Is the Number of the Beast Up: Iron Maiden 1986 - 2015
 

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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...
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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 shit, 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?

Looking forward to reading this. I've never understood their popularity.

Then you have the perfect person to explain it to you. As related several times elsewhere, Maiden were the first ever metal group I got into. I was 19 at the time, which might go some way towards explaining the attraction, but they were a gateway to other bands like Saxon, Motorhead, Tygers of Pan-Tang, Sabbath and Deep Purple for me.

Glad to have you along. :)

Expect Batty to drop by with many reasons why this will fail, why Maiden are unassailable and what part of my anatomy I should insert where.

ha, well I look forward to all of it.

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Chapter I: Progressive or Regressive:
Does a fan's attention span vary inversely with the length of a song?
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If you put a gun to my head, I'd wet myself. Probably shit myself too. But if you assured me all you wanted was a direct answer to the question, what went wrong with Iron Maiden, I would, after several attempts at speaking, tremble out the answer in two words: long songs.

Now, that might seem an oversimplification, and it is, but I believe it is at least partially at the heart of Maiden's perceived fall. Of course, the band have had long songs since day one, and not just long songs either, but involved ones. On their first album there's “Phantom of the Opera”, a seven-minute monster that to me is in three movements. It's quite classical in its composition, leading to its being also described as Maiden's first foray into progressive rock, or I guess you'd have to say progressive metal. For the time, it was pretty shocking and new. Most of the bands that came up via the NWOBHM – at least, those who survived that trial of fire – favoured short, snappy songs that came in around the three to four minute mark, were, in general, pretty basic (listen to any Angel Witch or Saxon or Raven album to see what I mean) and didn't overtax the imagination, either of the listener nor the composer that much. That's not to put those bands down, but they really more or less found a formula and stuck to it. Saxon were a little more expressive and adventurous with their lyrics, but by and large a lot of their tracks sound quite similar.

Which only made Iron Maiden stand out more. Obviously, the bulk of two albums they put out between 1980 and 1981 were short, to the point, rock out songs like “Drifter”, “Running Free” and their title song which closed the debut, but there were other ideas in there too, mostly due to the interests of the founder, bass player and lyricist Steve Harris. As befit a metal band, especially a new one riding the wave of new British heavy metal, the themes were almost all dark – murder, horror, paranoia, anger all feature heavily in the lyrics of both albums, as do a sort of defiant rebellion against authority. This is only to be expected. Saxon, after all, titled one of their albums as a snub to the police, while The Tygers of Pan-Tang have a wild tiger snarling on the cover of their debut, and Motorhead had a distinctly Teutonic, not to say Nazi, look about their logo. This was, after all, at its core, protest music – loud, angry and often full of expletives, yes, and hardly the sort of music sixties protest singers would acknowledge as having been the forebears to, but still protest. Metal has always been about a kind of protest, though in general not a real “smash the system” punk-style thing, more a “leave us the fuck alone” sort of idea.
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But you can protest and snarl and rage and spit, and still have a lot to say, and Harris did have a lot to say, and he said it through the lyrics of the Iron Maiden albums. After a few years he calmed down a little and began writing in a more restrained way, taking history and literature as his subjects, and indeed sharing the songwriting credits, from about the fourth album on, with some of the other band members, but he still remained, and remains, the one who writes the lion's share of the music, or at least the lyrics.

The thing about metal is that it is a pretty new phenomenon in many ways. It grew, as we all know, out of a kind of synthesis of the old hard rock bands like Deep Purple, Free and Bad Company and punk rock, into something harder, sharper and faster than nearly any music that had been recorded up to then (punk excepted in terms of pure speed of course). And it was, I begrudgingly admit, a British phenomenon. It started in Britain and eventually spread from there, but even the godfathers of the genre were British. The NWOBHM, after all, was the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, and it was a tumultuous time for music. A slew of bands rose and fell, and only the best – or luckiest – survived, and at the very top of that pile, swaggering and arrogant and – in the words of our missing member OccultHawk, unassailable – strode Iron Maiden. They would be the ones to carry the torch, bring the gospel, if you will, of heavy metal to the world; they would hold the banner high, wave the flag proudly both for Britain and for heavy metal, and show that the genre was not just something the kids listened to while bashing their brains out. This was music with something to say. It might say it loud, it might say it angrily, it might curse at you and look at you with contempt, and sometimes it might be so loud and/or fast that the message was in danger of being lost in the maelstrom of guitars, drums and growling or screaming voices, but it had a mission.

And Iron Maiden were its spokesmen.

So to get back to my original point: long songs. Another seven-minuter showed up on their most commercially successful album at that point in 1982, though to be fair “Hallowed Be Thy Name” owes much of its runtime to that superb solo that all but closes out the track, and the album. A year later they were at it again with “To Tame a Land”, again closing the album, again with a big guitar solo, again tipping the seven-minute mark, in fact making it the longest song of theirs at that time, at almost seven and a half.

And then came Powerslave.
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This blew all records off the shelf, introducing us to the almost fourteen-minute epic “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, and throwing in the title track at over seven minutes too, for good measure. The quality of all of these tracks is not in doubt, but I think the real reason they were, if you will, accepted – even welcomed – by the fans was because there were more “standard” Maiden tracks filling out the albums around them. Fast-forward on to 2015 and their most recent, to date, album, the double offering The Book of Souls (their only ever double album at the time of writing) and there are no less than four of the eleven tracks that hit over the seven minute mark (two of which go over ten) and that's not even counting the closer, which as all Maiden fans know, comes in at a whopping eighteen minutes, finally taking the record from “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and knocking it senseless to the floor. We'll talk more about that song later, never fear.
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But for now, back in time we go and in fact it wasn't totally necessary to go all the way to the twenty-first century to find Maiden experimenting with longer songs, and more of them, on one album, as the very next one to follow Powerslave has three out of eight which run for over seven minutes, with a fourth almost edging in at just over six and a half, making almost half of the album consist of long tracks. I must admit, I'm not a particular fan of Somewhere in Time: I do like it, but I find some of the songs too long and frankly boring. Again, more of that as we get to the album. However even here the longer songs are balanced by relatively shorter ones, but still I don't think I could sing too many of even the shorter ones.

Then we get to Seventh Son of a Seventh Son.

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Now this one, to its credit, has only one long song (though it's almost ten minutes!) but the problem here that I see is that, if “Phantom of the Opera” was the very faintest mewling of the infant known as Iron Maiden: Progressive Metal band, then Seventh Son is a pretty lusty roar. It's said not to be a concept album, but it is the closest they come to one, and the themes of the songs are all loosely tied to ideas of insanity and power, and I personally see it as the next best thing to one. Thankfully, Maiden did not yet – and have not so far – gone the whole hog and written a multi-part metal suite (though to some extent you could argue that “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” could be seen as one) but this album, for me anyway, stands as a marker for the direction they were later to go in.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with progressive metal. I love it. But it's a sub-genre, and really, unless you're in that sub-genre you kind of have no business trying to play it. Maiden have always been a little hard to categorise for me – are they speed metal? Thrash? Some refer to them as NWOBHM, and that's to me as much a copout as my own description of standard metal, but the fact is they play, for want of a better or more accurate phrase, the kind of metal you'd expect a metal band to play that isn't an extreme metal band. They're not pop metal but to some extent you might level that accusation at them, if only for the pop(ularity) some of their songs have achieved, even outside of metal, something few other bands in the genre have managed.

But the thing about metal is that at its core it's loud, abrasive, fast, powerful, angry. The songs are short, direct, simple. There are some sub-genres which buck the trend: atmospheric or ambient black metal often relies on long, meandering, often quite beautiful melodies that run into double figures, with some bands even having albums with only one or two tracks on them. Doom metal can also have very long compositions, and of course progressive metal is where you can find this too. Overall, you don't tend to get fans singing along to twenty-minute ABM tracks or Doom songs, for many reasons, but one important one I think is this. People want to be entertained, and they have short attention spans. Not everyone of course, but your average person will listen to music for as long as they enjoy it, then if it becomes a chore to keep listening to it will stop. In other words, and again to be very simplistic about it, if it's too long it's usually boring. Prog heads like me can listen to twenty-five minute compositions without a worry, but not all of them. I still fall asleep every time I try to listen to IQ's “The Last Human Gateway”, yet have no issue with Genesis's “Supper's Ready” or Rush's “2112”. I suppose really the key thing is not how long the song is, but how engaging it is, and continues to be, through its run, and I think this is where Maiden have stumbled.

I'm pretty sure I could ask any Maiden fan to name a song from any of the last four albums that they really enjoy and know well, and they'd struggle. Do you know all the words and music to “The Reincarnation of Benjamin Breeg”? “The Red and the Black”? God forbid, “Empire of the Clouds”? I personally don't think metal fans are built for this kind of investing in songs. Naturally, that's a generalisation, and perhaps an unfair one, because we all know most if not all of the words to “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” or “Powerslave” and we can all sing along to “Hallowed Be Thy Name”. But I think it takes a particular type of music fan to enjoy longer compositions. Prog fans are masters at this, and I think Maiden's somewhat clumsy attempts to merge mainstream heavy metal with progressive metal have, on balance, been unsuccessful.
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That doesn't of course translate to a dip in album sales. The Book of Souls shot to number 1 in the UK and number 4 in the US, giving Maiden their best performing album both sides of the water since, um, the previous one, and going gold everywhere as well as platinum in Hungary (huh?) so sales weren't affected. How people felt after buying the album is of course something sales don't tell you, as I once noted about box office receipts for movies: how do you know what percentage of those who bought a ticket (or album) liked the film, or album, once they had paid for it? It's not like they could return it, or even if they could, that there's any record kept of returned album sales. So maybe millions bought it and a large percentage were disappointed with it. It did receive largely critical praise, though some outlets were less effusive in their opinion of the album.

But sales and critical acclaim aside, talk to any Maiden fan or go on forums and you will hear a general disappointment with the direction their favourite band is headed. I likened Maiden earlier to a lumbering dinosaur desperately trying to stay relevant, but with songs like the frankly hard to maintain your interest in “Empire of the Clouds” (not saying it's a bad song, but are you going to listen to it once a month?) they seem to be failing spectacularly. Not only are few bands – even outside metal – writing such epic compositions, the potential for singles, which abounded in albums from the eighties and even nineties is no longer there. The shortest track on The Book of Souls is “Speed of Light”, and that's five minutes! And it was the one chosen as the lead single! Where are the “Run to the Hills”, “The Trooper” and the “Aces High”? Long gone, it would seem.

Have Maiden misjudged their audience, or have I? Even with five years between that and their last album, even with it being their first ever double and featuring their longest song ever, even with much effusive praise, both by fans and critics, who talks about it now? We still go on about “The Number of the Beast” or “Hallowed Be Thy Name”, almost forty years later. It's only been seven years since the release of The Book of Souls, and does anyone talk about it, sing its songs, even remember it? Myself, personally, I think it was a behemoth too far. But again, I'll discuss this when we get to the album.

The point is, those four albums may be great. I don't know. I've never listened to them enough to make a decision. I've been, in the main, unimpressed and bored by them, and have not wanted to sit through another listen. I could never say that about the previous albums. To be fair, I know why I hate The X-Factor and Virtual XI, but I don't know why – or if – I hate Dance of Death, A Matter of Life and Death, The Final Frontier and the monster Book of Souls. I just don't know them well enough, and I don't know them well enough because it's become a chore to sit through them. The songs are long, and that's one thing, but they're also boring. Or to put it in the words of Dave Lister on Red Dwarf, I am smegging un-gripped. I just don't see the point. Why have a song run for ten minutes when nothing much seems to happen? Why repeat most of the track just to make it eight or more minutes long? Where are the hooks? Where are the singalong choruses?

Where, in short, is the fun?

For now, I'm still looking.

**** off you idiot. Western language reads left to right, not down and up. Contribute something or sod off with your stupid comments.

:bowdown:Dont worry about him he just has to set the pace backwards... I agree much of what you have said and so much reading but then you write well for sure. I look at Nightwish and love some of their early stuff but not so much at all the newer stuff coming out of then so guess lots of the bands change sometimes... it is just purely change of band members and influences by the media even, fans, changes in their lives...can be so many things that change a band....I except more what I hear as opposed to in depth wonderings. I suffer word blindness at times so likely missed some of your post comments/feelings..Take Bon Jovi my good mate Ash who we share music with mostly says they are soft.. but I enjoy them a lot so hey does it matter what others opinions are that much when you enjoy..it is hard I can see that for you as your start out with a band and they change, they all change to some degree..James Bay enjoy his music a lot and I cant believe it but he is now enjoying some of his music...:wavey:
Favorite Nightwish Song...

Hey Dianne, welcome to another of my many journals. I too am a huge Bon Jovi fan, and get a lot of stick for it, which used to bother me but now I don't worry about it. What does bug me is that Batty is a big Maiden fan, a real authority on metal, and his input could be really valuable here, but instead he just wants to make pithy posts criticising how I put text on graphics. It's annoying, but not that unexpected. Anyway welcome, and hope you enjoy the journal.

What's the Western language?

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Chapter II: Strangers in a Strange Land: Writing the Future


So where to begin our exploration (deconstruction?) of Iron Maiden? Well, as I already mentioned, there's no need to involve the first five albums, so here is, for me, the jumping-off point, the album on which the smallest cracks, which would later develop into wide fissures and threaten to ruin this band for me, began to show.
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Somewhere in Time (1986)

This album has quite a few firsts. It's the first to feature Eddie, the band's ubiquitous mascot, who has been on every album sleeve bar three since the debut, in a futuristic setting. Looking quickly back, you had a contemporary, almost punk Eddie on the debut, a maniacal, homicidal but still modern times Eddie on Killers, a scene out of some horror movie but set in current times or thereabouts on The Number of the Beast (though I guess you could argue that was the future, perhaps depicting Judgement Day) and then Eddie in an asylum of the sort we (apparently) don't see these days on the cover of Piece of Mind. Powerslave of course went all the way back to the ancient past, depicting him as an Egyptian god. So this is the first time we see, if you will, future Eddie. It will also be the last, so far, as even though 2010's The Final Frontier is a futuristic painting, it's not Eddie who graces the cover.

It's also the first time since he joined that we hear of tensions within the group between Bruce and the other guys, notably Steve. After a gruelling tour to support Powerslave, which lasted almost a full year, Bruce was exhausted and his ideas for songs, mostly based around acoustic styles, were rejected by the band. Bruce, however, felt there was a definite need for change, as it could be said that the band had reached their commercial and creative peak on the last album, and if they didn't do something to change things the only way was down.

Somewhere in Time was also the first instance of the use of synthesisers by Iron Maiden. Although they were only guitar synths (keytars) it was still a major departure from the pure guitar sound and something of a mockery of the legend printed proudly on the back of The Number of the Beast: “No synthesisers or ulterior motives.” Were there ulterior motives in bringing keys into a band who had thrived and made their name on a twin guitar attack? Was there concern over either the prowess (surely not) of the two axemen or their dedication to the band? Adrian Smith would in fact be the first to leave, and he may have been influenced by Bruce Dickinson's dissatisfaction with the direction of the band, I don't know. Maybe they just wanted a fuller sound, or maybe they felt the album, loosely based on science fiction, needed a more futuristic sound? Either way, it was the beginning, but certainly not the end, of Maiden's flirtations with the ivories, and it did change their sound somewhat.

The album was also their first to have more than a year between it and the previous outing (Iron Maiden – 1980 – Killers 1981 – The Number of the Beast – 1982 – Piece of Mind – 1983 – Powerslave – 1984) and in that context should have stood as one of their best, considering how long they took to get it right – twice as long as the other five. But that's not how it has ever sounded to me. Finally, it was also the first Maiden album to feature songs written solo by Adrian Smith, three in all, something that would never happen again. While he would co-write songs on the next album (after which he would depart till 2000) and again on later albums, for whatever reason he would always collaborate with usually Harris or Dickinson. Given the songs he wrote solo here, I'm not quite sure why, but again we'll get into that. One more point to note: this is the first album of Iron Maiden's to feature – if we accept any song seven minutes or over as being “long” - three long tracks, with one of them coming in at eight and a half, making it – after “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, of course – Iron Maiden's longest song to date.

So, the album then. We have a total of eight tracks, leading to a playtime of just over fifty-one minutes. Of those, three, as already mentioned, are penned solo by Adrian Smith, four by Steve Harris and one a collaboration between Harris and Dave Murray, only his second foray into songwriting, unless you count the two bonus tracks “Eclipse” and “Twilight Zone”. It's clear that even though the songwriting is shared a little more evenly here, Harris is still in control. No writing credits appear for Dickinson for the first time since he joined the band, as already explained above.

Somewhere in Time (7:22)

The first thing that impresses me is that the guitars in the opening riff have a very distinct Egyptian sound, perhaps a holdover – conscious or otherwise – from the previous album. Since the main culprit I see of Maiden's shall we say staggering onto the wrong path or taking the wrong fork in the road is the increasing length of their songs, I want to examine the longer songs on every album with a view to deciding if they need to be that long. Is every minute used, or is the song padded out unnecessarily? Could it be shorter and still work, or does it need its full length in order to achieve its objective and get its message across? How much, in other words, if any, of the song is wasted or not needed? The opener and title track (a Harris tune) kicks off with about one minute of instrumental intro, but that's fine: Maiden songs don't usually punch right in with the vocal straight away, and there's a need and an expectation of setting the scene musically as it were. I do note, for future reference, a very similar melody here to a song which will surface on the next album, and I wonder if this song was on the mind of Steve when he co-wrote “The Evil That Men Do”?

It's a powerful punchy start, and certainly gives you the idea that this album will be a worthy successor to Powerslave. I wouldn't say it's one of my favourites on the album, but neither is it one of the ones with which I have a problem. There's the obligatory solo about halfway through, and there's a decent hook in the chorus. It takes up about two minutes of the song, but again that's all right: we're used to Dave and Adrian bossing the show; they don't do short solos, and unlike some guitarists theirs never seem boring or overstretched, and they never seem to be showing off how good they are. Both have always given me the impression that they play purely for the joy of it, and seem to have a great time doing it. So as we head into the sixth minute Bruce is back, and the song of itself seems pretty well structured and balanced, so in answer to my own question as to whether or not this song is too long, in this case I would say no, it isn't. I can see a few seconds here or there being snipped off and the song being no worse for it, but I don't see that its length detracts from the song itself. It ends well, it's a good opener and it gets things going. For such a relatively long song, it goes by quickly and there's no sense of when is this going to end?

Wasted Years (5:03)

Next up is Adrian's first attempt at a solo composition, and overall I'd have to say it's pretty damn good. Perhaps because it's his first try, it's a decent length, as you can see, and in fact none of the songs he writes here even reach the six-minute mark, though this is the shortest of them. Not surprisingly, there's plenty of work for the guitars to do, but then you could say that about any Maiden song really. It's also gone on to be one of the few tracks to survive the album into live concerts, which might kind of prove my point, but more of that later. To give Smith credit, there's much less of a guitar intro to this one that the opener, and it rocks away really well, with a fine hook in the chorus, leaving scope for vocal harmonies, unlike the one that preceded it. It's fairly typical of the Maiden songs of old – short, to the point, memorable, simple.

It of course features a guitar solo halfway but again it's nowhere near as indulgent as it could have been. It really only has the one verse with the chorus repeated to the end, finishing on the same guitar riff that opened it, and that's perfectly understandable for a first effort. No point in trying to run before you can walk.

Sea of Madness (5:42)

The next one is his, too, and in fact one of my favourites on the album. A very chaotic opening quickly settles down on a thick chunky bass line from Harris and the guitars more buzz than scream on this one. The hook here is probably the best on any song on this album so far; it's right through the bridge and chorus and it's hard not to sing it. Is the title related to their epic? Maybe, I don't know: the Ancient Mariner would certainly have felt he was on a sea of madness, but song lyrics can be so esoteric, it could be about a state of mind or politics or anything really. In the end, that's probably not as important as how the song sounds, and halfway through I find the solo very Thin Lizzyesque, which is not a criticism.

I like the thinning out of the sound then, in what I can only characterise as a sort of Police “Walking on the Moon” style, where the guitar is stripped back down, and then the song gains power and volume on the back of Dickinson's voice before crashing back into the opening riffs and into another verse (the same as the first? I think so; I'll have to check back) and to the chorus which then takes us to the end on Bruce's scream. That's how to write a song!

Heaven Can Wait (7:24)

Having ceded the floor to Smith for the last two tracks, Harris is back with another seven-minute-plus composition which, despite its length, is another of my favourites. You can hear the guitar synths this time as the actual guitars bite into the melody and slowly bring up the atmosphere, another long intro as you might expect in a song of this length. Faster than really anything that has gone before, it retains a slight edge of Killers-era Di'Anno I feel, though the hook is beautiful and perfect and very commercial. It's even possible this could have been a single had it been shorter, but I'm not sure it could have been cut down from its present form and not lost something. The solo comes in earlier this time, and if I remember there may be a second one.

After the solo the rhythm turns into a sort of slower march, leading to the familiar cries of “Woh-oh-oh!” which, let's be honest, are put in for audience participation purposes but show either laziness or the lack of need for this section of the song. It's fun to sing along to and throw your fists in the air, sure, but it takes up about a minute of the song and it could probably have survived just as well without it and yes, as I thought, there's the second solo. I've no problem with multiple solos, but take out that second one and the “Woh-oh-oh”s and this song could have been stripped down to a lean six minutes or so. But on we go. There is another verse, and at least it's not just a repeat of the first one, back to the chorus and, rather like Smith's “Wasted Years” it ends on the guitar riff that opened it.

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (6:31)

This is where the album began to take something of a nosedive for me. I've pretty much always hated this track. It's not that long, as you can see, but I feel little happens in it. There's a powerful guitar intro which then almost seems to get elbowed aside, dashing the hopes that this was going to be something decent. Reminds me very much in ways of “Gangland” off The Number of the Beast, or maybe “Invaders” from the same album; either way, two tracks agreed to be the weakest on the album. There's an attempt to insert a hook in the chorus but for me it just does not work. I guess I'm biased against it and am looking for negative things to say about it, but I'm trying to see it with new eyes – or, I should say, hear it with new ears – and give it a chance, but there's no getting away from the very clear fact that everything – everything – that has gone before it has been superior, and it really isn't going to get a lot better. The quintessential album of two halves, I personally feel there's not much to recommend side two of Somewhere in Time.

Even the guitar solos sound forced; I don't get the impression of anyone enjoying participating in this song, and I kind of wish they had even tried one of Bruce's acoustic songs instead of this. After the power punch of “Heaven Can Wait” following “Sea of Madness”, it might have been a nice change of pace. I've never been able to remember this song, and even now I know that as soon as the next track starts I'll have all but forgotten it, whereas the other four are still clearly and loudly playing in my mind. Yeah, it just sort of fades out and away – not musically; few if any Maiden songs actually fade, but in terms of remaining in the memory, already forgotten.

Stranger in a Strange Land (5:43)

The last Smith effort on the album, it swaggers in on a punching guitar riff that makes you sit up and take notice, and whether the lads got permission for Heinlein for this or not I don't know, but it's interesting to hear the title of a future album in the lyric, and in fact the album that would see Smith return to the fold as Bruce sings “No brave new world, no brave new world.” The hook in the chorus is okay, but it doesn't quite grip in the same way as the first four songs did. I'm impressed too that Smith resists throwing in the guitar solo until nearly the fourth minute, and when it does come in it's quite restrained, almost you could say acoustic in nature, until it then picks up in intensity and power, and seems to fit just perfectly.

There's no doubt it's a huge improvement on “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner”, and probably the best on side two, as it were, but “Stranger in a Strange Land” still doesn't come close to the quality of any of the four on side one. And what I said about songs fading? This one does. It must be one of the only Maiden songs to do so.

Deja Vu (4:45)

The shortest song on the album opens a little like “Revelations” on Piece of Mind I feel, with a haunting, wailing guitar before thundering up into a breakneck guitar intro that flies along nicely but is rather basic and sounds like something they might have saved for Fear of the Dark. This is the one song on which Steve Harris pairs up with Dave Murray, and again I think I can hear those keytars; they don't make a huge difference here, and I'd have to say they don't have a massive impact on the album in general: had I not read they were there I probably would not have noticed them. There's a pretty long instrumental section in this song, but given its short length I don't have an issue with that. If anything, it's probably more a standard Maiden song than the last two; I'm not convinced by Bruce's raspy, supposedly threatening vocal delivery though. Not sure what that's about.

The hook is okay but nothing special, and even the guitar solos seem a little tacked-on and copy and pasted from the Great Iron Maiden Songbook. You'd have to wonder when Bruce sings “Feels like I've been here before” is he unintentionally delivering a message to the band?

Alexander the Great (8:35)

Harris's love of history comes through in the lyrical matter of the closer, but it also comes across as highly indulgent of him. The song is, as already mentioned, the longest on the album and indeed to this point the second-longest recorded by the band. Taking that into account, its lengthy instrumental intro (preceded by a spoken passage where Alexander's father mourns his failure to provide a better legacy for his son) is understandable and acceptable. Once it gets going it gallops along nicely in a sort of mid-paced way, but you do get the feeling (well I do anyway) that the rest of the band realise they're servicing Harris's personal vision here and that it's his project; they're playing his song, which of course you can say about any of his solo penned tracks, but here it just seems... different somehow.

I feel the attempted hook in the chorus fails miserably, and so I don't see any hook in it, no memorable chorus you can sing. The again almost acoustic solo in the middle is interesting, building up on Nicko McBrain's staggered drum patterns, then it smashes into a very slow, graceful section, beginning a gradual march to the denouement of the song. It's epic, certainly, though not, I feel, in the same way “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is epic, and considering its length, I think even “Phantom of the Opera” is better constructed. Another, more standard guitar solo now as we head into the sixth minute, and at least Harris resisted the urge to throw in some “Woah-oh-oh”s as there is a place in the song where you could definitely hear that, and perhaps onstage they do that, but they kept it out of the studio version, which I think is just as well.

I feel the ending is a bit of a damp squib, and as a closer to the album I don't think it really works that well at all.

What is significant is that as I mentioned, none of these songs, bar “Wasted Years” and “Heaven Can Wait” were added to the live setlist, proving perhaps that the boys realised many of them were too long to keep fans' attention in a live setting. I'm not going to put the album down too much, as it does have some great tracks, and even the weaker ones are not terrible (with one exception) but I do remember being all excited having bought the album, still riding on a Maiden high from Powerslave even two years later, and being underwhelmed by this one. That is, generally, still the feeling I get from it, playing it now for this review. It's almost like the comedown, or the return after a great holiday to normality, rain and wind and work. The idea, the feeling that something wonderful has taken place and will never be so again permeates this album for me; the idea of a band desperately trying to equal or (impossibly) surpass their greatest achievement, and probably quite aware they had fallen far short. I wouldn't call it a failure, and in terms of sales and charts it was definitely a hit, but I wouldn't call it an unqualified success either.

Is this, then, where the rot began to set in? Not quite, you'd have to say. Maiden were able to bash out a pretty awesome album two years later, and while the ones following that certainly had their flaws, they managed to maintain a pretty high standard overall, even gaining their first ever number one. But the days of Powerslave and Piece of Mind were, if not gone, receding in the rear-view mirror, and as Maiden knew, and we all knew, when the past is gone, it's impossible to get back to it. Maybe that's why they tried looking to the future, but in that future they may have seen some warning signs, leading to their looking to the past again for their next album, unsure where they were going for the one after that, till eventually they ended up a tree, clutching frantically at shadows in the night, still trying to claw back the creativity and spontaneity they had enjoyed on three Dickinson-era albums, surely fearing the future and unsure how to get their feet back on the ground.

Trouble was, by then even that ground was beginning to crumble beneath their feet...

Well, maybe not. Probably not, really, but it's interesting how you can trace the change in the band's fortunes through the various album covers over the course of their career.
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1981 – Iron Maiden

“Hello there, I'm Eddie, nice to meet you. Now die!”

Look at the face of Eddie on the cover of the debut. He's a punk, isn't he? Without the capital P. A loser, a ne'er-do-well, a lout you wouldn't want to run into down a dark alley. He's sporting crazy spiky yet long hair which would later be robbed by a band called Sigue Sigue Sputnik for their signature look; it doesn't have the appearance of even knowing what a comb is, much less having used one. Like many Iron Maiden covers, it's drawn taking place at night. The moon is high and pale in a gloomy sky, and Eddie is standing – perhaps we might say lurking – under a streetlight, obviously up to no good. He's angry, he's aggressive, he's out for your blood. Like Horslips once wrote, “if you see me you had better run, run run!” And you would. This guy isn't going to ask you for a cigarette, unless it's made out of your windpipe which he'll happily extract with none of the precision of a surgeon, or if you happen to know the score of the big match? He's a troublemaker, a skinhead with lots of hair, a headbanger.

And it's your head he wants to bang, preferably against that wall behind him.

So our first introduction to Eddie – and by extension, Iron Maiden – is hardly a welcoming, pleasant one. Perhaps Eddie is saying “come and have a listen if you're hard enough”, who knows? But it's an aggressive, threatening cover that simmers with barely-restrained violence and possible murder, which will take its natural (!) course on the cover of the next album. One thing is for sure: Eddie is in control here, and if you want to survive you had better pay him big respect! This is a band who say “We're here; don't get in our way or we will fuck you up, and if you can't handle our music go listen to Barry Manilow or the Black and White Minstrel Show!” Or something. The point is, it's a statement of power, intent and aggression. Iron Maiden have arrived. Deal with it.
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1980 – Killers

And if you can't deal with it, here's what will happen. Eddie has now evolved (devolved?) from the street punk threatening you on the corner to a full-blown maniac, his hair more carefully arranged but that snarl still on his face, a face that enjoys slaughter, pain and terror, and in his hand this time is an axe. Careful with it, Eugene! I'm not Eugene, I'm Eddie, and I'll put it where I like. And where I like is the centre of your head!

If any album cover depicted naked aggression, many do but this one certainly does, and it ties in well with the album title, leaving you in no doubt as to what to expect on the album. In terms of power, Eddie has grown from the dodgy punk throwing shapes at you from under a streetlamp to a dangerous, homicidal killer who's ready to satisfy his awful urges. He's taking no shit from anyone, and as the lyric in the title track growls, “he laughs as he's watching you bleed.” But you laugh too, because this music is so good. On the last album Maiden announced their arrival, on this one they declare their intention of not just making up the numbers. But if world domination is on their minds, there's a small problem to be dealt with first, a kind of symbolic murder as one member is torn out of the band and left bleeding on the darkened roadway, and the remaining guys in the band slouch along the street, deaf to his cries, searching for a new leader.
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1982 – The Number of the Beast

And they find it in Bruce Dickinson, the album cover reflecting their new power, as Satan makes Eddie dance to his tune, unaware that he is in fact the puppet controlled by a much larger Eddie. The symbolism couldn't be clearer, and Maiden are headed for big things. In terms of power, Eddie has now progressed beyond the lone axe-wielding killer and has the entire world at his feet, in a very real way, as Iron Maiden quickly became a household word on the back of this album, even terrifying the pop pickers on the local chart shows as their songs kicked their way up the “hit parade” (we'll just leave the “s” off the beginning, shall we?) and proved to all the world that metal was not only alive and kicking, it was taking over!
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1983 – Piece of Mind

Ah, poor Eddie! He appears to have been caught and put in the loony bin, sorry that's very insensitive isn't it? Nut hatch: there, that's better. But while Eddie may be a prisoner in a padded cell, he's angry as hell and I don't think anyone believes those chains are going to hold him for long, and when he gets free – watch out! This could be interpreted (which I'm sure is not the case but for the fun of it) as a response to those on the moral majority and the Bible belt, the do-gooders and self-appointed guardians of decency who completely mistook the previous album for a pagan, Satanic expression of youth (rather like the same people, or their forebears – maybe only three bears, I'm not sure – did with Black Sabbath a decade earlier) and had it banned and, probably, burned in a knee-jerk reaction.

The message here could be, you've managed to get some of public opinion and authority against us, but we're not going to lie down and die. Maybe it's you who should be in this asylum, and maybe the likes of us are the only sane ones. Or not. Though this cover may seem, on the surface, to be stripping Eddie of his power, I think we all know it's only a temporary situation and he is going to break out. Can't cage the Beast! The album also coincides with more chart success for Maiden, despite (or perhaps due to) the backlash from the Christian Right, proving once again the more those in authority don't want us to do it, the more we want to do it.
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1984 – Powerslave

And now Eddie achieves the ultimate. In every sense, he has become a god. He is worshipped by the faithful, frowning down on them from an image surely hundreds of feet high, a true Egyptian divinity. Interestingly, he no longer seems angry, just stern and unsmiling. Powerslave is widely regarded as the high watermark of Iron Maiden's output, which makes the depiction of Eddie as a god all the more appropriate. The title of the tour to support it was the World Slavery Tour, which is apt in two ways: the world essentially was enslaved to Iron Maiden: they sold out every concert, every venue, leading to a tour that spanned over three hundred days. On the other hand, having to work almost right through the year must have made the boys feel as if they had become slaves themselves: slaves to the fans, slaves to the tour, slaves to promoters, slaves even to the music.
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1986 – Somewhere in Time

Eddie has now moved into the future, an alienesque bounty hunter, and his traditional scowl is back, not that it ever left, except for the cover of The Number of the Beast. He's searching, and in itself this is a significant point, as the band – certainly Bruce anyway, and maybe Adrian – were searching for a new sound, a way to top their apex album, a way to follow up almost that which could and would never be followed up. Searching maybe for relevance in a changing world. Eddie is either naked, wearing very tight (and transparent) body armour or an exo-skeleton, but whichever it is, it's the first time we've seen his body this way, and while it's musclebound and sleek, I think it looks a little vulnerable too, his head slightly bowed as if he's not quite sure where his quarry is hiding, or why he is here.

In a lot of ways, I think this cover represents the uncertainty among the band of stepping beyond that classic album, the trepidation and perhaps even fear that they would not be able to measure up to its phenomenal success, and the concern about what the future held. Eddie looks pensive, thoughtful rather than his usual angry scowl or even maniacal grin. Like the band, he looks unsure.
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1988 – Seventh Son of a Seventh Son

But two years later he's a godlike being again, as Maiden retrace their steps, perhaps in an effort to recapture the essence and atmosphere of Powerslave, and go back, not forward, in time. Back to a time, in fact, which probably did not exist, to the age of legends and myths, the stories of the Arabian Nights and fairy tales and based around Orson Card's novel Seventh Son. This is also Maiden's first concept album – their only one to date – and returned them to the singles chart with a number three entry for “Can I Play With Madness”. Eddie looks pretty all-powerful, holding what might be his heart (or someone else's) in his hand and having no body below his chest, which always made me mistakenly see him as a djinn. Hugely successful, this album was nevertheless Maiden's first flirtation with progressive rock structures, which would lead them off in a very different direction to the one in which they had begun.

And those, if you will, are the positive album covers, with maybe two later exceptions. Following on from that album, two years later we have this
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1990 – No Prayer for the Dying

Playing on the old Irish (?) idea of a prayer for the dying, this album cover sees Eddie in very much changed circumstances. He's in a coffin – admittedly, bursting out of it but still in his bloody grave! - and in addition this will be the first of five non-consecutive albums to use the theme of death in their titles. Considering Adrian Smith left after this album, would it be very unfair to say the title is directed at his departure? Yes. Yes it would. But it could be. I doubt it however, but it's an interesting hypothesis. Eddie, meanwhile, is out for revenge, and in terms of success this album gave Maiden their first (and only) ever number one single in the Dickinson-penned “Bring Your Daughter... to the Slaughter”. Ah, revenge is sweet!

But beneath the accolades and vindication as a songwriter for the band, an undercurrent of unease and restlessness was bubbling, and like Eddie suddenly exploding out of his coffin and taking the unfortunate grave-digger by the throat, things were coming to a head, and could not be left to rest for much longer.
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1992 – Fear of the Dark

Fear indeed. Transpose Eddie to Bruce and I think you have a pretty good idea what's going on here. On the face of it, you have Eddie in a tree, waiting to pounce on the unwary, but my reading is that this is Bruce, forced into a defensive position, (perhaps literally barking up the wrong tree?) and trapped with nowhere else to go. Eddie is melded with the tree – is the tree – and Dickinson at this point might certainly have seemed to be so much a part of the band that leaving them would be as unthinkable and as much a wrench as pulling himself free from the embrace of the wood that is, in the picture, part of Eddie/Bruce's body, but knowing that if he did not extricate himself he might be absorbed into something he had no interest being a part of any longer.

The title of the album can be interpreted two ways: Bruce could be afraid of leaving the band and facing the dark – the future – alone, and he could just as easily fear the idea of remaining with a band with whom he was having less and less in common, being sucked or trapped into a situation he did not want to be in. If the tree represents the band's family tree, then Dickinson was about to cut a branch off of it, and one had already gone with the departure of Adrian Smith two years and one album previously. The absence of Derek Riggs, who had designed every Maiden album cover up to this, shows another crack appearing in the once-watertight relationships within the band, and perhaps the title could also refer to a fear of the remaining band members as to what they would do without Bruce on board?

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1995 – The X-Factor

End of an era, for now, and Eddie is beginning to lose his power. For the second time he is captured, this time held on some sort of medical/torture table and about to be cut up into pieces. There couldn't be a more literal representation of what was occurring among the band at that time. Longtime guitarist gone, followed by vocalist and frontman, even Eddie looks a little pathetic and worried as he waits for the saws to cut into him. The music was similarly ravaged, with this ranking as my all-time least favourite album. I can barely pick a single track off it that I like, or can at least tolerate. The departure of Bruce did not go down well with fans, which was sad for Blaze Bayley, as he really tried, but it's hard to replace such a legend, and as a result the album sold poorly, achieving only silver status and just barely scraping into the top ten in the UK, while it didn't even make the top 100 in the USA.
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1998 – Virtual XI

And now Eddie is gone altogether. Did they slice him up on the table? Who knows? He will be back, but for now we have a similar figure (though clearly not Eddie) leering out of the album cover and looking rather demonic, which confuses the issue as apparently Steve Harris wanted some sort of crossover between their computer game Ed Hunter and the FIFA World Cup. I don't see it, personally, and the album was pretty much a flop, poorly received by fans and critics alike, again garnering a mere silver status and this time not even getting into the top ten in the UK, but languishing well outside at number 16. Is this Eddie-but-not-Eddie creature reaching out to pluck the very heart from Iron Maiden, grinning evilly as it does so?
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2000 – Brave New World

Salvation as everything returns to normal. Adrian is back, Bruce is back, Eddie is back, this time a somewhat ethereal, ghostly figure looming triumphantly out of the clouds with evil glee, lightning bolts flashing around him, and Derek Riggs too is back. Could there be a more perfect synthesis of redemption for a band? Unless of course it's all style and no substance. But of course, that was not the case and the album is a rip-roaring return to form, an affirmation that this band can still piss over any of their competitors, that Dickinson still has it and a reminder why Iron Maiden are still seen as the premier heavy metal band on the planet. In stark contrast to the last two albums, this one quickly went gold, gave the boys two top twenty singles and rocketed to the dizzy heights of, um, number 7 in the charts (UK) which, while a long way from the top slot taken by previous classic albums was still a huge improvement on the last two. It even did well in the States, making the top forty. Just. Still, for a band who had kicked around on the lower fringes of the top 200 for four years, this was progress.
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2003 – Dance of Death

While arguably (well, in reality, no arguing about it!) the most successful Maiden album since Powerslave, racing to number 2 in the UK and 18 in the US, this was the second album cover not to feature Eddie in any way. Instead we have that jolly old character, Death, and a sort of Roald Dahl/Ingmar Bergman-inspired illustration. This is the first album to use the word or concept of death in its title, something which would follow the band through the next three. This album also gave the band two more top twenty singles in the UK, and was also certified gold.
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2005 – A Matter of Life and Death

Another album to use the death motif, the cover shows a dour picture of war, with a tank surrounded by soldiers rumbling on, perhaps recalling to mind the description I made of the band earlier? No? Sod ya then. This was in fact even more successful commercially than the previous album, finally cracking the US market for them after years and giving them a placing in the top 10, while in the UK it reached even higher than Brave New World, taking the number 4 spot. It also went gold, and platinum in Finland, where all its three singles also went to number one. No Eddie again, and I find the cover here quite depressing and reminiscent of a dull, plodding march towards the inevitable end.

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2010 – The Final Frontier

It might be stretching it a little in terms of metaphysics, but you could see death as the final frontier, the last barrier any of us will cross in our lives, so I would stick with my comment about the band using references to death in their album titles. This is also the second album to look to the future, with a very sci-fi cover which again has no room for Eddie, who is replaced by a screaming skull and a strange futuristic monster or robot. In terms of commercial success, it improved on the previous album, taking the boys all the way to number one in the UK charts and 4 in the US, and going gold everywhere except – you guessed it – Finland, where it went, uh huh, platinum.
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2015 – The Book of Souls

And finally Eddie is back with us, though looking distinctly primitive and suitably pissed-off, staring out from what is essentially a black cover at the world that has forsaken him for over fifteen years. I'm not sure if there was a genuine attempt to degrade Eddie in this way, show him as a “savage” compared to the more sophisticated creatures who had graced Maiden album covers since he had been away, but he does not look happy! Empire of the fucking what? Piano intro? You're having me on, lads! Eighteen... nah, nah, must be going deaf. For a moment there, (nervous laugh) I thought you said (hah) eighteen minutes!

Matching the performance of its predecessor, The Book of Souls went straight to number one in the UK and again 4 in the US, and went gold everywhere but oddly not platinum this time in Finland, though Hungary had this honour. Given that there had been five years since the last Maiden album, those rankings are not at all surprising, but foisting a double album on your fans, to say nothing of an eighteen-minute closer, either shows a band supremely confident in their ability and in their fanbase or one who just want to do what they want to do now and don't give a shit anymore.

So I hear some of you saying there you go Trollheart: hoist on your own picard. (It's petard, dumbass) Well whatever. You made the case that Iron Maiden's popularity was on the wane, and it's not. You've clearly proved they're as successful as ever, if not more so. Hah. You failed, loser.

Nah, you weren't listening. I never made any sort of case that Maiden were less popular (except around the Blaze era); I don't think their commercial appeal or their popularity among their fans will ever fade. People will still buy the albums – I'll still buy the albums – and go to the concerts, and Maiden will always be the number one metal band in the world. My point was that this was a personal opinion. I set out to show why for me (important two words there) Maiden began to lose some of their attraction and lustre after Powerslave, that I personally lost a little interest in them and didn't pay too much attention to their latter albums. And I didn't. Listening back over them for this journal may, or may not, change that, but at the moment I'm still not too bothered whether or not they ever release a seventeenth album.

The album covers here were used merely to illustrate – in a very tongue in cheek way – how the rise and fall of the band could be catalogued, but only really with respect to me. Others may not see it that way. Or they may. I really don't know. But for me, personally, the progression, or indeed regression, is clearly shown (or can be) through the successive album covers.

You wanna know the biggest issue with Iron Maiden translating themselvea to the new millennium? They had Brave New World that was just a really good version of an old school Iron Maiden album and A Matter of Life and Death was the best version of Maiden doing a more prog version of Maiden, but they've never managed to sound vital since the mid 80s. Even their good **** since Powerslave was just reputable rather than any kind of exciting sound.

Whereas Judas Priest has had many a non-starter sound or just okay sound since the mid 80s bit they still recognized that part of being a relevant metal band was managing to sound like they were coming for your jugular.

And so they threw caution to the wind and recorded Painkiller. That was an actual reinvention of their sound which Priest has done many a time whereas Maiden never did anything other than say how can we sound more like a more mature version of how we.already sound

I'd agree with that 100%. It almost looks like, as I said (despite the sales and acclaim) Maiden have been somewhat lost since Powerslave; that the majesty of that album has proven impossible to even duplicate never mind exceed, and so they've sort of retraced what they think are their roots, thrashing about confusedly like a drowning man desperately trying to keep afloat.

You could probably take the last four albums, take two or three tracks from each and come up with a half-decent album, but even then it would never equal the power and grandeur and (as you'd say) total bitchin-ness of the first three, even five.

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Chapter III: Sibling Rivalry: Fanfare for the Common Metalhead

Hell don't worry: I'm not going to take this album apart. It wouldn't even be here as an example of how Maiden began to veer off the path were it not for the fact that it very clearly indicates their initial interest in expanding into progressive territory, something they had dabbled with slightly as far back as 1980, when “Phantom of the Opera” could conceivably be considered their first suite (although not broken into sections like a traditional prog rock suite), followed later by “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and maybe even “Alexander the Great”. This however was the first time they had a) based their music on one subject, in this case the novel Seventh Son by Orson Scott Card and b) written a concept album focussed on that material, so it's hard not to see the album as a progressive rock or metal one.

That would have been fine had they left it at that. Seventh Son of a Seventh Son stands as almost the last point in their golden period (I don't consider Somewhere in Time part of that, but you can't ignore it), giving them a good run of seven albums – five from the Dickinson era – that really all but defy criticism. After this, the slide towards mediocrity comes really quickly.

But right now we're talking about this album, and it has all the great signs about it. Eddie towers over the fantasy city on the cover in almost a nod back to Powerslave and to some extent The Number of the Beast, and the boys have had the sense not only to make this an album of ten or fifteen songs, keeping it to a modest eight, but they also resisted the urge to make any of them really long, as had been the case on the previous outing. Here, only one stands out – admittedly it's almost ten minutes long, but it is the title track, and anyway Maiden had been doing ONE long song on just about every album since, well, the debut. Or one song over seven minutes anyway. So there's no big seismic shift here.
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Seventh Son of a Seventh Son (1988)

It's true to say though that Seventh Son is something of a missed opportunity; as Bruce himself would say years later, they didn't see the project through. There's no actual story here, no plot as it were, and though the songs are all linked by common themes – the future, madness, life and death – it's really not enough to call it a concept album, no more than the previous one was. But it's a step in that direction, and maybe because they had started down that path, though they had stumbled, they decided to explore it further. That decision would lead them into increasingly dark, tangled woods from which they would find it all but impossible to find their way back, until two shining lights pierced the gloom in 2000 and led them back to familiar ground.

But that's a long, long way away at this point, and the journey was only beginning, nobody aware what was waiting at its terminus.

This time around, there's plenty for Bruce to do. Steve apparently rang him up after he got the idea for the theme of the album, but had no songs, and between the two they wrote three of the eight songs here, though Harris being Harris, there are also three solo efforts from him. It strikes me as odd that, given he had no idea what the songs were going to be, and asked Bruce for ideas, that the title track ends up being his work alone. Bruce also collaborates with Adrian Smith on the opener, and Dave Murray has a writing credit with Steve for “The Prophecy”.

The album cover appears strikingly different to me. Up to now, Maiden album covers had been mostly dark, using yellows, oranges and blacks, and even though some blue had leaked in for the sky above Egypt on Powerslave, the bulk of that cover is yellow – yellow sandstone, yellow sand, yellow pyramids and yellow temple. Here we have, for the first time, almost exclusively blue, and it's as if the dark has been dispelled and light has come through, though there's no concern that this is going to be anything like an album of love songs or ambient music – Eddie's presence on the cover takes care of that. Still, it is, for want of another description, a relaxing cover.

Oh, and I've checked: it's not his or anyone else's heart in Eddie's hand, but a baby. All right.

Of the eight songs here, I can say with confidence I like five of them, and the others I just don't recall too well, so while reviewing this now I may end up adding to that total. I'm pretty certain there are no tracks on it that I actively don't like, much less hate.

Moonchild (5:38)

Opening on a deceptive acoustic guitar and Bruce's vocal, the album kicks off with dark, rising keyboards – proper ones this time, not keytars – already giving it a feeling of more progressive than heavy metal, and though the guitars of course kick in alongside the bass and thumping drums, there's a feeling of a seachange about Maiden here. Once it gets going the song romps along nicely, with a great hook in the chorus and Bruce in fine form, cackling and grinning evilly, while Dave and Adrian rack off the solos as usual and it's a powerful start.

Infinite Dreams (6:08)

A slower, more low-key opening to this track, though I doubt anyone would call it a ballad. Definitely more restrained, from Bruce's voice to the lads on guitar, and I don't hear much in the way of keyboards as yet. Again quite a progressive rock feel to it, nowhere near as punchy as we've come to expect from Maiden songs, but still undeniably Maiden. Halfway through it takes off one one of those rocking guitar rides which sort of puts me in mind slightly of “The Prisoner” and maybe “The Trooper”, the two guitars chiming and harmonising really well. I would have to be honest and say I don't hear a hook in this song at all, which may be one of the reasons why I tend not to remember it that well. After all, it's the hook we usually remember, but this is still a damn good song. I'd definitely put it on a somewhat lower level than “Moonchild” and some of the others though. I'm also not fond of the ending, but there you go.

Can I Play With Madness (3:30)

Speaking of hooks, this has them in spades, and so it's not hard to see how this was a hit single. Galloping along with a great sense of fun from the beginning, the acapella opening (the first since the title cut on The Number of the Beast, I believe – I wouldn't count “Alexander the Great” as it has the sound of wind accompanying the voice) quickly giving way to a guitar fest and bouncing keyboards, which do, it has to be admitted, add a lot to the song. Bruce tries to be all hard and evil on this one too but you can tell he's really enjoying himself, as are the lads once they let loose with the obligatory solos, though they are kept to a minimum, the song being so short. Ends as it began, and really it's possibly the perfect Maiden song, at least for the radio.

The Evil That Men Do (4:33)

And the good stuff just keeps coming, with a low-key guitar intro giving way to rolling drums and an insistent beat. Again that hook comes in, and it's really hard not to remember this song long after the album is over. In fact, the hook is both in the bridge and the chorus, which is not a unique occurrence but not a standard one. Bruce is back to cackling and growling at his best, some good vocal harmonies (minimal really but they work) and a relatively short burst of guitar solo sets fire to this song; it's one I could probably have wished was longer, though I'm sure it's exactly the right length it needs to be. I hear more of “The Trooper” in the melody there, just a little, and this time the abrupt ending is justified.

Seventh Son of a Seventh Son (9:52)

Were it not for that song, this would stand as Maiden's longest up to this point, only eight seconds short of ten minutes. That said, it is the only one that comes even close to that length, so it doesn't seem as if the boys are dragging things out, and given that this is, in essence, a progressive metal album, well, you probably knew there would be at least one really epic track on it, didn't you? There's a long intro, as you might expect, and in many ways it harks back to the days of Powerslave, with a kind of chant of praise and a very Egyptian feel to it, a much slower track but not the least bit less heavy. Actually, I'm wrong: the intro isn't that long and Bruce gets singing about the second minute. It occupies the kind of territory that songs like “To Tame a Land” and, to a lesser extent, “Stranger in a Strange Land” and “Alexander the Great” have trod before, perhaps a little too fleshed out by the standard “Whoa-oh-oh”s, but they fit in well.

You can see it as a sort of semi-suite, to quote Tom Waits, with the first part, the slower, marching and perhaps introductory section taking us to the fourth minute before it slows down on Adrian's introspective guitar which leads into a dark spoken vocal from Bruce and gives Steve a real chance to bring the bass front and centre almost, though not quite, in a “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” vein. It's almost an interlude in some ways, driven all but solo on the bass and synth with a choral vocal coming up in the background giving the song a sort of sepulchral, reverent feeling, then for the third movement, if you will, the guitars punch back in again just before the seventh minute and some fine fretwork takes place as the solos rip through the tune, but the feeling is very much of a song rooted in progressive rock, especially the early Yes or Rush style of thing. More chanting and whoa-oh-oh-ing, but essentially it's an instrumental finish, and a fine one.

The Prophecy (5:04)

One of the songs I either don't care for, or can't remember enough to care for, it slides in on soft acoustic and then electric guitar and lush keyboards, sort of puts me in mind of “Infinite Dreams”, but then breaks down into a rolling, galloping, loping run on the guitar, a sort of almost blues feel to it. Not quite vocal harmonies here – not sure what you call them: staggered maybe? Bruce sings one thing and then a second or so behind him he sings another almost call-and-response sort of idea. The guitar work here sounds like it comes from the sessions for Somewhere in Time, then bursts out into a solo worthy of The Number of the Beast or Powerslave. Yeah it's still one of the weaker tracks for me, and again without a hook you can hold on to. No real chorus even, which makes it even harder to get a handle on the melody. Some nice almost medieval bass there at the end, reminds me of something but I can't quite put my finger on it right now.

The Clairvoyant (4:26)

Another one I don't recall making too much of an impression on me the last time I listened to this album. Good bass line opening it certainly and then some choppy guitar, with a really nice motif when it gets going. Moves along at a nice pace, faster than the previous two, kicking the tempo of the album back up as it heads towards its conclusion. Can't say I'm impressed by the chorus though; seems very weak. Good guitar work from Dave 'n' Adrian keeps it moving and it ends strongly, but yeah, again, not one of the better tracks, which is to say, weaker than the really strong ones. But not a bad song, all in all.

Only the Good Die Young (4:40)

And speaking of ending strongly, as a kind of bookend for the album this works really well. The start of it does seem a little abrupt, like it came out of nowhere, or was meant to follow on from another track, but that's a small niggle in an otherwise brilliant song. The boys really don't put a foot wrong on this closer, and it's the one that stays in your head and on your lips as you pack the album away/shut the file down. Great hook, the first song on side two that seems to have one, wonderful driving beat, and it doesn't rely so much on the guitar solos this time – though they are there – instead standing as a piece of music in its own right. Bruce puts in a terrific final performance, and you might be tempted to think this was the last time he really enjoyed himself on an Iron Maiden album. I like the sign-off in the lyric: “So until the next time, have a good sin!” Powerful, crashing guitar ending with a real punch to the jaw as it explodes to its end. Superb. And then the coda as the opening line from the album is repeated. You could, quite easily, make this an endless loop, which might not be a bad thing.

I mentioned that this album seems to have been the last time Bruce enjoyed himself, and I think you could extend that to the rest of the band too. I'm not sure how Dave, Steve and Nicko felt about the change in direction they took from the next album on, but they don't seem as cohesive a unit from this till the time of the departures, Adrian first and then Bruce. So to a very real degree, allowing for the weaknesses on Somewhere in Time, you could say this is the end of an era. Either the first period of Iron Maiden, from the debut to now, or the second, from The Number of the Beast. Either way, the next album would show a marked difference to the last two albums – oddly enough, not due to long tracks or the interest in progressive rock, almost the opposite – as the band seemed to struggle to find ideas, melodies, but not hits, as the next album gave them their first ever number one.

Ah yes, but one silver lining can't dispel the dark clouds, and the thunderheads were massing on the horizon, about to burst in a deluge of mediocrity, disappointment and lack of ambition.

And under that cloud, one man would decide he had had enough.

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Chapter IV: Say your prayers: The Requiem Mass Begins

You can probably consider Seventh Son of a Seventh Son as the crisis point. Since the pinnacle had been reached with Powerslave Maiden had been desperately trying to equal that success, regain the formula, and it had resulted in one okay album and one very good one, but neither were ever going to be Powerslave II. Maiden's focus had, since Powerslave, been shifting very dramatically away from the standard/NWOBHM metal of Killers, The Number of the Beast etc in a much more progressive rock/metal direction; songs had become longer and more involved, themes had become centred on historical events more, lyrics deeper and the dreaded keyboards, always slated by the band, had wormed their way into their repertoire. It wasn't quite the beginning of the end, but it was the beginning of the beginning of the end. Maybe.

Believing they had perhaps overstretched themselves on the last two albums, Steve Harris decided the time had come for a more stripped-down, back to basics Maiden, even insisting that the new album be recorded in the UK, their first since The Number of the Beast (the next three were recorded in the Bahamas, while the band went to Germany to record Seventh Son) and more, that it should be in, um, a barn on his own property, using the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio.

By the time the next album was ready, and in pre-production phase, Adrian Smith was so unhappy with the new direction that he quit the band, going off to put together his own solo outfits. He was replaced by Janick Gers, who had worked with Bruce on his first solo album. The new Iron Maiden album, their eighth, would see a dramatic shift downwards in their fortunes, with the album only gaining gold status though hitting the number 2 spot and giving them their only number one single. Nevertheless, none of the songs, bar that hit, seem to have survived into a live setting. And there's a very good reason for that.

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No Prayer for the Dying (1990)

Tailgunner (4:13)

My initial impression on hearing the opening song was, and remains, this is just “Aces High” rewritten. And it is. It doesn't sound exactly the same, but we're still talking about World War II pilots (bomber this time instead of fighters, but that's a small distinction really), and I find the melody somewhat similar. Bruce's voice has changed; it's more raspy, rough rather than the operatic wail we've been used to, and I don't think it suits him at all. The chorus in “Tailgunner” is really pretty awful, though the idea of the guitar riffs counterpointing the words “Tailgunner, you're a tailgunner” do work well. I will give it that it's a fast, punchy, powerful opening to the album, and for a short while it maintains the kind of quality that makes you think maybe it will be a vindication of the band, but it doesn't last.

Holy Smoke (3:47)

The first real effort by Maiden to take on organised religion, with Bruce actually taking the persona of Jesus works well and this is also I believe the first Maiden song that flirts with humour, which again is very effective. Dickinson changes his persona during the song to go to the other side, becoming Satan and to be fair his growl here suits the song well. It's another good guitarfest, and while I'm not saying I don't miss Adrian, Janick fills his shoes admirably. Dave is on form as always, and the songwriting partnership of Harris and Dickinson produces two damn good songs. It's not an original theme of course, but you can't help thinking the boys are getting their own back on the ones who demanded copies of The Number of the Beast be burned before they could corrupt young minds.

No Prayer for the Dying (4:22)

Almost a sense of slowing down here, with a slightly introspective guitar nodding back a little towards the previous album, though the melody and structure for me point more towards Somewhere in Time. The first song written solo by Harris, as he has written almost all the title tracks on every album (when there is one), it has its moments but they're few and far between. The guitars do get going nicely about halfway through as the tempo picks up in an almost end of “Hallowed Be Thy Name” kind of way, but really that burst of fretboard fever is about the only really decent thing about a song which fails to live up to the promise of its title, or indeed fulfils the responsibility of being the title track.

Public Enema Number One (4:03)

The mildly amusing title of this one is all I ever really remember. It does romp along nicely with some very chunky, growling guitar, but I feel it's a bit of a mess. You can hear elements, lyrically, from “Two Minutes to Midnight” and “Die with Your Boots On”, though this song is nowhere near in the league of either of those two songs. It's one of two efforts from Dave Murray, on this occasion with Bruce, while the next one teams him up with Harris.

Fate's Warning (4:09)

Another one I can never remember. You'll notice that so far there have been no long tracks, nor will there be, the longest on this album being five and a half minutes, but whereas before that benefitted Maiden in snappier, sharper songs, here it's almost as if they just can't write those songs any more; with a few exceptions, inspiration seems to have dried up, and though this has a decent guitar instrumental intro and then bursts into life, and has a hook of sorts, it's a weak one and doesn't grab my attention. There's a good idea in the melody in the middle eighth but they don't develop it and it really falls flat. Even the solos are quite meh.

The Assassin (4:16)

Continuing what will be a recurring trend on Maiden albums of song titles beginning with the definite article, the opening of this sort of reminds me of “The Prisoner”, with elements of both Powerslave and Seventh Son thrown into the guitar riffs. Another long instrumental introduction, which fails to live up to its promise. Another Harris solo effort, lyrically it reminds me of the rather poor Genesis song “Just a Job to Do”, which was on their eponymous 1983 album. The chorus is dire - “Better watch out (vocally harmonised, and at which you're tempted to sing “better not cry, better not pout I'm telling you why...”) cause I'm the assassin.” Yeah. Marillion did this far better in 1984 mate. The solos are all right but nothing special, and it just sounds, I don't know, amateurish. Again, there are some good ideas but they don't come to anything.

Run Silent, Run Deep (4:34)

I do like the thick ringing bass line that opens this, and if those are synthy keyboards making the dark, hollow noise then they're used to good effect. I have always assumed, from the title, that this is about a submarine, possibly a U-Boat, which both ties it into political lyrics and ones about war, making it the second on the album to cover that topic, and the sixth overall. The galloping beat is good, the solo a little over-screechy maybe, though parts of it seem to hark back to Piece of Mind, and in fact it's a better track than I remember it being.

Hooks in You (4:06)

The only track on the album to feature any contribution by the departed Adrian Smith to the songwriting, it's a fast, punchy, rocky song in the mould of “classic” Maiden, written in collaboration with Bruce, and looking back to the lyrical fare of Iron Maiden and Killers, with some very cutting wordplay ("I like a girl who knows where she's bound, don't like a girl who likes hanging around”) and tongue very firmly in the cheek, setting up the hit single. The amount of humour in this makes me wonder if Smith was having one last laugh at the guys, or with the guys, before he abandoned ship? Either way it's a fun little song that you can't take seriously, but with some serious guitar work. If you listen though, it's basically a retread of the melody from “Holy Smoke”. I always found it funny that Marillion, who released their “comeback” album, the first without Fish, two years earlier, also had a song by the same name on that album. Totally different lyrical content of course, but interesting.

Bring Your Daughter... to the Slaughter (4:42)

The kind of macabre humour continues as we head into the song which would give Maiden their only ever number one single. Now, don't get me wrong: I really like this song. I mean, really like it. But I have to admit, I don't see what makes it number one material. Maiden certainly have better songs, and I was quite surprised to see that it hit the top. Written by Dickinson and Janick Gers (the only track on the album on which the latter is credited) it was supposed to be on his debut solo album, Tattooed Millionaire, and was part of the soundtrack for the last gasp of Wes Craven's Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, but Harris wanted it for Maiden and convinced Bruce not to put it on the album. His version was apparently a lot different anyway.

Again, the tongue (when not being sawn off or pulled out by the roots) is firmly lodged in cheek, not that the stuffy old BBC could appreciate that, leading to a ban on the song both on radio and TV controlled by them. That it made number one in spite of that is a credit both to Maiden and their fans, who weren't about to be told what they could and could not listen to by Aunty Beeb. In fact, as is usual in these cases, the ban probably made the song the more popular and made more people want to buy it, pushing it up the chart no doubt to the rage of the suits at the Beeb.

It kind of has everything: a powerful, grinding guitar almost right out of Killers, insistent drumbeat, Bruce at his most menacing and a hook to, er, die for. I mean, what the fuck it is about I have no idea, but surely something like the need for young girls to rebel against their parents and hang around with boys they know they should not. There's a great singalong section in the middle, and it is, to be fair, the first song on the album where the boys break out the Woah-oh-ohs and they're handled well. Yeah I could see it, but I wonder if the ban was the reason it got to the very top, as it's a great song but there are better.

Mother Russia (5:30)

The last of Harris's solo efforts closes the album, and has always seemed, to me, to be very much the weak point in a not particularly strong album. Maiden have been known for strong closers, but this is not one. It's the longest (that's normal) but it just doesn't have the fire of the last few tracks, and seems to me to drag the album down. Reminds me a bit of “Powerslave” in parts, elements of a slower “To Tame a Land” too. The constant semi-Russian riff is just annoying, the choral voices presumably made on the keyboards add to the annoyance factor, and the song just plods along with no real energy or vibrancy.

It's perhaps no surprise that hardly any of these songs get played live any more. After all, if you need “Tailgunner” there's “Aces High”, and who really wants to hear “Public Enema Number One” or “The Assassin”, and most of all who wants to hear “Mother fucking Russia?” Jesus Christ on stilts! Oddly though, given that it gave them their biggest ever chart success, “Bring Your Daughter... to the Slaughter” isn't played either. I guess with a back catalogue like Maiden have, and even had at this point, it's easy to leave out songs, but you'd think one or two of them might have made it in.

No Prayer for the Dying would be a prophetic title, as the cracks that had appeared in the band began to yawn into fissures. Already annoyed at the way this album had been recorded, and later at its lacklustre reception by critics and fans – despite climbing to number 2 in the charts – Bruce was already packing his luggage, preparing for one last foray before he would split and vanish into the night, heading back to his own solo career which had stalled at the first album, and which would end up encompassing five more, the last of which recorded and released after his triumphant return to Maiden in 2000.

But right now, the coffin on the cover of this album looked like a physical representation of how the band was, with one member already (dearly) departed and another about to fall through the widening gap as the twin tectonic plates of musical differences and personal tensions ground together, heralding a seismic shift which would all but destroy Iron Maiden, but which, after a decade of failure, would finally see them back together, reunited and stronger than ever.

For a while.

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Chapter V: Barking Up the Wrong Tree: Darkness Closes In

I watched an interview with Bruce a while back, and he was holding forth with considerable amusement and surprise as to how even in the most remote of places the band were known and liked. He made a joke that there could be a tribe lost for centuries in the Patagonian rainforests who, when discovered, grinned “Favourite album? Fear of the Dark!” Now, sure, that was just a joke, but in reality I doubt there are too many metalheads, never mind Maiden fans (Maidenheads? Ah, no) who would rate this album anywhere near the top, and certainly not as their favourite. It's not that it's a bad album, but at best it's a good album, and frankly that's not good enough for Maiden. It suffers from a lot of bad tracks, which we will get into in due course, and I fear (sorry) the few good ones can't disguise the overall mediocrity of the music here in general.

I’m always slightly ambivalent about this album though. Being the last to feature Bruce for the next ten years, I so wanted it to be perfect that I compare myself to a parent who struggles with a problem child; I make all the excuses I can for why it is below par, and yet, in the end, I can’t help but admit the uncomfortable truth. Here it is that the album, my "problem child"* does not form a fitting departure for the man, more a quiet, almost embarrassed exit than a dramatic one.

The title of the album I find interesting. There may of course be no major significance to it – Steve Harris is well known for his love of horror movies, so the title would certainly fit in to that – but I tend to wonder if it has deeper meaning? Fear of the dark is essentially a fear of the unknown: when we're little (and not so little) we're at our most terrified and on-edge when we can't see what's around us. It is, in all cases, the terror of what might be lurking out there in the shadows that plays on our imagination, makes sheets draped over chairs into ghosts, calls to us with the voice of vampire or witch from the banging window that someone forgot to close properly, treads with the creaking step of the axe-wielding homicidal maniac on the squeaky stair, and makes every sound of a house settling at night, well, unsettling. We fancy we hear whispers, see things, catch sudden movement or that eyes are staring at us out of the dark, eyes that mean us harm.

If we've recently watched something scary, or if – as often happens no matter how hard we fight against it – something scary comes to our minds, something we may not have thought of for a long time (my own favourite horror is Eugene Tooms from The X-Files, always scares the shit out of me, and always comes to me in the darkness) then the fear is amplified as we imagine that thing, person or situation suddenly coming to life in the stygian gloom of our bedroom. We may want desperately to jump out of bed and turn on the light, but are frozen with fear and cannot do so. We may cautiously draw back beneath the covers feet that have slipped out, worried something nameless will reach out from beneath the bed and drag us under. We might squeeze our eyes tight shut, reluctant to, but perversely forcing ourselves to open them as our logical inner voice tells us there is nothing to be afraid of, in time to see the rampant, undisciplined memories playing in our minds run out and leak out of our eyes, painting shapes that we know are not there, cannot be there, cannot be real, yet make us quickly shut our eyes again and pray for the morning.

Of course, in the morning all fears are banished. Shapes that took on terrifying significance while the moon held court vanish in the calming rays of the sun, creaks and moans and thumps that tormented our attempts to sleep are replaced by birdsong, traffic, the sound of people moving in the street, maybe sirens or music as the world breathes a sigh and lives, moving into another day. All is well with the world, and there is no reason to fear, or at least, no reason to fear the dark. Sadly, there is much to fear in the world of light, but we can consign the terrors of the night to the region of nonsense and feel slightly ashamed that such easily explainable events and sounds caused us so much trepidation.

Until night falls again.

But the point is that, to go back to what I was saying, fear of the dark is almost always a fear of the unknown, and I wonder if Iron Maiden were concerned with what the future might bring? With Adrian gone, and Bruce soon to follow him, the core of the band was breaking down. Yes, true, Bruce had not been there from the start, but then nobody really had. The oldest member, other than Harris, is Dave Murray, who later recruited Adrian. Nevertheless, it's true to say that the Iron Maiden who went on to conquer the world, i.e. post-Di'Anno, can be considered the core lineup of Harris/Murray/Dickinson/Smith/Burr, and this means that with the imminent exit of Dickinson, only two original members of the band would be left.

I feel it could be that the band feared how they would go on without the frontman who had been with them for ten years by now, and who had become, in all ways possible, the face of the band as well as its voice. Harris had worked without him, of course, but while it would be unfair and inaccurate to attribute all their success to Bruce, the band had found fame under the new image, when Maiden mostly ditched the rawer, more punky edge of their sound and had gone in a much more commercial direction which landed them very quickly in the mainstream consciousness and right at the top of the pile, a position from which it has proved almost impossible to dislodge them, even after nearly forty years. While I'm sure Harris was not naive enough to think that Bruce was Iron Maiden, he must have worried how to replace him, with whom, and how the fans would take it.

Iron Maiden were not a band who could conceivably continue as an instrumental one, unlike Genesis, who considered going in this direction on the departure of Peter Gabriel, or who had potential singers within their ranks. Other than backing vocals, I don't believe any of the others ever sang on any Maiden song, so a new vocalist was not going to suddenly make himself known from within the band. That would mean going outside, and as Genesis found with Ray Wilson, fans often don't like that. Not to mention those who would consider themselves loyal to Bruce (again, look at Marillion when Fish left) the very idea of a new face and voice behind the mike, singing Dickinson standards such as “The Trooper”, “Aces High” or “Run to the Hills” probably made the vast majority of fans queasy to contemplate, and may in fact have put in the minds of many the idea that their beloved band was dead. This could not have helped but increase Harris's concern, and that of the remaining band members too.

As for Bruce, what was his fear? Well, they were many of course. His frustration with the direction the band had taken on at least No Prayer For the Dying had only increased as they recorded Fear of the Dark, and I think it shows in his singing, of which more very soon. His attempts to divide his time between recording with Maiden and his own solo career must have made things difficult, both for him and the band, and, like any long-established member of a band contemplating parting ways with them, there must have been a number of fears. Would the band survive without him (worse, perhaps: if it did, would it thrive in his absence, showing him that he was not in fact indispensable? One of the worst things I imagine is to leave a project you believe is all but yours, only to find that the fans go on with your replacement and in time you're all but forgotten) or would his departure lead to its break-up, and if the latter, could he live with that? Would his own solo career, no longer as bolstered by that of his parent band, crash and burn? Had the fans only supported him because of who he was, and, in leaving their first love, would be become a pariah, accused of betraying the band who “made him”? Would his records bomb, Maiden fans ignore his work, and might he, in the end, have to crawl back, cap in hand, to beg Harris to take him back?

Who knows? Maybe none of these things went through the mind of anyone. But if you want to expand it, what about the fears of the fans? I know I was upset – more than upset – when I heard Bruce was leaving. After all, I had come to Maiden via The Number of the Beast: Dickinson represented my first ever experience of the band, indeed, of heavy metal itself. His presence within Iron Maiden was all but part of my DNA, and to imagine him leaving, well, it was like thinking of Ozzy leaving Sabbath. Oh. Wait. Right. Well, anyway, I'm sure I wasn't the first or only fan to worry what would happen to the band without Bruce, and as it turned out, those fears weren't groundless in the least, as we'll see in the next chapter.

So while you can argue – and quite rightly, probably – that the concept of fear of the dark is, or could be, no more ominous than not having a prayer for the dying or finding you'd lost a little piece of your mind, and that may be all it means: it's Iron Maiden, and we live to scare the shit out of you when it's dark, I think personally fear – real fear, based on real things, not just shapes lurking or crouching in the dark (or indeed, up trees) – runs almost like a virus through this album, tainting the music and holding back the genius, whatever remained of it at this point, and we're left with an album that falls far short of what Iron Maiden could do, and had done, and perhaps shows us how after all it was not such a leap of logic to think that Bruce had had enough.

Fear is not a good motivator for musicians. It can be: if your fear hinges on the worry that your music won't sell, won't be good enough, then maybe it spurs you to go the extra mile and make sure you write and play the very best you can. But if fear is allied to doubt, doubt about the future, doubt about the very existence of your band after this, then it can be crippling, and I think that comes through almost every song here. Not only that, but it you want to call them deaths (bit over-dramatic, but it suits my purposes), you have not only that of Dickinson (and ostensibly Iron Maiden themselves) but also Derek Riggs, who would not draw the album cover here for the first time, and never would again until Bruce's return, and their longtime producer Martin Birch, who would retire after this album.

You'd have to say, the weight of Iron Maiden's history lies heavily on this album, and in some ways it's not that surprising that (forgive the tree allegory but I couldn't resist) when the wind blew, the bough bent, and would very shortly break, scattering metaphorical cradles in all directions, engendering much weeping and gnashing of teeth. The wilderness years were waiting in the wings, and as the title of my piece says, the darkness was closing in.
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Fear of the Dark (1992)

Be Quick or Be Dead (3:21)

The first thing I noticed about this album, right from the off, was Bruce’s voice. I mean, it’s hard for it not to be the focal point of the music anyway, given who he is, but that makes it all the more hard to take when his voice is below par. And it is, here. Gone is the deep growl, the controlled roar, even the air-raid siren scream. Here, as “Be Quick or Be Dead” opens, I’m jarred by the scratchy, screechy quality of the Maiden mainman’s vocal, and the only real accurate way I can describe it is as “witchy”. He shrieks the vocal, his voice seeming as if it’s going to crack. The song is, to be fair, standard Maiden fare, and certainly gets you headbanging from the start, and it’s short - as indeed, are most of the tracks. But in a way that’s worse. If Maiden songs suffer from being too long you can at least point to that as the failing; here, there’s nowhere to hide. These songs, for the most part, are just bad because, well, because they’re bad.

“Be Quick or Be Dead” gives you hope, despite the weak vocal, that the album is going to be an improvement over No Prayer for the Dying, though that hope soon fades. Interesting though: for some reason I always thought this was a song based on the Wild West (maybe because there’s a movie with a similar title that is set there) but now I see it’s a political song about scandals. Well, who knew? Yeah well I didn’t. Anyway, Maiden tend, or used to tend, to always kick off the album on a good fast rocker, and this is no exception. It certainly scratches the itch, after waiting two years for a new album. In some ways, the track is a little too short and living up to its title, it’s a case of be quick or you may miss it.

From Here to Eternity (3:35)

Things keep rocking nicely here, though the sexual innuendoes are a little embarrassing, to say nothing of the terrible group chorus, surely went down well onstage, but in the song itself it’s poor. It's my belief that the tongue of Harris, who wrote this solo, is lodged firmly in his cheek here, as you can’t take this seriously. It even sort of parodies The Eagles’ “Life in the Fast Lane” to some extent. It’s a real, dare I say it, brain-dead rocker song, and was obviously aimed at the biker brigade, with whom I’m sure it went down like a bottle of Jack, but Maiden don’t write songs like this. This is poor, poor, poor. Even the ending is contrived. Just bloody awful, and the again frankly embarrassing grin from Bruce at the end makes me want to puke. This is the band who wrote “Hallowed be Thy Name”, remember? Motorhead write these sort of live-fast-die-young songs, not Iron Maiden. Oh lord save me! Things are beginning to tilt downwards, my son!

Afraid to Shoot Strangers (6:52)

Thankfully, Harris redeems himself without question and in fine style, with a song that harks back to the classic Maiden period and even borrows a little from the basic melody of “To Tame a Land” as the second politically-motivated song, this one including themes of the Gulf War and PTSD, restores order and reminds us we’re listening to Maiden, not Metallica. Opening on a lilting almost acoustic guitar intro, the song allows Bruce to find his voice, dropping the screech this time and letting him drop into a far lower register as he reminds us why he’s the man, or was. The guitar backdrop is quiet and laid-back, but we know of course that Gers and Murray are just waiting to pounce, and we anticipate that event with delight. The song smoulders along like a fuse burning down to the big explosion we know is coming.

Nicko’s drums keep a slow, doomy beat as he ushers the song along, the track itself one of the two longest on the album, almost seven minutes, and not a second wasted. I’m glad to hear that Dickinson, while singing lines of bitter sarcasm, manages or chooses to do so in a sort of matter-of-fact, almost bland manner, rather than growl or hiss them, or spit vitriol. There’s a hint of the powerful breakout solos to come nearly halfway through, but the song so far remains basically slow and low-key. It’s only now, too, that the chorus comes in, and as it dies out the boys gear up and we’re off. The whole tempo changes as everything is kicked up a notch, and when Bruce comes back with the vocal it’s strong, but not this time screechy: the Bruce, for a short time, of old. In the end, the song slips back into its slower, more laid-back groove and finishes well. Unlike the first two, its almost humble style is what wins it points from me: whereas the other two (and more like it, later) sort of scream for attention, “Afraid to Shoot Strangers” quietly but firmly sets its stall out, and without any hawking or promises to lower prices, you feel compelled to buy.

Fear is the Key (5:30)

To some extent, I think this can be considered (by me, at any rate) as the second in a trilogy of decent tracks on the album. I don’t say this is by any means as good as the one that has gone before it, far from it, but it’s less mediocre than some that are to come, and it’s followed again by a half-all right song. I know this is damning with faint praise, but it’s the best I can do. Still, I must admit, I question the wisdom of having two songs on the album with the word “fear” in them, which can only, if anything, drive home the point I was making in the intro. Then again, this is a band that uses the definite article as if it’s all but mandatory in song titles - they do, however, restrict it to just two on this one - so perhaps I should not be surprised.

That said, “Fear is the Key” is written about the AIDS pandemic, and in the wake of the death of Freddie Mercury, with Bruce, who co-wrote it with Gers, opining hotly that no real notice was taken of the virus until famous people began to die, which is true to some extent. Up to the time of Mercury’s passing, it was kind of the “dirty disease”, with certain people of questionable morals calling it a judgement from God on the gay community. Stupid, and disproved too, when it became clear heterosexuals could catch it too, but to be expected, because as the title again tells us, fear is the key, and as we know, fear drives us to lash out often.

It’s a slow marching sort of tune in the vein of Dio’s “Egypt (The Chains Are on)” or Sabbath’s “Heaven and Hell”, and glad to hear Dickinson’s voice seems to be back to some measure of normality. There’s definitely a sense of eastern/Arabic melody here in the guitars, and given that “Afraid to Shoot Strangers” speeds up halfway, it’s the first really slow song on the album, though hardly a ballad, even if it does reference love and sex. As Bruce sings “Now we live in a world of uncertainty” you have to wonder if he’s giving little hints about his own plans for the future, not to mention the follow-up line “You’re outnumbered by the bastards”, though I doubt he thought of his bandmates in that way. Technically speaking, the song does take a slight uptick in tempo halfway, but it must be noted that all the band are doing here is repeating the opening verses with slightly different melodies behind them. It’s, well, it has to be said: it’s lazy, isn’t it?

Even the solos seem more of an afterthought, as if the guys know the fans expect them, or as if the song, with its five-and-a-half minute running time, might struggle to retain their attention and interest without some fretburning, but really it’s second-rate, and while this is, as I noted above, one of the better songs, it’s telling that it really wouldn’t stand up to being on a classic Maiden album, not even close. It is, to be blunt, one of a few of the best of a bad lot.

Childhood’s End (4:37)

Things kick back into high gear then for, if you like, the third of the more decent tracks, and it will be almost the end of the album before we come across anything else that can fall into this category in my opinion. I probably have a soft spot for this song because it’s also the title of a Marillion track, but that’s just me, and this is nothing like their song. Not that you’d expect it to be. Driven on Nicko’s rolling, thunderous percussion, it comes in on a sharp guitar intro from Dave or Janick, or both, before it takes off, and here again I feel Bruce’s voice is straining a little, not quite cracking as it did on the opener, but shaky certainly. It’s another Harris solo effort, and contains a pretty cool guitar motif, but again it’s lacking something. Well, almost everything really. It’s kind of a cross between “Two Minutes to Midnight” and “Die With Your Boots On”, but missing just about all the charm of each, or either of those tracks.

It does break out into an acceptable guitar solo, again about halfway through - Maiden have become nothing if not predictable by this stage - and this helps to lift the song out of the somewhat plodding quagmire it was in danger of falling into. To be entirely fair, it’s the solo that saves it; without that, this song would be very ordinary indeed. Instead, it’s just ordinary. I don’t like the abrupt ending either. Feels like they couldn’t decide how to end it and just had Bruce shout the title. Yeah.

Wasting Love (5:46)

Much has been made about this being Maiden’s first real ballad in I don’t know how many albums, but personally I feel it was a misstep, if there can be such a thing on what is so fundamentally flawed an album. This wasn’t what the fans wanted, not on what was to be Dickinson’s swan song. Metal fans, generally, don’t want ballads. Iron Maiden fans definitely don’t want ballads. I doubt there’s any Maiden fan who has written on a blog or forum “why don’t Maiden do more love songs?” There’s surely a reason why the last proper ballad on a Maiden album was back in the Paul Di’Anno era, when 1980’s Killers gave us the surprisingly lush “Prodigal Son”, and why we wouldn’t hear another ballad from the band until, well, ever really. I’d have to check. “Blood Brothers”? I don’t think so. “The Man of Sorrows”? Shrug. Either way, you can very easily count the number of Maiden ballads on one hand, even if you’ve lost a finger or two.

And do we really need another song about love? We’ve already had “Fear is the Key”. What’s with that? Is this an album for chicks or what? Where are the songs about battles and history and motorbikes (yeah) and obscure events and concepts which we’ve become used to hearing these guys sing about? A ballad? Come on guys. Give it a rest. But a ballad it is, and we must review it as such. At least there’s a whiny guitar and a bit of a drum punch to start the track, but then it fades down into introspective guitar (introspective? Iron Maiden? Have I fallen into some sort of alternate dimension?) with a low-key vocal and a pace to rival the most doomy thing you can think of. I mean, it’s not terrible, but does it belong on a Maiden album where the needle is frantically swinging from “All right I suppose” to “Better” and more frequently to “Very poor”? It’s also way too long, almost six minutes.

There’s of course an attempt at a solo, but it’s almost as if the guitars, to paraphrase Queen, want to break free, and are being held in check. I mean, it’s a fucking ballad, guys! How much shredding can you do on a ballad? Answer: not much. And not much is a descriptor I would give to this song as well. I find it quite poor and if it was a gamble to see if the fans would wear another ballad twelve years later, I think it probably was a failed experiment.

And spoiler alert: it’s not going to get much better for a while.

The Fugitive (4:52)

We return to Maiden’s habit of using “the”, and I have to be honest here: they already wrote a song called “The Prisoner” in 1982, so why reuse the theme? Admittedly, that was about a particular prisoner, and the show itself, but the lyric mostly concerned a man on the run. And what’s another word for a man on the run? Sigh. Yes. Fugitive. This is another of the efforts on which Harris holds up his hand and says “It’s all right lads, I got this.” But he doesn’t. Not by a long way. At least it kicks the tempo up the arse, so there is that, but overall it’s a pretty empty song with nothing much to say and as I say above, mostly retreads the ground covered on the Patrick MacGoohan-inspired cut from The Number of the Beast. No matter how many times I listen to this (and I don’t do that often) I can never remember it afterwards, which tells its own story perhaps.

I wonder if it has to do with the series of the same name? It’s possible, and if so then there’s even less reason for its existence, as they did this already, and then repeated themselves on Powerslave with “Back in the Village”, itself pretty unnecessary. Yes, the boys are allowed to cut loose but hell, even the solos sound off; I don’t know what it is, they just sound confused, as if they don’t know what they’re supposed to be playing. This song is just a mess, and it should never have been included on the album. Surely there were better songs left on the cutting room floor, as it were? Way too long for what’s in it. A really shitty hurried ending too, though I guess at least it ends.

Chains of Misery (3:33)

Hey, double the run time and you have… woe to you, O Earth and sea, for the Devil sends, you know. There’s a certain sense of hard rock boogie about this, it sways along nicely, but Bruce’s voice is breaking again. It does have a hook though, which is something a lot of the other tracks lack. There’s also another shouted chorus which again I imagine was fun to do onstage. One thing I’ve noticed so far is that this album is totally devoid of the “whoa-oh-oh” syndrome; hasn’t been a single one up to this point, which, given the weakness of some of the songs, is quite remarkable. Maiden often use this chant as a way, I feel, to support songs that don’t quite cut it, though of course not always, as some of their better songs have the “Whoa-oh-oh” in them. Nevertheless, it seems that often, when they’re not sure what to put in the song they throw a few rounds of this in; it’s almost come to be expected by now, and again it gives the fans something to sing when Maiden go on tour.

But all of that waffle from me serves only to underline how pretty basic and forgettable this song is, even with the aforementioned hook and the fact that it is one of very much the shorter songs on the album. This is also only one of two songs on the album which Dave co-writes, both with Bruce. This is poor, but he does redeem himself later. At least they didn’t try to stretch it out, thank Eddie. Next!

The Apparition (3:53)

And we’re back to the definite article again. Definitely. Sorry. Only twenty seconds longer than “Chains of Misery”, this is one of two written by Harris with Janick Gers, and - let’s be quite clear about this - not only this one, but the other one too is shite. So basically, I don’t think the German can write for shit. The other songs he’s involved in are the opener, with Dickinson, and the poor ballad, again with Bruce. Mind you, he does help him write “Fear is the Key”, so maybe he’s not totally useless. But this song is. The staccato drumbeat following it is boring, the lyric is weak, the diction is really terrible, and it’s another of those tracks I forget as soon as it’s ended.

Bruce’s voice is again raw on this one, very scratchy, even the solo is poor, though either Dave or Bruce’s co-author do their best to lift the song out of the realms of the mediocre, an impossible task really. The word throwaway could have been coined to describe this track, and its only saving grace is that it’s very short, though not short enough.

Judas Be My Guide (3:06)

Things finally begin to look up, with my second-favourite track on the album (though that’s saying very little). From the moment I heard the soaraway guitar opening this I knew we had a different animal on our hands, and this track stands head and shoulders above just about every other track, with the possible exception of the title cut. It’s Maiden from the classic days, when they rocked and shredded and just put their heads down and got on with it. This is Dave and Bruce at their very best, and helps to - almost - wind up the album in fine style. It certainly banishes, temporarily at least, the memory of the last few tracks and we can luxuriate in Maiden the way they’re meant to be.

Bruce is also in next to perfect vocal form on this, the voice we remember from The Number of the Beast and Powerslave. It’s kind of ironic that the almost-best track on the album is also the shortest, a mere few seconds over three minutes. Whereas some of the others would have benefitted, in my opinion, from being cut at least twenty or thirty seconds shorter, or more, I would have listened to another minute of this easily. But such it is, and we have to make do with a nugget of gold among the coal, to be politer than I would like to be. Great solo too, almost restrained but all the better for that. Definitely over too soon, and there aren’t many tracks on this album I can or will say that about.

Weekend Warrior (5:37)

Case in point. Why is a superb song like “Judas Be My Guide” so short and this garbage over five and a half minutes long? Again, I got this one wrong lyrically: I thought it was another one about motorcycle gangs, but I read it’s actually taking as its subject the cancer of football hooliganism. Bruce is back to screeching the vocal and it’s painful to hear, after his sublime performance on the previous song. At least there’s some sort of attempt at introspective guitar, though it doesn’t last. The chorus is lazy and weak, and there’s not a hook to be found in the song anywhere. Even the melody is totally forgettable, and Gers fails (if I can blame him; he does work with Harris on this) for the second time.

In effect, it’s a real pity, as without this the album would have ended very strongly, with “Judas” and the title track, but as it is we’re subjected to this below-par drivel, meaning you can’t even play the last two tracks (well of course you can now, on a playlist or Spotify or whatever, but I’m talking from the point of view of someone who is, or was, used to playing an album either on a CD player or, if you want to get really down into the age of dinosaurs, a turntable) and it just ruins the flow of the latter part of the album. I will give it grudging props for the solo, which is sweet, but there’s no way the song needs to be this long. Or exist at all.

Fear of the Dark (7:16)

They say save the best till last, and while that would not have been hard with this album, the boys do pull it out of the hat on the final stretch. Had this opened the album, I feel I would have been saying that Maiden would have trouble matching its quality, and I’d be right. The rest of the album, mostly, would be judged against this. As it is, it manages to almost snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, and at least gives you something decent to be humming to yourself when you switch the album off. As a swansong for Bruce it’s almost perfect, as a return, however brief, to the glory days of Iron Maiden it’s a tempting glance back, perhaps even a vision of what could or might have been, had Bruce stayed, and had the band listened to his ideas for their future. At worst, it’s a killer (pun intended) track that almost, but not quite, makes you forget the dross, mostly, that it supports.

I personally don’t think it’s stretching it to call “Fear of the Dark” Iron Maiden’s “Hallowed Be Thy Name” for the nineties, and I can’t think, off-hand, of a single better closing track since that one. No, not even “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, which I love, but this is better. It’s just a pity it comes as a kind of unexpected treat or reward after a hard slog through mostly rubbish music, sort of like knocking on doors and being rebuffed every time, with the final door being your big sale. Surprise, you know, but a good one. The fact that it runs for over seven minutes is very acceptable, especially since longer closing tracks have become something of a hallmark of this band, and I don’t believe it’s in any way overstretched.

From the hammering guitar which opens it, to the fade down to quieter, almost acoustic guitar before Bruce comes in all but whispering the vocal, you just know this song is going to repay you, make it worthwhile that you stuck it out to the end. You can feel the joy rising (I said, the joy! If something else is rising that’s your affair!) as Maiden finally give us the song we’ve been waiting, praying, begging for, but had lost all hope of hearing. It’s almost like we’ve jumped into some other album, it’s so different from what has preceded it. The idea of the vocal initially being so low ties in well with the image of something waiting in the darkness, half-glimpsed, perhaps even imagined. Then the guitars really get going, the percussion kicks in and Bruce takes off in full flight.

He really pulls out all the stops here, as if he knows this is to be his final performance with the band for some time, perhaps, at that time, he believed, forever. The boys rally to his cry, and everyone plays the best he has on the album, and indeed the best he has in many a year. I think you could search a long way back into Maiden’s catalogue before you could find a song as “classic Maiden” as this one, and in a way it’s really sad that it signals the end of an era.

I said it before, and I’ll repeat it here, that it’s very telling that the final words we hear Bruce sing, the last on the track, the last on the album, and the last he will utter in a studio with Iron Maiden for ten years are “I am the man who walks alone.” I guess by now he’s realised his destiny lies beyond the band, and if he fears the dark, he nevertheless steps boldly into it, confronting his fears and determined to defeat them.

And as the final strains of guitar and voice wind down, we fade to black.
Or at least, neutral, boring grey.

For Iron Maiden and their fans, winter was coming, and it would be a long, hard and cruel one.

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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.

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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 fuck 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 fucking 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 FUCK 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 shit 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 fucking 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 fuck, 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.

Judgement of Heaven (5:10)

Two more solo Harris compositions coming up, with - for this period anyway - typically morose subject matter. Once again the vocal is low and indistinct, the guitars almost rock and roll in a way, then they punch through and the vocal comes up, but my question is why does it take so long? Why can’t these songs start off going for the throat, instead of creeping up on you and sussing you out first? We want the mad killer from 1981 who stalked the streets spreading terror, not some fucker cowering on the ground, raising his fist to the sky and cursing god. Fuck that. Having said that, once this song gets going it’s not without its charm, but still not a patch on even anything from Fear of the Dark. At least though there is some life in it and we hear the familiar twin guitar attack, which does help.

Blood On the World’s Hands (6:00)

And here’s his other one. Another bloody epic - well, six minutes plus at this stage of their career would have been considered an epic for Maiden. Opening on an almost jazzy bass line which makes you wonder if a piano is about to join in, it’s almost a bass solo, which, to be fair, Harris has never to my knowledge attempt - oh wait. Isn’t there “Losfer Words”? Is that a bass solo? Can’t remember. Anyway, the song does eventually get its shit together, but it hasn’t in any way been worth waiting for, slouching along with its hands in its pockets and head down, one of Maiden’s politically-themed songs, in case you hadn’t guessed. It retains a very proggy/jazzy feel in the melody, and I can’t see too many people headbanging to this. Well maybe: there are people who, if drunk or out of it enough, would probably headbang to “Fur Elise”. But it doesn’t elicit that kind of reaction in me.

The solo is a bit confused, as if Dave or Janick aren’t quite sure what they’re supposed to be doing, or what’s expected of or to be tolerated from them, and the song proceeds along without any real direction that I can see, with a fairly obvious chorus, but at least a good performance from Bayley. Sounds very progressive metal to me. Hell, at least there’s some aggression here, something that has been mostly missing from the album.

The Edge of Darkness (6:39)

Whatever about the wisdom, or not, of including two tracks with the word “edge” in them, this is another slow starter, very moody, very sombre - reminds me a little of Bon Jovi’s “While My Guitar Lies Bleeding in My Arms” from These Days - and again we have a barely-heard vocal from Blaze, a slow introspective guitar and bass opening, though Bayley’s vocal does start to come into its own here once the song gets going. For a short time, yeah, you could convince yourself this is Bruce. Not for long, but for a while. It’s a very familiar Maiden riff once it gets going, though I can’t quite place my finger on it. Sort of an almost Celtic feel to it maybe.

I do like the solos, though they kind of remind me of first Big Country and then Thin Lizzy, not something I’ve ever said about Maiden to this point anyway. I still hear no hook, and in fact to be perfectly honest I don’t even hear a chorus or any real kind of song structure, which is fine: plenty of artists throw the rules out the window. But Maiden are not known for doing this, and while I don’t insist they stick to verse-verse-chorus-verse, their songs, even “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, do tend to observe some sort of rules, and this doesn’t. Makes it very hard to follow it.

2 AM (5:37)

Has anyone else noticed that since “Man on the Edge” every song has been at least over five minutes, many over six? That’s not the norm for a Maiden album, though as I think I said earlier it does point the way towards how their work would develop over the next decade. Another low vocal which thankfully explodes fairly quickly, but this is pretty much a self-indulgent song as Blaze sings “Here I am again on my own”. Yeah we get it Steve: you’re hurting, and we sympathise, but you have a job to do here, and it’s somewhat unprofessional and not very fair to use the album that was supposed to confirm Iron Maiden as still being a force in heavy metal to pour out your troubles to us and cry into your beer. Do that on your own time, guy, yeah?

In terms of tempo, it’s a slow, marching sort of thing, with heavy drums and grinding guitars, which makes an attempt to kick itself up the arse late on, some all right guitar solos spilling out into the tune, but they’re almost incidental, and gone as soon as they begin. Even an extended instrumental section just more or less marks time till Blaze comes back in to whine again in Harris’s words about how cruel and miserable life is. Heavy metal Morrissey? Not far from it.

The Unbeliever (8:05)

Sigh. Yes indeed. An eight minute closer. But wait! What’s this? A lively, sprightly guitar riff to open the song? Could it be… surely not. Now that sounds like keyboards there though they’re gone as quickly as they come in. Oh dear. The rhythm is poor with a hurried vocal. Oh no wait. That dramatic bridge is not at all bad. But then we’re back to bouncing along and then back to drama. Where in the name of Bruce Dickinson is this going? Little riff there almost reminiscent of the debut album, then it turns into something from Seventh Son with a little “Two Minutes to Midnight” thrown in. A pastiche? Perhaps. A mess? Possibly.

If this is building to a big solo then maybe there’s hope. But no. It stops and goes to a bass part, with a sort of apology for a solo - more a rhythm part really in the background, bass definitely taking the lead. Oh and now there is a solo, and hey it’s really not too bad. Is it too little too late? Maybe not. Where do we go from here? If it ends well then it might not be the worst closer. Okay, back to the bouncing rhythm of the verse, dramatic bridge, and still basically no chorus. I suppose I could be generous and say the bridge is the hook, and it kind of is, but it doesn’t really go anywhere. Bridge to nowhere? Sorry. But it should have led to a big chorus or something and it doesn’t, so I’m left waiting. And it ends on some sort of mad “chopsticks” thing. Oh dear.




I didn’t have preconceptions originally when I came to listen to this album. Like most Maiden fans, I expected and hoped to like it. But as I slogged through it - and it’s the only description that fits really - I began to realise something was very rotten in the state of Maiden. You might be surprised to hear that I was not testing Blaze Bayley, ready to light up the fire and pile up the wood (or is that the other way around?) as soon as I could declare “he’s no Bruce!” No. I didn’t expect him to be as good, but I wasn’t too bothered. What was done was done, and as long as he didn’t sound like, I don’t know, George Michael or yer man from Air Supply or someone, I would have been happy.

What I did feel crushed about was the poor quality of the songs, the overlong running times, the dark, pessimistic, self-pitying atmosphere emanating from the music, and the fact that only about two tracks - if that - impressed me sufficiently that I could remember them when the album was finished. I laid the blame for this, as I saw it, gross failure directly at the feet of Harris, McBrain, Murray and Gers. They were the ones who should have known better. Bayley was the new guy: what did he know? Of course, he ended up taking much of the flak for the album’s dip in quality from previous releases, but that was I think projection. People were unwilling to blame the boys, and didn’t have far to look for a scapegoat.

What The X Factor proved to me was that Iron Maiden actually could not continue without Bruce Dickinson, and their next offering only served to confirm this. It was going to be a long five years.

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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 fucking 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 shit. 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 shite. 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.

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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!

When Two Worlds Collide (6:13)

Written, according to Harris, mostly by Blaze Bayley in an attempt to try to sort out his feelings on taking over from Bruce Dickinson, this is only the second of three the soon-to-be-former singer writes on the album, and only one of two that has three authors, Dave joining Steve to help the burning one out. It has a kind of dramatic opening, which I feel is somewhat keyboard-led, another faux-ballad start, which to be fair to him showcases Bayley’s vocal abilities, which are not inconsiderable. It soon sparks into life and trundles along nicely, but there’s something - I don’t know - basic, about it. Some nice guitar work for sure. The lyric is somewhat prophetic in respect to him - “When two worlds collide/ Who will survive?” Not you, mate, that’s for sure.

The galloping drumbeat set up by Nicko McBrain really gives the song a sense of urgency, even panic, and though Bruce wouldn’t announce his intention to return for another year, I have to wonder if Bayley realised he was living on borrowed time, that he was just filling in until the master stepped back into the studio and back onstage? Ah, look! More “whoa-oh-oh!”s. Cute.

The Educated Fool (6:46)

Harris takes control now almost to the end of the album, writing this and the penultimate track solo, and again we’re looking at the longer side of his writing, with this nearly seven minutes and the next one over eight. I have no issue with long songs - you’re talking to a proghead after all! - but I do have a problem with songs that are long just for the sake of being long. As I said to an annoying degree above, “The Angel and the Gambler” is a prime example, but it’s not the only one, though I can’t in fairness point to an example from the pre-Blaze era. Maybe that’s because I know and love all those songs so well, but I don’t think so. Certain songs I consider somewhat throwaway exist in this era - “Gangland” off The Number of the Beast, “Quest for Fire” from Piece of Mind and maybe even either “The Duellist” or “Flash of the Blade” on Powerslave - did they really have to have two songs about fencing? But none of them are long songs, certainly not epics. When Maiden did epics - and it was quite occasionally, back before these albums - they did them right. Who could find fault with “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, “To Tame a Land” or even “Hallowed Be Thy Name”? All right, that’s hardly an epic, but it’s as long, longer in fact than this one.

Is this anything like as good? You seen any flying pigs recently? It utilises that kind of “Fear of the Dark”/ “Afraid to Shoot Strangers” slow acoustic-sounding riff but has some interesting phrasing to be fair and I would say it’s possibly the only longer song on this album on which the length is actually justified. It seems to progress through a number of movements, and so in ways again it’s looking forward to Maiden’s partial reinvention as a progressive metal band, pretty much starting with the next album and, um, progressing from there. Good fluid solo from Dave or maybe Janick, never sure and it ends as it began, which is another trademark of this band.

Don’t Look to the Eyes of a Stranger (8:11)

Discounting the previous album, I don’t think you could ever look at a Maiden record and see a song eight minutes long and yet not the longest track, but here it’s not even the second longest. An interesting premise, the old stranger danger idea, though Harris should know, as most/all parents do, that sadly it’s not the strangers you have to beware of when considering your child’s safety, but those who are well known to you, those you trust. It’s too often the case that an abduction of or attack on a child is perpetrated by a family member, friend or acquaintance. Be that as it may - well actually, maybe that’s what he’s saying here: DON’T look to the eyes of a stranger, look to those you know? As I say, be that as it may, it's a somewhat brave theme to tackle.

Wow. It really has an odd, almost carnival-like opening, so much so that for a moment I thought I’d clicked on the wrong album! That is weird. I don’t remember that, but then this is only about the third time I’ve listened to this album so not that surprising really. A sort of sotto voce vocal from Bayley as the guitar riffs build in a kind of almost pizzicato way. Okay no: he’s definitely talking about being wary of strangers. The song pumps into life now, with a sort of not quite but almost nod back to 1981’s “Killers”, a sense of being pursued and stalked. I must admit, I find this very stilted and hard to follow the melody on; there’s just something, well, off about it. Being a Harris song, it’s not at all surprising that we get an expressive bass solo in the first third of the song, with keyboards leaking in too and the vocal taking it to a big crescendo as the choppy guitar adds its muscle.

I feel at this point this could be half as long as it is, and not lose much. There’s a lot of repetition again. I repeat, there’s a lot of repetition again. It sort of looks back to “The Angel and the Gambler” in its overuse of the chorus, such as it is, though here at least the lads get to cut loose with some decent solos and Nicko has a bash at it too, though much shorter in his case. Yeah, definitely stretched way beyond breaking point.

Como Estais Amigos (5:26)

The closing track is the only one on which Steve Harris has no input (he probably had to approve the song but he is not involved in the songwriting) and the only one on which Janick Gers gets a songwriting credit. He shares this with Blaze Bayley, so whether written as such or not, this turns out to be Bayley’s final song both in terms of writing and singing. After this he would depart the band to make way for the return of Dickinson. The song is apparently based on the Falklands War, in perhaps the same way as “Afraid to Shoot Strangers” is set in the Gulf War. It has a nice ringing guitar opening which does kind of put you in mind of Mexican folk songs, and the keyboards play a pretty prominent role in the song, but just as you thought “they wouldn’t, would they?” the track shows its teeth and it’s certainly not Iron Maiden’s third ever ballad of their career to date.

It’s definitely less energetic and frenetic than any of the other songs on the album, but it punches and thrashes too, and while it’s maybe not the ideal closer, it could I suppose in ways be said to be a farewell from Bayley to the Maiden fans, with its main line “No more tears/ If we live to a hundred years/ Amigos, no more tears.” Kind of touching in a way I guess. But it is a downbeat way to end an album that started on high-octane energy and with surely the intention of banishing the memory of The X Factor. This kind of, almost, recalls those darker days and makes you wonder where exactly Maiden might have gone had their vocal god not come back?



Like I say, this is the third time I’ve heard this album. When I first heard it, I was very disappointed. I gave it another chance some years later in my journal, in the section I titled “Last Chance Saloon”, and was equally unimpressed. This third time, I may have gained a slightly better appreciation for what it is, but I’m still leaving it down the bottom of my list of favourite Maiden albums. I suppose the only thing you can say about it is that the boys did seem to learn a little from past mistakes, tried to resurrect the glory days, mostly failed, and had to, to paraphrase one of the song titles, look to the eyes of a friend to manage their comeback.

You can also give it this: it’s not the X Factor. Perhaps, in the final analysis, that is its saving grace. It’s not much, but it’s something.