Hewitt could see his job prospects going down the pan fast, but kept his sangfroid and smiled nervously. I think he was beginning to enter into the spirit of things.
‘Now, what else is broken, Hewitt?’
Thus ended that particular desk, consigned to the scrapheap by Martin Birch, ably assisted by a man called Hewitt.
The next day Martin was gone. Zomba had him straight on a flight to LA to start another album with Sabbath, or Whitesnake, or whoever. I saw how much he put into making records, how much of his psyche was chucked into a mincing machine every time. I wondered how long he would be able to keep up the pace.
For us, though, the pace had started to quicken – and there was no going back now.
The Big Dipper
Being in a band in global demand with a number 1 album was like being on a rollercoaster. The difference in our case was that the rollercoaster didn’t stop, or even slow down, for the next five years. We had cranked our way up the clunky railway and now stood at the threshold of the drop. As we toppled over the edge and tumbled into free fall, we went straight down, screaming, hair standing on end, adrenalin pumping. Five straight years of this sort of thing can seriously wobble whatever internal gyroscopes you might rely on. For now, however, we just enjoyed the rush.
Almost as soon as the album was mixed, the single, ‘Run to the Hills’, was released, and sold nearly 250,000 copies in the UK. Before the album was officially released we were in the midst of a UK tour, and we had the first of several spats that would crop up over the years.
We were on a totally ridiculous schedule: eight shows, day off, seven shows, day off, and so on. These were two-hour shows, and the vocals were not the world’s easiest. The on-stage set-up caused friction immediately. I was quite traditional about basic stagecraft, like, hey, if I’m singing, I stand at the front. If you’re playing the solo, you stand at the front. That sort of thing.
Steve Harris had other ideas. He wanted to stand in front of everybody and run all over the stage. I wasn’t having it. I wasn’t going to sing to the back of the bass player’s head.
The wedge monitors we used were equally spaced out across the front of the stage, which meant there was no focal point when I sang.
We did the soundcheck, then we did the show. The first thing I did was move my wedge monitors to the front and centre of the stage. Steve grumbled, and the roadies moved them back. So I moved them back again to the centre.
When I was singing, half a bass guitar was being stuck up my nose, because clearly there was some demarcation zone I had infringed. I countered by putting ludicrously long legs on my mic stand. The base of it now resembled a TV aerial, and in my peripheral vision I could see Steve careering towards me, so I positioned it as a sort of anti-bass-player tank trap. I have quite a few chips in my teeth as he would still run into it full tilt.
It all came to a head when we played Newcastle City Hall.
We had driven down from Edinburgh at ridiculous o’clock in the morning, because Rod thought it a good idea to shoot ‘The Number of the Beast’ video there all day, immediately before the show. We brought in ballroom dancers to use as extras, with 666 pinned to their backs. I think that might have been my idea.
Anyway, we had to hold the doors because we were still filming half an hour or so before the audience were due to come in. Of course, we were all exhausted. We went on stage, quite a small stage, and Steve and I spent a bad-tempered show like two rutting stags locking antlers.
Rod needed to separate us backstage. We were both busy rolling up our sleeves to go outside and sort each other out. Steve was yelling at Rod as he separated us, ‘He’s got to fucking go!’
Well, I didn’t fucking go. Can’t say I didn’t warn you, guys – this will be a little different. Get used to it.
We came to a compromise on the location of microphones and monitors, and established that, in the case of who stands in front of whom, good manners trumps boundless enthusiasm. It was a small breakthrough, but it set us on a path to a new level of theatricality and presentation.
We got the news that the album was number 1 when we were checking out of a cheap hotel in Winterthur, Switzerland. The celebration was somewhat tempered by the necessity to push a full-size tour bus down the hill in order to jump-start it. The driver explained in quite unnecessary detail that the emergency brakes depleted the battery and that this gizmo drained that gizmo . . .
He could have just owned up and said that he’d left the lights on.
We played all the countries I had heard of and never been to. I got a chance to practise my dodgy French, which was much more successful than my non-existent Spanish. At the show in Madrid I attempted to concoct a phrase that translated as ‘you are the best singers in the world’.
Well, I thought, El Mundo was a newspaper, and it was pretty obvious what that meant. Cantante was something to do with singing. Hey, how hard could this possibly be?
Whatever I said, I said it boldly, and they cheered.
So I said it again, and they cheered a bit less.
Thinking they hadn’t heard me right the first time, I said it slowly and, I thought, very boldly and clearly.
There was near silence.
After the show I asked the record company what had happened.
‘Aha. You say that you are the best singer in the world.’
Hmm. Loud, confident and wrong.
Now we were out of Europe, having triumphantly bashed our way around anywhere with a government worth speaking of. We were off to the United States, a place so impossibly exotic I couldn’t bring myself to go to sleep for a week thinking about it.
We landed in Detroit, Michigan, in the summer. Next stop, Flint and various other places I had never heard of. We were in the heartland of motor-city USA, before water scandals and property crashes ripped the heart out of it. To start our US onslaught, we were third on the bill to a most peculiar pairing: Rainbow and 38 Special.
The last time I’d toured with Rainbow was when Graham Bonnet was in the band. He was notable for having a monstrously loud gravel-voiced tenor, and a very florid taste in stage-wear allied to a haircut better suited to James Dean than the sidekick to the ‘Man in Black’, Ritchie Blackmore.
I was, and still am, a big fan of Blackmore. I understand his penchant for wearing pointy witchy hats and dressing up a band as strolling minstrels. This tour, however, was not that. The singer was now Joe Lynn Turner, an American with what Ritchie hoped would be a radio-star voice to give Rainbow the leg up they required in the USA. It’s ironic that had Rainbow stayed with Ronnie Dio, the world might just have turned in their direction after all, but that’s all 20/20 hindsight and speculation.
Anyway, this was Ritchie, with the now legendary hair weave and abundant locks, plus Joe, with equally abundant locks and a less-sophisticated trichological procedure – as in a big wig.
On the other hand, 38 Special were equipped with five singers, one of whom was basically a mascot. The guitarist was the principal songwriter and the principal male voice, but there was a Van Zant, Southern rock royalty, in the band, complete with Southern rock trilby hat. There were two, perhaps three backing singers, all wearing prodigious crinolines better suited to a Mississippi river boat of the 1900s.
Then there was us. Five English terriers snapping at everyone’s heel and pulling faces at frightened Americans who thought they had come to see some adult-orientated rock, and instead got 20 minutes of West Ham laid across their stoned brains like an iron bar.
We actually got on quite well with everyone, but all was not peace and love between the Southern rock fraternity and the darkened offspring of Paganini’s ghost. There were constant arguments about who should headline, which revolved around who each band manager thought had sold the most tickets, and the system of alternating headlining status started to break down. In the end, Iron Maiden headlined one show, because no one could agree who should go on last.
Rod Smallwood had determined that a tour bus was
a waste of money, so we drove around in two large Ford LTD estate cars, one driven by Rod, the other by our tour manager, Tony Wiggens. There was always plenty of space in Rod’s car.
It’s silly things that start a corrosive process in a band. In our case, it was Clive Burr’s luggage, which exceeded the allotted space and meant we were often delayed leaving hotels. Dark mutterings were heard. Of course, if we’d had a tour bus no one would have cared.
America was an undiscovered country, with strange procedures and unusual devices to which a lad from Worksop had not been exposed. We stayed in the road crew hotels, and on the first night at the Ramada in Flint, Rainbow’s sound engineer introduced himself, saying, ‘The lads are going to a hot tub party if you fancy it.’
Well, this left a curious image in my mind. What was a ‘hot tub’, and in what way would it involve a party? I thought of apple bobbing, but I couldn’t understand why the water had to be hot. Perhaps they were toffee apples, I mused. Otherwise, why would people have a party around a warm bath?
My curiosity piqued, the cab pulled up outside a sprawling single-storey suburban house, and I had my first glimpse of American teen spirit.
The kitchen was full of girls drinking wine. The lounge was full of boyfriends, who weren’t speaking to the girls, because they had lost the ability to speak. Elmley Castle had come to Michigan, but instead of hallucinogenic cider, great mushroom clouds of dope billowed up towards the ceiling as they concentrated on playing Pong, a primitive video game.
My Falstaff days were long gone. I drank beer, but that was it. I moved through to the back, which is where I discovered the bubbling Jacuzzi full of roadies, and females who were not roadies. Apple bobbing was not the game in town, and the other American invention, the waterbed, was available for relaxation in the bedrooms.
I went back into the kitchen and struck up a conversation about the motor-car industry and the local economy with a girl who seemed to have a bit more about her than the others. After only a few moments she tired of the subject, asking, ‘Shall we go to the hot tub?’
I couldn’t help but notice her broken arm, firmly set at right angles in a very robust cast. ‘Aren’t you worried your cast will get wet?’ I said.
‘Oh no, I’ll rest it on the side.’
My first hot tub was an interesting experience. Rainbow’s sound engineer served us drinks as we bubbled our flesh, but conversation was somewhat stilted with the other occupants of the tub. It’s difficult to have a chat about backdrops with your stage manager when he is about to ejaculate.
The bubbles temporarily ceased, and I leaned over to the silver button. I know exactly what this does, I thought.
We drove around the USA in our LTD Fords. We stayed in strange motels and ate hamburgers in Louisiana served by men with faces full of warts. We were pulled over several times for speeding, à la Smokey and the Bandit, and we finally finished the tour in Norman, Oklahoma.
We were due to fly to Canada for a short headline tour before returning to America to start a special guest slot with Scorpions. I have always loved Canada, and Canada returned the favour by faithfully following Maiden for years. Canada espoused the band well before the USA, and eschewed the vagaries of fashion and radio popularity to support us, which it continues to do undimmed to this very day.
Canadians share a very similar sense of humour and a refreshing lack of hysteria. Perhaps because of their closer Commonwealth ties and French culture, their sense of history is embedded, giving places like Toronto a comforting sense of permanence.
Despite this starting to sound like a Sunday-school outing, I was due a rather nasty injury, and one of our road crew almost got his head blown off at Massey Hall in Toronto, where we were being recorded for a live broadcast. An M-80 firework (equivalent, it is said, to a quarter of a stick of dynamite) was thrown on stage during the band changeover, when our guitar technician was peering at a pedal board as he squatted on the floor. The device landed on top of the board and exploded. Bill was concussed and blinded by the detonation. I grabbed the mic and had a rant about the stupidity of the individual involved, and we came close to cancelling the show. Thankfully, he lived to tell the tale and his sight returned.
I am not 100 per cent sure what possesses someone to throw something at a person on stage. Is it an act of homage or attempted murder? The same goes for racist football hooligans who chuck projectiles at players on the pitch.
Sometimes the objects are genuinely intriguing. On stage at Donington one year, I discovered a fully formed, inverted sherry trifle, sans bowl, on the front of the stage. Was there a sherry trifle trebuchet cunningly concealed in the beer tent, and if so, why was there only a slight crack in the custard, like a miniature rift valley?
By contrast, in Portugal one year I spied blood-filled syringes sticking out of the lino stage flooring by their hypodermic needles – quite disgusting, and really quite hazardous. Live ammunition, ball bearings, coins, wallets, sunglasses, brassieres, panties, T-shirts, flags, hamburgers, beer cans, bottles of piss and hundreds and hundreds of shoes have all rained down on our parade.
In Argentina so many shoes ended up on stage that I proposed constructing a shoe cannon to fire back their cheesy odour-eaters in what a Napoleonic artillery man might have termed ‘a whiff of grapeshot’.
The mystery of the shoes perplexed me for years, until the mechanism was finally revealed. Why would anyone take off a shoe (for only ever a left or right arrived, never a pair) when they would need footwear in order to get home? Alternatively, perhaps all their rucksacks were full of shoes that they brought specially for the purpose of lobbing. The question still remained. Why? The truth is that the shoes are stolen mainly from people who practise crowd-surfing. Opportunistic rascals steal the sneaker and toss it on stage. That’s all there is to it. Case closed.
Well, I’m glad we got that out the way, because it preoccupied me for a long time whenever a shoe landed on stage. In Canada, though, I had other things to worry about. I had virtually lost the use of my left arm.
My problem had begun on the European leg of the tour, a couple of months before. Every night on stage I would thrash my head up and down. By now I had grown a heavy mane of hair, which had quite a momentum to it, twisting my neck this way and that. Headbanging was a pretty effective way of losing all track of time and space and wobbling your brain to the music.
My neck seized up, and I could not move it without a great deal of pain. I was sent to a German doctor, who gave me a couple of injections and laid me down under two huge heat pads for half an hour. He then sent me away, a bit stiff but all seemed well.
However, the damage my headbanging had caused to the discs between the vertebrae in my neck had not gone away; only the symptoms had been temporarily alleviated. By the time they returned, things were much worse. In Canada I could barely move my left arm, which cramped and spasmed, continuing into the left side of my neck. The pain was intense and unrelenting, and I lost all fine motor control in my left thumb and first two fingers.
I tried ice packs. They didn’t work. Massage made it worse. Heat made it worse. I could not sleep. I was sent to a local doctor in Ottawa.
‘You have muscle spasms,’ he said.
Tell me something I don’t know, I thought. ‘Why do I have muscle spasms?’
He was busy writing the prescription. ‘Take these.’
Librium, Flexeril and Butazolidin were the end result. I lasted one day, after which I realised that I had lost the ability to speak and I could not actually feel my gums when I brushed my teeth.
The shows carried on and we got to Montreal. I went to the hospital. They took X-rays and stuck pins into my thumb.
‘Can you feel that?’
I said I could.
‘Hmm. Neurologically normal,’ he wrote on his pad. He swivelled his chair to pin up the X-rays.
‘Aha!’ he said.
‘What is it?’
‘See those?’ He pointed with his pen to cloudy areas around m
y scapula. ‘They are muscle spasms,’ he proudly pronounced.
‘No shit, Sherlock,’ I said.
He told me nothing I didn’t already know, except about the pills I had been given.
‘Good lord, who gave you these?’ he said.
‘A Canadian doctor.’
‘And he gave you a liver-function test?’
I didn’t shake my head; it hurt. My eyes did it instead.
I threw all the pills in the bin. Next stop was New York. There had to be somebody there who knew what they were talking about. I paid 100 dollars for five minutes with a sports doctor. He had treated Muhammad Ali, ballet dancers and American football players. He pressed with his fingers.
‘Here?’
‘Ouch.’
Then he cradled my head and gently lifted upwards, taking pressure off the spine.
‘How’s that?’
He took an X-ray. It wasn’t pretty.
‘You have a herniated disc at the top of your neck, C4 and C5. I can fit you in for an operation on Monday.’
‘Whoa there, Doc. What operation?’
‘Well, I take out the cartilage and put a plastic piece in instead.’
‘I have a gig in Chicago before Monday.’
‘Oh, well. In that case it’s traction.’
‘How long does that take?’
‘Eight weeks.’
‘Well, that won’t work either. What else?’
He sighed. There was a golf course in his future, I sensed, and I was delaying him.
‘Okay, home traction unit and a neck collar. Best I can do.’
A home traction unit was a badly designed gallows that fitted over the top of a wardrobe door. A water bottle was hung from one side and my head was lifted up from the other. It looked pretty stupid.
Finally, Tony Wiggens, our tour manager, came to the rescue. His American girlfriend recommended a chiropractor.
‘A chiropractor? That’s like a fortune teller who uses dead bodies.’
‘No, that is a necromancer.’
The chiropractor was actually very good at telling this dead body exactly what was going on. He gave me good advice, the best of which was to stop hurling my head around as if it’s trying to achieve escape velocity from my torso. Wear the neck collar and throw the rest of the apparatus in the bin, he told me. I was advised on ways to modify the way I moved, ate and drank to give my neck the best chance of healing given the punishing schedule.
What Does This Button Do? Page 11
