The first shows were nervous affairs for me as the new boy. We were trying out some new material and gauging opinion. I had bought a pair of black spandex pants, de rigueur if you didn’t wear jeans or straight tights like Steve, and we did photo sessions with Ross Halfin, the band photographer at the time. We were encouraged to gob at the camera and look suitably feral. Later, we discovered the shower-room shot, the long concrete-corridor shot and various other setups at which Ross was extremely adept.
The Rainbow Theatre show was a success of sorts. The press wrote nice things as I recall and, in general, their reviews were positive for the new vocal interloper. Of course, having been in Samson helped one’s notoriety, but fans of the previous singer, Paul Di’Anno, remained unimpressed. One wrote a letter of complaint, detailing his horror at hearing his favourite songs being played through an ‘air-raid siren’, and there may well have been an uncomplimentary remark about a cement mixer as well.
Rod immediately seized on the ‘air-raid siren’ remark and repurposed it as testament to my not-yet legendary tenor howl, as showcased on songs like ‘Run to the Hills’. I became the ‘human air-raid siren’. There was always an element of feeling like the Elephant Man in all of this. Rod was not so much the ringmaster of the circus as he was the impresario, the organiser and manipulator of the artists and acts, all controlled from the anonymous caravan behind the big top, where the money was counted as well.
Having a management-appointed nickname was standard practice. Even the road-crew names were interspersed with unwanted epithets. Our producer, Martin Birch, would turn up to rehearsals in his Range Rover, with straw attached to his boots. Thus his credit on The Number of the Beast reads: Martin ‘Farmer’ Birch. It was all harmless really, and it took a few years before it became tiresome.
After the Rainbow show we really set about the new album. As well as being the first album with a new singer and a totally different vocal approach, it was also the vexatious and critical third album for the band. Traditionally, it is the third album that determines whether it is the end of the beginning, or the beginning of the end for a band or artist.
Album culture, the cult of the 40-minute LP with two sides, still persists to this day, even in the days of digital. I think there are several reasons why this is, and the recording format itself has shaped the artistic vision in positive ways.
To write tight, concise material that takes a listener on a musical journey is quite a demanding task. Doing 40–45 minutes of new music every 14 months is complex and hard work. Commerce demands that albums follow in quick succession, that tours can be enabled and follow-ups can happen, based on the sales of the previous record. All this puts a strain on the creative elements in the group. Write album, rehearse, record, perform for eight months, then do it all again . . . and then do it all again.
After two cycles of that kind of behaviour, many bands would simply be emptied of ideas and exhausted by touring, or dispirited by lack of success. The third album, then, becomes the watershed. Even successful bands, and Maiden were very successful when I first joined, were fragile. With our third album, we had the whole world to play for. If we dealt the right hand of cards, we would be the leader of the pack.
Any sense of pressure was swiftly negated by sheer enthusiasm. The act of creating and rehearsing have always been sacrosanct for Maiden: no managers, strangers, outsiders, fan clubs or minicab drivers.
The cocoon of the rehearsal space was our musical playpen, and we were discovering new toys and new playmates. Everything was duly recorded, and still is, on a cheap boombox cassette recorder. This becomes a reference as we try to remember what on earth we did in rehearsal when we come to put it back in order in the recording studio.
Martin Birch turned up right at the end, for one day. He had a listen to the songs. He made no comment; he just looked thoughtful and paid attention to them. Much later down the track, Martin and I had a few beers, and he opened up on his philosophy of production.
‘There are two types of producer,’ he said. ‘One type thinks that it’s his record, and he’s going to make a hit record that will sell shitloads and everyone will say he is a great producer.’
He sipped his beer and looked around the bar with disdain. ‘And then there are producers who are just a mirror. We reflect the artist in the best way to let their message, their sound, come through.’
‘And what if the band is shit?’ I asked.
‘I don’t do shit bands.’
I thought back through his catalogue. Deep Purple’s In Rock and Made in Japan, Black Sabbath’s Heaven and Hell, Blue Öyster Cult and quite a few little surprises: Leo Sayer, Jimi Hendrix, and Wayne County and the Electric Chairs. You could learn a lot from Mr Birch.
We moved from the Caledonian Road straight back to Battery Studios in Willesden. We had only five weeks to record and mix the album, including a single and B-side, which had to be finished first, as it had to be released almost immediately.
Even today, with digital desks, this would be quite a tall order, but with two-inch tape and an analogue desk, no memory or mixes or automatic fades, this was old-school craftsmanship.
A mixing desk is just like a telephone exchange. Instruments come in at one end and are routed to magnetic tape, where they are recorded. In between entering and ending up on tape, the signal is modified for tone, level and amplitude to make sure the molecules of iron oxide on the magnetic tape are kept in a faithful, happy state, and not splattered all over the place. To mix, however, the entire process is not simply reversed; it is completely rebuilt. The taped instruments now re-enter the desk, but this time they are combined to produce the nice stereo vinyl record we so desire. The only way of recording the settings of the hundreds of knobs on the desk was with small chinagraph pencils and sheets of A4 paper with pictures of the controls, and biro marks so that the desk could be reset. To flip-flop the whole process twice in five weeks was huge, but that’s what we had to do.
We were using an old mixing desk made by a company called Cadac. It was on its last legs, and this was its last job. The rest of the studio looked like a building site as well. The vocals were done in a demolished kitchen with wet plaster still drying on the walls. There was plenty of beer on hand, and a fair amount of cocaine for those of that disposition.
Steve and I were non-participants, while others varied from occasional to ‘quite’ often. Despite small amounts of coke, the main consumption was of Party Fours, a half-gallon-oil-can-sized beer container. We built a wall of empties to rival the Great Pyramid by the end of the album.
Outside, the winter weather was slush, cold and foul. Someone was murdered at the bus stop and the chalk outline remained for several days. Martin’s Range Rover was hit by a minibus full of nuns, and the repair bill was £666.66. We laughed, but Mr Smallwood seized the day, and all manner of stories about curses, hauntings and evil spirits were dreamed up. One of the more creative ones had to do with Steve’s bass gear being possessed by the evil one during the tracking of ‘The Number of the Beast’.
It is true that there was an evil moaning and groaning sound on the tape that we could not account for. It was only when we checked the talkback mic that we discovered the culprit. It was Steve ‘Evil One’ Harris himself. Steve insisted on standing by his bass gear when recording. He wore headphones and was unaware of his vigorous, rhythmic chanting. Still, it made for a good story.
We had two spoken-word pieces on the album, one from the Bible, and the other from the Kafkaesque TV series The Prisoner. The latter was my idea, so Rod had to call Los Angeles to speak with Patrick McGoohan, The Prisoner’s creator and star, and owner of the rights. I was there when he made the phone call, and I have never seen him so nervous. The short conversation was priceless.
‘Hello, this is Rod Smallwood from Iron Maiden.’
‘What? Who are you?’
‘Er . . . we’re a band.’
‘A band! WHAT sort of a band?’
‘Well, we’re a heavy metal
.’
‘Metal, you say?’
‘Yes, we er . . .’
‘What do you want?’
‘Well, you have a bit about “I’m not a number, I’m a free man”, and we wanted to use it – on a track.’
‘What did you say you were called?’
‘Iron Maiden.’
‘Do it.’
The phone went dead.
‘Fucking hell!’ said Mr Smallwood.
Much the same response sprang from his lips when he spoke to the agent for Vincent Price. Although it is a cliché, ‘I’m afraid Mr Price doesn’t get out of bed for less than 10,000 dollars’ certainly put a marker down in the sand.
Fortunately, I used to listen to the ghost story at midnight on London’s Capital Radio, being quite a fan of radio that displayed any semblance of imagination. When Vincent priced himself out of the market I suggested using the guy who read that, and to this day many people believe it is Vincent Price reading the classic biblical lines at the beginning of ‘The Number of the Beast’.
The Capital Radio voiceover performer came into the studio, and in half an hour had given us five absolutely corking performances. He was a lovely man, an actor in his sixties and a total professional, with a subtle delivery. He was utterly unfazed at being in the midst of one of the world’s more disruptive rock bands.
The first song we recorded was intended to be a B-side. It was called ‘Gangland’ and featured a writing credit for Clive Burr, on the basis that the drums were as integral to the track as the guitar riffs. We were all like little puppy dogs recording it. We stayed till four or five in the morning, listening back.
‘Too good to be a B-side’ was the general feeling. I wasn’t so sure; I thought it a bit presumptuous seeing as we had nothing else to compare it to. I was the new boy, however, and at least everyone had their tails up before the main event, which was a track called ‘Run to the Hills’.
The layered harmony vocal was such a colossal change for the Maiden sound. Our jaws dropped as we heard the rough mixes. There are some songs that you can feel in your bones will be huge. In our case, the third album, the expectation and the curiosity all colluded to make ‘Run to the Hills’ the perfect storm as a showcase to the world of the delights to expect from the forthcoming album.
The only slight disappointment, in hindsight, was the choice of B-side. With ‘Gangland’ destined for the album, we had no spare tracks save ‘Total Eclipse’, an excellent presage of global catastrophe, climate change and the end times. It was an extra track on the Japanese version of the album, and I suppose it was an unexpectedly good B-side.
The title track of the album, ‘The Number of the Beast’, needs little in the way of description, as it’s one of the greatest metal tracks of all time. Steve had a habit of whistling softly into a portable cassette machine, and then transposing this into a vocal line or guitar riff. I only discovered this when he played me his original songwriting tape for ‘The Trooper’, which sounded like a cheerful postman walking up the garden path to deliver the mail. I suddenly understood why a lot of Maiden vocal lines were virtually unsingable, or at least required careful attention to phrasing to ensure you didn’t bite off the end of your tongue while wrapping your gills around the unnecessary consonants.
For Steve, the words exist in rhythmic space first and foremost, then perhaps lyrical or poetic space, and lastly in a format designed to make the most of the human voice. It took me years to figure this out, and when the penny finally dropped it was a relief. I didn’t get nearly so cross and frustrated at the melodies and lyrics produced by Steve once I understood his motivation. In return, over the years, Steve has learnt to live with the voice as an instrument, which bends and shapes to create moods, and is not simply an assembly of Lego bricks.
Clive found ‘The Number of the Beast’ very tough, in part because the drum timing is very much an extension of the melody, and thus it is almost spoken, as in the song’s intro. The problems lay in interpreting the lyrical riffs in Steve’s head and placing them into a definitive format that musicians could write down and reproduce. In sharp contrast, a track like ‘Hallowed Be Thy Name’ is utterly straightforward.
When the time came to sing before Mr Birch, it was a mixture of curiosity and frustration. The frustration was born out of Martin’s tactic of making me wait; the curiosity was finding out what he could teach me. This was a guy who’d had some of the greatest voices, and some of the greatest vocal performances, on his watch.
I wanted to get stuck in to bashing out the vocals, to bask in the glory. Martin was not interested in such frippery, and in the nicest and most polite way he taught me not to take things for granted.
Consider the opening sequence to ‘The Number of the Beast’. Before the blood-curdling scream à la ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ is an almost whispered intro building into the climactic shriek. It’s not very high and it’s physically undemanding. I thought I could polish it off in a few takes and move on to being loud and bombastic.
Martin, Steve and I spent all day and all night on the first two lines. Again and again, until I was so sick of it I threw furniture against the walls in frustration, taking big lumps out of the damp plaster in the half-completed kitchen.
We took a two-hour break. I sat glumly with a mug of coffee. Martin was positively chirpy. Bastard, I thought.
‘Not so easy, eh?’ he grinned. ‘Ronnie Dio had the same problem on “Heaven and Hell”.’
My head, which ached, and my eyes, which ached, started to pay close attention. ‘Like, how?’
‘Well, he came with the same attitude as you. Let’s bash this one out. And I said to him, “No. You have to sum up your entire life in the first line. I don’t hear it yet.”’
Of course, I know the song. The opening line.
‘Your whole life is in that line,’ said Martin. ‘Your identity as a singer.’
Dimly, I started to see the difference between singing a line and living it.
I went for a walk around the rest of the studio. It was deathly quiet, no musicians around. The silent drum kit, the guitars lying around and the faint odour of dust roasting on the valves that were still switched on in the amplifiers.
‘I left alone, my mind was blank. I needed time to think to get the memories from my mind . . .’
And that’s who I was when I went back to the microphone. ‘Just what I saw, in my old dreams . . .’ and so it went on. It was like Martin was a can-opener, and I was the can of beans.
Once the crack had appeared in my self-constructed dam, the flood happened. The wall I built was my ego. Everyone needs one, especially if you want to own 100,000 rock fans, but you don’t bring it into the studio. What possesses you in the studio should be the song, like a film that unfolds before you. All I do is sing the words that paint the picture. I thought I’d invented theatre of the mind, but Martin Birch had been doing it for years.
The level of intensity involved in all of this was considerable, and the stress and strain on Martin even more so. We had an engineer to assist him, the very amiable Nigel Green, who was on his last mission as engineer before being a producer in his own right. For reasons lost in the mist of time, Nigel was nicknamed ‘Hewitt’.
From somewhere at 2 a.m., ‘Hewitt’ would be commanded to produce cases of beer. He was a combination of highly accomplished technical engineer and concierge of dubious legality.
As musicians, we got to relax with a pint after our performance was done. Not so for Martin. He worked every day, no breaks, until he would unexpectedly call us in and declare, ‘I’m having a day off tomorrow.’
This, I subsequently realised, was possibly what Dr Jekyll said to himself in the mirror shortly before meeting his alter ego, Mr Hyde.
Martin had an alter ego. We called it Marvin. Over the years Marvin has provided us with hours of entertainment and near-death experiences. The first time I met Marvin I was confused. In fact, I was in Samson, and during the recording of Shock Tactics we were invi
ted over to listen to some finished mixes of Killers, which had recently been completed.
Marvin was out, loud and proud. And foolishly I introduced myself, and was sober at the time. Marvin was not.
‘Sit down, boy,’ he said.
He flamboyantly hurled the producer’s chair on its rollers so it bounced off the rear wall. He put his hands on my shoulders and shoved me into it. I started to feel just a tinge of apprehension.
‘Now, boy. Listen to this . . .’
He slammed the chair up against the mixing desk, wedging me in place, and played Killers till my ears bled.
‘Whaddidyathink of that?’ he challenged, just audible over the cochlear cataclysm that was my inner ear in shock.
‘It’s, er, very good,’ I said.
‘Heh, heh. Yeah, yeah – very good.’ And he just walked out muttering to himself, and left me alone in the studio with the tapes for the new Iron Maiden album.
At the end of recording The Number of the Beast, Martin played back the album, mixed and super loud. ‘I’m having a day off tomorrow,’ he announced, as the madman peered out from behind his eyes and Marvin took charge.
‘Hewitt,’ he demanded, ‘how old is this desk?’
‘Don’t know, Martin,’ Hewitt replied, looking slightly nervous.
Marvin seized the flexible metal cord built into the desk, which held the studio talkback microphone. With one wrench he uprooted it and tore it from the desk. It looked like a forlorn tulip with its roots dangling down as the electrical connections were left hanging.
‘It’s broken, Hewitt.’ He tossed it over the back of the desk.
Hewitt visibly winced.
‘And which channel doesn’t work, Hewitt?’
‘Er, channel 22,’ Hewitt replied.
Marvin stood up and unscrewed the channel, a piece of circuit board about three feet long and, up till that moment, potentially quite valuable.
‘Piece of shit,’ Marvin muttered, and snapped it in half.
What Does This Button Do? Page 10
