IRON MAIDEN - IRON MAIDEN

It is hard to believe that it is now forty years since Iron Maiden's debut album was released. On 14th April 1980, the New Wave of British Heavy Metal (often shortened to the rather unwealdy accronym NWOBHM) found its first superstars and an album of excellence to rival any of the previous decade's prog rock classics. Iron Maiden had already had numerous line-up changes in the run-up to recording their eponymous album, even as late as their 14th November BBC session recording for Tommy Vance's Friday Rock Show on 14th December 1979, Vance having promoted NWOBHM acts since his engagement a year earlier. The Metal for Muthas compilation album also recorded in November 1979 also still featured Doug Sampson, and while an excellent drummer (the BBC session version of 'Sanctuary' is still for me the best), he left at the very end of 1979 due to health issues and had to be swiftly replaced by Clive Burr in time to record the new album in January 1980. 

 

 

 

The five members who made it into the studio were band leader and bassist Steve Harris, guitarists Dave Murray and Dennis Stratton, drummer Clive Burr and singer Paul Di Anno. A debate among Iron Maiden fans has often raged over who is Maiden's best singer, Di Anno or Bruce Dickinson (Blaze Bayley is never included). The pro-Dickinson camp are of course wrong. Di Anno may be a terrible specimen of human being, but Dickinson's voice is all wrong for heavy metal, yet alright for the more commercial poppy and proggy incarnations Iron Maiden would become. Di Anno was a great and versatile heavy metal singer. That said, Di Anno's lifestyle made him unreliable and some of the live performances from late 1980 onwards are less than impressive, with him often cutting notes short, as his alcohol abuse took its toll on his voice and fitness and he became unable to hold long notes or reach the high ones. A pity, for this album shows his ability both to sing soft soulful ballads like 'Strange World' and raw post-punk-flavoured metal songs like 'Prowler'.

 

The five on this album have a perfect balance achieved by pulling in different directions at the same time. Di Anno, sporting short spiky hair in contrast to the rest of the band, came unsurprisingly from punk, having been in a punk band called The Paedophiles. Stratton was more into the progressive and blues rock of such bands as Wishbone Ash and The Eagles. Murray's influences were more conventional for a metal guitarist: Blackmore, Hendrix and Kossoff. Burr, who sadly passed away in 2013, tragically for a muscular drummer from multiple sclerosis, had a huge impact on the next generation of speed and thrash metal drummers with his playing style. For me, his successor after The Number of the Beast, Nikko McBrain, while selected for his cameraderie with the band, does not approach Burr's level. Although Harris' early influences were prog bands like Genesis, ELP and Pink Floyd, he was conscious of keeping Maiden firmly within the limits of heavy metal, but did develop a unique playing style that is more like a rhythm guitar, often described as a 'gallop'. The later losses of Stratton, Di Anno and Burr would certainly help to make them more mainstream, but reduce the - dare I say the word - 'diversity' of styles.

 

Harris' musical conservatism would push out Stratton after this one album and later push out his replacement Adrian Smith, both for the same reason of wanting to experiment in a more progressive style, a style which in any case dominates the Seventh Son of a Seventh Son album. One major criticism of Harris' conservatism that comes out here would be the overreliance on the same repetitive song structure for almost all of Maiden's songs. All the songs on Iron Maiden follow this structure of Intro, Verse 1, Chorus, Verse 2, Chorus, Bridge (sometimes purely instrumental, sometimes with lyrics), Verse 3 (sometimes a repeat of Verse 1), Outro. Even the instrumental 'Trannsylvania' musically follows the structure. This is not a major criticism though, because all the album's songs are of a high standard. The fact that the songs presented had already been composed and played as fan favourites on the pub circuit a long time prior to recording meant the album has no filler tracks. There is a distinct drop in consistency on the Killers album.

 

Steve Harris was never happy with the production quality of the album and turned to sound engineer Martin Birch for the next album and beyond, until Birch's retirement in 1992. Blaze Bayley often gets criticism for the failure of The X Factor and Virtual XI, but the major reason is the drop in production quality due to the loss of Birch. Birch had worked extensively with Deep Purple and its spin-offs, as well as mixing for other bands like Fleetwood Mac, Wishbone Ash and Black Sabbath, and was responsible for a more polished sound. While this works well for the more prog-oriented albums of Stranger in a Strange Land and Seventh Son of a Seventh Son, it would not have suited this one. The feedback at the end of the instrumental of 'Phantom of the Opera' is probably unintentional (Maiden have never really been exponents of feedback), yet perfect. To correct some of the 'flaws' would, ironically, ruin the album.

 

Lyrically, the first incarnation of Iron Maiden refreshingly and consciously avoided politics, as Clive Burr stated in interview. Even the cover of the single 'Sanctuary', included on the American version of Iron Maiden, that depicts mascot Eddie killing Margaret Thatcher had nothing to do with politics and everything to do with disgruntlement at the media claiming they were named after the prime minister of the time. In fact, Iron Maiden was named at the end of 1975. Politics certainly came in later, though, and who can forget the anti-White lyrics of 'Run to the Hills'? Iron Maiden takes in the darker side of the human condition in such songs as 'Prowler', 'Running Free' and 'Charlotte the Harlot', as well as high culture in 'Phantom of the Opera', flights of fancy in 'Strange World' and personal remembrances of Di Anno's recently deceased fighter pilot grandfather in 'Remember Tomorrow'. 'Remember Tomorrow' in particular shows how poetic Maiden's lyrics can be:

 

Unchain the colours before my eyes,
Yesterday's sorrows, tomorrow's white lies.
Scan the horizon, the clouds take me higher,
I shall return from out of fire.

What is remarkable about the album is its distinct Eurocentrism. It is no coincidence that Iron Maiden's following grew organically out of the White European pub-goers of London's East End. It was music and lyrics that they could relate to, that appealed to them, instinctively and culturally. It is why such music is repressed today in favour of the soulless manufactured meaningless sounds of a soulless consumerist meaningless society.