I was sick, dizzy and weak, on my knees on the cold lino floor, groaning and gasping into the bowl. I heard voices progressing towards me from the studio: ‘He’s in here, is he?’ The door was kicked in and a strong pair of hands dragged me backwards. Ian Gillan wiped the vomit from my mouth, sat me upright and put me in a cab home. This was not my finest hour, as he would remind me every time we met for the next 20 years: ‘Hiya, mate. You’re not going to throw up all over me again today, are you?’ How not to meet your maker.
Home in this case had moved to the other side of the Isle of Dogs, where I paid the princely sum of 10 pounds a week to stay in what was essentially a post-student flophouse. I had nowhere formal to sleep, like a bed, but after the last of the bongs had been smoked I wrapped myself up in sheets and slept on the floor beside the unguarded gas fire. The windows were sealed with sheets of polythene and the single bath had spectacular growths of mould suspended from the ceiling, which at least gave you something to look at while having a soak. The address was Roffey House and it was the only property on the floor that was not boarded up, but its fourth-floor balcony still stank of piss and dog shit.
It was a relief to go out on the road on tour somewhere – anywhere, in fact. We were moving on up, and our self-booked tour plus Ian Gillan had finally attracted a half-decent agent.
Ham of the Gods
The future was looking almost rosy. Our album had charted at number 34 and we were on the radar of a new and very progressive publishing company, Zomba Music, run by Clive Calder and Ralph Simon. They represented songwriters and also record producers, having realised that it was often the producers who controlled the recording output and through them they could effectively control the output of the music industry. They were shrewd, but in a business full of charlatans and dreamers they were as close as you could get to being straight.
They managed Mutt Lange, who had just produced AC/DC’s Back in Black. The engineer on the album was Tony Platt, and they were anxious to develop his career. He was the man who knew what most buttons did in a recording studio, and he was to have a profound effect on me in particular. He reshaped my voice, and it became the voice that people recognise today.
Samson went in to Battery Studios in Willesden, north-west London, to record a third album, Shock Tactics. By chance, there was another Zomba-managed producer working right next door. His name was Martin Birch. He had produced some of the greatest, if not the greatest rock albums of all time, with bands like Deep Purple and Rainbow. He was a legend.
He was making an album for a band called Iron Maiden, called Killers. I had first seen Maiden at the Music Machine in Camden. Samson were headlining, but the Maiden tribe turned up and packed the place out. Uncompromising, intense and with a savage execution, they were the cutting edge of the new metal movement. When I’d listened to Deep Purple in Rock and Speed King from behind a closed door at 15, I’d felt an upsurge of adrenalin, of chills running up my spine and out to my fingers. When Maiden launched into ‘Prowler’ I got the same goosebumps. This was a modern-day Purple, but with a theatrical side. I regret to say that, from the moment they took the stage in Camden, I knew I would be their singer. This was going to be a theatre of the mind, and I could do it with them. Darth Vader didn’t stand there hissing and clanking saying, ‘It is your destiny.’ He did not have to. They had Eddie.
Iron Maiden’s first album had gone straight to number 4, and they were now a worldwide band. Unusually, their uncompromising leader was a bassist, Steve Harris, and their no-nonsense manager was called Rod Smallwood. They had earned a reputation for firing a lot of musicians. I didn’t have a problem with that; nobody rides for free. Dave Murray, the guitarist, was Steve’s right-hand man; left-hand man was Dave’s childhood friend, Adrian Smith, who had joined the band just before Killers. The pairing made for one of the UK’s most formidable guitar attacks. Clive Burr was the drummer.
Clive had also played a year before in Samson and found our juxtaposition highly amusing. He was a very open, warm and friendly individual who was chatty about drums, women and designer sunglasses. Maiden all wore a boy-band-style uniform, based on a hybrid ‘typical metal’ fan. In the case of Steve Harris it didn’t matter, because he always wore tight jeans, white trainers and a leather jacket. I think Mr. Smallwood wanted to make sure there were no backsliders who might head down the slippery slope to Hawaiian shirts or, in my case, red floppy hats.
Samson termed it their ‘cunt kit’. As in: ‘Morning, Clive. I see you have your cunt kit on.’
The truth was that behind the slightly bitter terminology was a streak of jealousy. Maiden were better players, manifestly better managed and properly funded by a record company, EMI, which actually gave a toss. There was a seriousness about them. In sharp contrast, Samson lolled around making smart-arse comments until the dope ran out. The cracks were already starting to appear, and I could see the end of days for us as a unit. Still, for now, we had written what I thought was our best material.
Tony Platt came from the Mutt Lange school of production, and he had some strong views on how things should get done. The major problem was that Thunderstick couldn’t really play the drums very well. Barry envisioned his style as being somewhere between Kiss and the Police, which entailed hitting everything in sight and kicking various clanging and tingling items of percussion while constantly ignoring the simple requirement to keep time. Twenty-four track, two-inch tape recording meant that the drums had to be put down with some semblance of accuracy. Our backing tape looked like Frankenstein’s facelift, full of splices, cuts and edits – hundreds of them – all designed to keep Barry in time.
Paul’s guitar sound got less echo and more presence, which he hated. In general we examined what we did in quite some detail, which required a degree of sobriety. I found that quite a relief. I was bored with pissing about. It was time we made a proper-sounding record.
So finally it was my turn. Tony had dug up a Russ Ballard song, ‘Riding with the Angels’, and decreed it should be the first single. It seemed fairly straightforward. I did two or three takes.
‘No. Pitch the whole thing up a couple of intervals,’ Tony said.
So it began. My voice was stretched and my head hurt. The falsetto screech became almost an irrelevance as my natural voice extended into the back of my eyes. There was so much power from my engine room going into those top notes that the falsetto simply had nowhere to go. It sounded weak, and I was shell-shocked. For me, listening back to Shock Tactics was a shock. More shocking still was that everyone else loved the new voice, over a copy of someone else. This was actually me. I hated it.
We started to rehearse for some shows; I was hoarse after half an hour. We played the Marquee Club; I couldn’t speak for two days afterwards. I was in despair. I had sung on an album that was getting great reactions, but I felt like a fraud. My voice couldn’t do it. I moped around for a couple of days, crying into my beer, before my subconscious drew my attention to some sage guidance I’d received from my dentist ex-girlfriend. As an ex-pupil of the very prestigious Cheltenham Ladies’ College, she’d had quite extensive singing lessons, and she kept a notebook.
‘I think you’ve got a jolly nice voice, but it needs a bit more control,’ she said, lecturing me in her plummy tones.
This made me grumpy – but interested. ‘For example?’
‘Well, can you do this with your tongue?’
I peered down her throat. Anybody watching might have thought I was trying to retrieve a goldfish, but I was in fact examining her ability to flatten her tongue like a squashed toad.
‘Hmm.’ I borrowed her exercise book, and took to the library in search of the voice and how it works.
Remember the little singing notebook, and the hours researching breathing and resonance in the library? my subconscious said. Remember stupid exercises with candles, holding chairs in front of you, squashing your lower back against walls and a multitude of other bizarre things to do to strengthen your diaphragm and de
velop resonance in your chest voice and head voice? it said. I started to pay attention to it.
Technique is just empty unless you apply it. You have technique to apply to your new voice. Stop feeling sorry for yourself and be smart. Learn how to be you. Teach yourself.
I started to enjoy my new-found pipes. I began to see that a whole new landscape had been opened up. If I was a painter, it would have been like being given a massive canvas and a whole palette of new colours.
Theatre of the mind was becoming very exciting, but I wasn’t sure if it would be with Samson. A&M Records were now interested in us. Rather more specifically, they were interested in me, which was made abundantly clear at a photo session in which I was certainly in the foreground, the band consigned to the middle distance.
Reading Festival that year was much more straightforward, but with a different drummer. Barry had left; Paul wanted him gone. I liked Barry but had to concede that in the actual business of drumming, there were certain shortcomings. Mel Gaynor stepped in. He was in about four bands at the same time and had a very active social life. He was an unbelievable drummer. Our swansong at Reading was rather good. I rolled out my new voice, everybody cheered and no one seemed to miss the gimp mask.
The festival was awash with gossip and rumour that night. There was no mud – it was fine and dry – and alcohol and chemicals were doing a fine job of creating mental instability and inability. In the middle of a clearing, surrounded by hospitality chalets and beer tents, was a single large pole, with bright-white lights on top. I was in a corner of a beer tent when Rod Smallwood approached me, saying, ‘Let’s go somewhere quiet where we can talk.’ We walked out and stood, illuminated for all the world to see, under the pole in the middle of the backstage area. I felt sure he was working up to something.
‘Do you want to come back to my room for a chat?’ he said. I felt sure he didn’t have any etchings for me to see. Reading Holiday Inn became a low-ceilinged rabbit warren of debauchery for a week around the festival if, of course, you could get a burrow.
Back in the room, away from prying eyes, Rod laid out his cards. ‘I’m offering you the chance to audition for Iron Maiden,’ he said. ‘Are you interested?’
There had been enough beating around bushes and tap-dancing around issues, I decided, so I told him what I thought: ‘First of all, you know I’ll get the job or you wouldn’t ask. Second, what’s gonna happen to Paul, the current singer, and does he know he’s going? Third, when I do get the job, and I will, are you prepared for a totally different style and opinions and someone who is not going to roll over? I may be a pain in the arse, but it’s for all the right reasons. If you don’t want that tell me now and I’ll walk away.’
The speech was a combination of pissing in beans, injustice, sleeping on floors, bravado and genuine invention. If Iron Maiden wanted to play with the hammer of the gods then bring it on. If not, take a hike and get someone more boring instead. As the saying goes, we should all be careful of what we wish for because we just might get it.
Neighbour of the Beast
I was asked to learn four songs for the Maiden audition. The band had two albums by now, so I learnt all the songs. I didn’t exactly have a great deal else to do. The existing singer was going to be fired after some Scandinavian shows the band was already contracted to play, which was made clear to me. The niceties of filling a dead man’s shoes did not sit comfortably with me, but it wasn’t my soap opera. At least not yet.
I turned up to the rehearsal studios in Hackney, and if I had been looking at the group as a military unit, I would have assessed their morale as being rock bottom. The atmosphere was weary. They needed cheering up. I had no idea what had been going on or the disagreements that were ongoing and, frankly, I didn’t care. My job was to sing and, above and beyond mere singing, to create my cinematic, musical mind-vision.
All the songs were in very comfortable keys. My voice was barely ticking over, so I let fly with a few improvised embellishments. We started to play for fun, odd riffs, verses from our favourite influences, bands of our adolescence; of course, we all had the same influences. We all shared Purple and Sabbath, and even Jethro Tull got a look in; Steve was a huge fan. We bonded musically, and I was left to ponder the sad state of affairs that had led to such profound apathy in the face of such amazing potential.
Steve wanted to book a recording studio the same day. I remember him shovelling coins into the payphone while talking to Smallwood. Like when a football player is transferred to a new club, there were still checks to be done. One of them was to be forensically tested in a recording studio, just to make sure that the musicians had not been swept up in the emotion of it all.
I had to wait a few weeks until Paul Di’Anno had been fired, and then I found myself back in Battery Studios. I overdubbed vocals on four live tracks. It was, frankly, not hard. I was coasting, but salivating at the chance to show what I could really do – to open the taps on my voice and blow the doors off. Management and band huddled together in the control room as I stood in the vocal booth. There was a discussion. I got the job.
We celebrated by gatecrashing the UFO gig at the Hammersmith Odeon that night, and getting quite drunk. The hard work began the next day.
‘Ever done any shooting? Right-handed?’ The audiologist grinned cheerfully as he reviewed my results. I nodded.
‘Absolutely typical,’ he said, in a very lilting Welsh accent. ‘Down at four kHz – you see?’
‘Is that anything to worry about?’ I asked.
‘Nooo, not really. Probably when you get to sixty-five, but you won’t be bothered by then, will you?’
Second World War rifles plus GPMGs, grenades and 7.62 mm SLRs with no hearing protection had excised a chunk of my hearing at 4,000 Hz. In the meantime I had eye tests, blood tests, drug tests and insurance companies crawling all over me. I was delighted to hear that I was a venereal-disease-free zone, and there was no reason why I shouldn’t go on the rampage for the next few years with a rock band.
As a musician with no fixed abode, I was living with yet another girlfriend, above a hairdresser’s in Evesham, Worcestershire. The commute to London was cheap as I still had a student railcard, and the trains were interesting and the Cotswold Line quite beautiful. It was still possible to find Class 50 locomotives, the odd class 47, and, on special occasions, a High Speed Train would sometimes whistle its way through the otherwise quiet Evesham station.
I was a minor local celebrity in the pubs where the metal fans hung out. There were quite a few bands, and a lot more pubs. The area was steeped in Black Sabbath, AC/DC and the occult. The last recorded human sacrifice was on nearby Breedon Hill. People still believed in witchcraft, and the whole area seemed to run on a tape loop constantly repeating from around 1973. Aleister Crowley, the self-styled Beast 666, was born up the road.
Mostly weekends were spent at Elmley Castle consuming mind-altering amounts of Scrumpy, a hallucinogenic cider. The pub sat at the bottom of the hill that led up to the castle ruins. The landlady had posed nude for Mayfair, and the pictures were available on request. Cider was dispensed in plastic containers, often with lemonade to give the cloudy liquid a bit of fizz.
Regular drinkers sat catatonic in the saloon bar. All the furniture faced outward, and there was a pentagram on the floor. In the corner was a TV, suspended from the ceiling. Watching it meant using the mirrors that lined the tops of the windows. The whole scene resembled shell-shocked corpses slumped in their chairs facing the wrong way, mouths awash with cider. At the end of the evening they would all drive home, some of them in little blue invalid carriages.
I left this paradise for lunatics in favour of the mighty metropolis. Joining Iron Maiden meant being paid the enormous sum of a hundred pounds a week, so I rented a room in a house in Stamford Brook, West London.
I made my way across town to the Maiden offices, an upstairs flat in Danbury Street, Islington. If I was to pick a character for myself from Winnie the Pooh, I’m sure it wo
uld be Tigger, full of boundless enthusiasm. And boundlessly I leapt up the rickety staircase to the first-floor office and presented myself: ‘New singer, reporting for duty, sir.’
Smallwood was unimpressed: ‘Go and get some fucking clothes – you look like a roadie.’
I asked Clive how I could possibly contrive to look like a cunt. He told me. Motorcycle bomber jacket, stripy T-shirt, white hi-top trainers . . . the only issue was the stretch jeans. Fine in principle, but designed for people with legs six inches longer than mine. Sheer laziness dictated turning them up at the bottom. I paid in cash, and gave Rod his change with the receipt.
Music was so much easier. Off the Caledonian Road was a rehearsal studio called Ezee Hire, and we parked ourselves there every day to write. It was a fruitful time. The choruses that formed our first album together were honed there, although some were written in the Hackney studio where I had my initial audition.
Before going in to record the album, some shows were booked, culminating in a headline slot at the Rainbow Theatre. The irony was not lost on me. I passed it in Shots wistfully, I filmed a ludicrous video in it with Samson, and now I was headlining it with Iron Maiden.
We did some warm-up shows in Italy beforehand. I had never performed outside of the UK up till then, and apart from a school trip, had hardly been abroad. We drove there on a tour bus. I had never been on one of those, either. There was a toilet that was almost useful, although it was forbidden to shit, which made it just a figment of a fevered imagination in the event of intestinal catastrophe.
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