; this is, by any other name, an Iron Maiden song on keys. Who would ever have thought it? Come on: even the second verse is just the first repeated. God, how lazy.
Lightning Strikes Twice (4:49)
One of only three songs on which Harris shares songwriting duties, here it’s Dave Murray collaborating with him on another basically short track, with a sort of deceptively balladish opening before it kicks into the expected power rocker Maiden have built their reputation on. Reminds me of “Heaven Can Wait” from
Somewhere in Time. Hmm, let’s see… written by Harris, but solo. Interesting. The chorus, though simple, is to be fair quite catchy. Murray and Gers are given their head here again, first time since the opener, and we’re back in familiar territory. I mean, again, it’s nothing to write home about, and again in fairness “The Angel and the Gambler”, despite, or perhaps because of, its flaws is a more memorable tune, but this is not bad and it does have some teeth.
The Clansman (9:06)
We’re back with a Harris solo composition, and we all know our Steve does love his history as well as his films, so it comes as no surprise to find that when the two collide, he may feel compelled to write a song about it. As he does here, taking
Braveheart (though not the actual historical story of William Wallace, interestingly) as his template. It’s the other song I rate on this album; it has all the classic Iron Maiden tropes: a sort of introspective opening on guitar, a slow burning run up to the main riff, a catchy as hell chorus that would surely have fans punching the air at the gigs and screaming “I am the Clansman! Freedom!” especially, one would imagine, north of the border. I guess the Scottish fans must have been delighted that after more than two decades of writing about English history and events, their hero finally decided to approach the history of bonnie Scotland and give them something to sing about.
And it’s a good song, there can be no doubting that. It’s hard to find anything wrong with it, as lyrically it looks back to songs like “The Trooper” and “Sun and Steel”, which musically it’s almost a peek into the future(al) of Iron Maiden, as they began to embrace longer, more intricate songs and turn in an almost progressive metal direction. For all I castigated him for his work on
The X Factor, and indeed here, particularly on “The Angel and the Gambler”, he really pulled this one out of his hat, as opposed to out of, well, somewhere else. Yes, for the last three minutes or so it’s something of a rerun of “The Angel and the Gambler”, as he just more or less repeats the same phrase to the end, but hey, he gets in the “whoa-oh-oh-oh”s, which up to now have been missing. Steve, you old sentimentalist, you!