A silver American Eagle tour bus was in our future, and a long series of overnight trips criss-crossing the USA in pursuit of the Scorpions. We were the special guests in a three-act show, with a good chunk of time to develop a connection with an audience who were ripe for conversion.
It’s taken a while for European tour buses to catch up to their American cousins, and back in 1982 there was simply no comparison. The American Eagle was like a whorehouse on wheels.
Bus life soon established its routine. The front lounge was misery, where Rod plotted, played cards and was grumpy, and where Steve watched hours of videos. The back lounge was naughty, where Clive, Davey and Adrian disposed of a lot of vodka. I flipped from one to the other and found the whole process a tiny bit frustrating.
The Number of the Beast tour was when we did most things on the road for the first time. As time went on it became clear to me that the novelty would soon wear off. The joy of getting brainlessly mashed every night just to get through the next pointless 18 hours soon paled into a hopeless numbness until the next show brought light and life to our world.
The biggest factor that changes ‘Saturday night out with the lads in a band’ to ‘every Saturday spent in rehab or therapy’ is money and drugs. Access to either can seriously damage your mental health. We didn’t have much money, actually – I don’t think any of us had a credit card between us – but everyone wanted to give us drugs, lots of them, and all for free.
I’m loath to attribute drugs as the root cause of Clive’s growing estrangement from Steve, but slowly yet surely niggles and arguments crept in backstage.
Clive’s luggage was an issue – Clive got more luggage. Steve jumped on the drum riser, telling him to play faster – Clive slowed down. The front of the bus became the front line, and the back of the bus turned into a bunker for the bad boys.
They had such a terrific on-stage row in Kiel Auditorium, St Louis, that Clive went into slow motion in protest. I didn’t help matters by bringing out a pillow and two blankets and pretending to go to sleep in the middle of the stage in protest.
‘I thought that was a bit out of order,’ Steve said.
‘Fair enough,’ I replied.
Once the rot starts in a band, it’s like a dog with a bone: always there, waiting to be gnawed on. We were too busy to talk about it, too close to escape from it and too tired one minute and full of adrenalin the next to be rational about it.
The juggernaut rolled on, but one wheel was wobbling.
On the Bandwagon
Oh boy, did we move on. The word was out in the USA, and halfway through our Scorpions tour we returned briefly to the UK to headline the Reading Festival.
Might I be permitted to pinch myself? I must be dreaming. One year before I was in debt, in a failing band, and standing under a lamppost being offered an audition at the very same festival we were just about to headline. We looked a very different band to the fresh-faced boyishness on the back cover of ‘Run to the Hills’. There was an air of confident lunacy about us. The Faustian pact we had made was still a one-way street all in our favour, oh yes, and my neck was feeling a lot better, thank you very much, just in time for us to scramble on a jumbo jet and resume operations in the USA. By now we were genuinely snapping at the heels of the Scorpions.
The bus rolled on, and we went from the West Coast to St Louis. It was time to begin with Rob Halford and Judas Priest, and the combination was one of the hottest tours in the country. Priest were incredibly reliable, and their sound engineer was phenomenal. The last time I had seen him was in a hot tub in Michigan. Life really did seem to be going in ever-increasing circles.
We had the aura of otherworldly beings, at least in our universe. Without realising it, circumstances led the rest of humanity to assume that we were rock stars. Deep down, when I was aged 16, I thought it would be an amazing experience to be a rock star, and do all those things that are read about in the newsprint broadsheet weeklies. Rock stardom was lived vicariously by journalists as envious as they were pretentious in many cases. It was a seductive and easy pit to fall into, and made easier if your will was addled by industrial quantities of coke and hash.
What saved Maiden from this depressing fate was our gradual organisation into an unplanned triumvirate of me, Steve Harris and Rod Smallwood. We each offered different ingredients to the overall pie, and as we gained knowledge of each other’s contributions, we started to fiddle about with each other’s domains. Not exactly a democracy, but at least a sort of guided autocracy.
There is a reluctance on the part of bands to admit that they are not democracies. The only member of a band who is quite happy to say ‘of course we are a democracy’ is the local dictator, because he knows he will never be contradicted.
The lesser beings, talented as they may be, have to put up with the largesse of the main man, and that’s just the way it is. It doesn’t have to be unpleasant. The reason so-called ‘supergroups’ so often fall short of expectations is because the monumental egos, when taken out of context and placed in close proximity, do not act as a force multiplier. Imagine putting Napoleon, Hitler and Stalin in a room together, setting aside any political differences, and just observe whether any sensible decision could be made to advance a common cause.
The interpersonal chemistry required to sustain a global rock group over many decades is nothing short of a miracle. Too many chiefs and not enough Indians; all Indians and no chiefs; one chief and rebellious Indians; stupid chief and clever Indians: all are doomed to fail. The temperature of the porridge has got to be just right.
The American tour concluded. All was well in the world. Rod was in his element, brimful of statistics, headcounts, merchandise dollars per head and countless other measures of our success in prising open the vault of the biggest music market in the world.
As the weather turned autumnal, we bent nature to our will and flew south for the winter to the land of Oz, which, after the gratuitous insanity that was touring the USA, was very much more Anglo-Saxon, but equally painful.
The flight, of course, was lengthy. Like 99 per cent of the rest of the world, we flew with our knees up into our chest in economy class, and stood in bleary-eyed line to be searched for peanut butter and any other food products that might silently take over the Australian ecosystem overnight. Apart from a cartoon strip dedicated to their existence, I could not for the life of me see what possible point there was in the continuing existence of funnel-web spiders. There are perfectly inoffensive English spiders that could do the job, but not kill you as you take a crap in the loo . . . sorry, dunny.
The Kings Cross district of Sydney had a club called the Manzil Room, a good rock ’n’ roll dive. I had my drink spiked with speed and stayed up for 48 hours, wired out of my skull. I called a doctor because I had a show that night and couldn’t actually speak after staying up and rabbiting ten to the dozen uncontrollably. I drank lots of water, slept all day, got up half an hour before the show and reset the gyros that kept my voice upright.
Thank God it worked. Twenty-three is an amazing age for the immune system.
The girl on reception in the hotel was very friendly, and so we found ourselves on a boat in Sydney Harbour with all the crew: cold beers, darkness, the Harbour Bridge lit up and twinkling on the dappled black water. We took a small yellow inflatable dinghy out into the harbour and a lot of beer. A shark’s fin appeared a few yards away, then another. My rowing experience came in handy.
Nothing in childhood is ever wasted.
Things had moved on from the days of the gold lamé jockstrap; in fact, they had become more transparent. Steve was now wearing a pair of black plastic trousers, tights basically, that looked like they had been sprayed on. Trouser envy took over, and I found the same type in Paris, but in red. The singer of UFO, Phil Mogg, was once asked about his trousers, and volunteered the comment: ‘Yeah, underpants are naff.’
I think we all subscribed to the same tailor. Not to be outdone, Clive wore a silver spandex ski
n-tight onesie. Line-up photographs, viewed at crotch level, resembled a vegetable shop well stocked with red peppers, aubergines and silverskin onions.
Our on-stage trousers eventually wore out. Mine in particular had the PVC coating worn away by friction with the microphone stand, leaving a rather horror-movie special-effect blistered finish. While strolling around Sydney I spotted the very thing in a shop window: two pairs of Harlequin ballet tights for blokes.
To date I had been using a pair of white boxing boots from Lonsdale. Steve’s personal helper, Vic Vella, had left them in front of an electric fire to dry out after they were soaked in one of our sweat-stained theatre shows. One boot survived, but the other parted company with its slightly shrivelled sole. Moments before going on stage I made the fateful discovery. The only solution was the universal panacea of gaffer tape. I taped around the top and bottom of the front of the foot, and it worked just fine. When the tape on the bottom wore out, I just added more. I got fan mail about my boots. One girl wanted to know where she could find the boot with the black stripe on it. Well, the answer now was in the dustbin.
Newly suited and basketball-booted, my next appointment was the check-in desk for the flight to Tokyo. I was on my way to the land of samurai and sumo, bullet trains, temples and Mount Fuji, and electronic gadgets and video-game nirvana.
Maiden were already big in Japan. The band had a live EP, Maiden Japan, which obviously was a pun on one of the greatest live albums of all time, Deep Purple’s Made in Japan. When I stepped off the plane and went to immigration at Tokyo Narita airport, a couple of things struck me immediately. First, it was unbelievably clean. There are hospitals in the UK that could only aspire to the antibacterial regime clearly prevalent in Japanese transport hubs. Second, this was the first country I had ever visited where not just the language but the alphabet itself was alien.
The latter problem was solved by a combination of bilingual forms and traffic lights. While awaiting your bags arriving in the operating-theatre sterility of the luggage carousel, you simply pressed a button and a green or red light directed you to a stern customs guard.
Very politely, your luggage was searched with white gloves, and very politely you were sent on your way.
The words ‘Live at Budokan’ marked a band as a worldwide phenomenon, and being big in Japan was so sought after that an American band called Riot named their album Narita after the international airport. ‘Gatwick’ or ‘Heathrow Terminal 5’ doesn’t have quite the same ring.
The concert organisation ran like a precision chronometer. We travelled on bullet trains to the shows, and these ran with a reliability and timekeeping that must have commenced with the ticking of the first atomic clock.
For all their legendary status, the actual concert halls were very modest theatres. We were not at Budokan level yet, but even Budokan is not quite so exotic when you realise it is just a medium-sized gymnasium that gets used as a martial-arts centre.
The phase ‘big in Japan’ is also very misleading. The Japanese have two entirely separate chart systems, the international and the domestic. Selling 50,000 records would catapult you handsomely towards the top of the international chart; 50,000 records on the domestic chart would barely register. It was rare for an international artist to make a domestic-chart breakthrough, as, for example, Sheena Easton did.
Maiden were young and growing. It was 5 p.m. Tokyo time and we had finished the soundcheck. The show would be over by 8. They started very early to ensure minimum disruption of the school or working day that followed, or so I assumed.
There was an eerie silence before we went on; just the occasional cough or shuffling of feet. There was no support band. Such things were not the norm.
The theatres were 1,200 to 2,500 seats in the main, and the wood and carpets muffled the sound, although I remember the Osaka Festival Hall as being just the right construction for a mix of ambient sound and non-reflectivity.
Blue-uniformed ushers would patrol the aisles lest a foot should stray or emotion get the better of obedience. At the front of the audience there was no barrier. There was, instead, an invisible Japanese force field. It was a piece of string between us and the crowd.
We, of course, were down the front edge of the stage, Steve machine-gunning with his bass and staring them out with crazy eyes. Every so often one of the crowd would crack, shaking in a frenzy on the spot. Emotion would take over, and they’d step out of line, then back, as if struggling against a moral tractor beam that pulled them towards the obedient masses.
Like a shot, a little blue-suited man delivered a swift blow with a rolled-up newspaper to the poor chap, who snapped back to his seat, head bowed, arms by his side, looking like a robot that had just been switched off.
In later years I discovered the Japanese expression often used in schools to describe an individual who was overly individualistic: ‘The nail that stands up is always hammered down.’
We were coming to the end of 187 shows, plus writing and recording an album, all in under a year. We were to spend a very brief spell in the UK at Christmas then straight into writing and recording another album and starting another enormous tour. I had traversed the globe, east to west and north to south. All my wildest fantasies had been fulfilled: number 1 album, big in Japan, US tours, headlining the Reading Festival.
My hotel room was covered in the spare junk of the intercontinental rock star. Suitcases never big enough for the T-shirts acquired. Fake samurai swords to take home, along with gadgets, posters, books and a stereo system, which I played super-loud in my room to the annoyance of anyone sleeping next door – usually Rod Smallwood.
After the last show we got very drunk. I was mixing hot sake with cold-beer chasers. Back at the hotel I was hungry. Room service had stopped for the night. I crawled on my hands and knees down a hotel corridor till I found a used room-service tray with two old bread rolls and a slab of butter. I caught sight of my reflection in the mirror by the lift.
There is a William Blake painting, Nebuchadnezzar, which is on the cover of Atomic Rooster’s album Death Walks Behind You. The king’s face looks out in horror as he realises what he is becoming: he is transforming slowly into a beast.
That painting was my reflection.
What has happened to you for the last year? I asked myself.
And what can you do to stem the insanity?
I checked if my foot was morphing into a beast’s. It wasn’t – not yet, anyway. There was still time, and I did have two bread rolls in hand.
New Battery
Christmas was a strange affair: life not on the road. I owned a house now. A small new-build terrace in West London – the spoils of war and having a number 1 album. Rod Smallwood came round for dinner. His Christmas present was an ornate box to hold playing cards, because he was quite fond of gambling, but only in the right circumstances.
The cards came out. After he won hands down, he pocketed the cash from everyone at dinner then left. It was, I suppose, his managerial instinct. If you invite a sabre-toothed tiger round for a cup of tea, don’t be surprised if it eats you. It’s not to be taken personally; it’s just what sabre-toothed tigers do.
The next three albums and tours equated to the next five years of my life. All of it, though, would be done without Clive Burr, let go at the end of The Number of the Beast tour.
It wasn’t about luggage, and it wasn’t about partying, or girls, because anybody and everybody was guilty of that at some time or another. ‘Artistic differences’ would be to overstate his creative input. The closest phrase I could get would be ‘self-fulfilling irretrievable disagreements’. The breakdown of the relationship between a drummer and bass player is pretty fundamental, especially if the bass player also happens to be the principal songwriter and band leader.
Clive always regarded the Maiden set-up with a jaundiced eye, even as he was held in high regard by fans. I loved his drumming feel, essentially because his sweet spot was of the big-band swing-time variety that guys like
Ian Paice of Deep Purple had going for them.
Where we didn’t see eye to eye was in the intricate and often eccentric fills and time signatures dreamt up by Steve. Their personalities were increasingly on a collision course. Steve was shy off stage, but aggressive and precise on stage. Clive was Mr Outgoing off stage, but often Mr Approximate when it came to precision on stage. Throw the whole melange into a pot and it got messier and messier throughout America. By the end, Steve took me to one side and said, ‘He’s got to go. I can’t fucking take it any longer.’
On the one hand, Steve and I had come a long way since near fisticuffs in Newcastle City Hall. On the other, I would be sad to see Clive go, but things had clearly been bubbling under for a long time.
We entered a whole new world with a leap of faith and a new drummer. Nicko McBrain was a professional musician and had known almost nothing else for his working life. Technically he was totally overqualified for us. The drum parts to date were busy, but not a problem for Nick in the slightest.
He had toured with the French band Trust already, and when they supported Maiden I’d watched him play from the side of the stage. Steve and the rest of the band were Trust fans, having toured with them previously.
Being a frustrated skinsman myself, I love watching drummers. They evolve a personal movement style over the years, which I find fascinating. Some sit, body upright, with their arms flailing like a syncopated spider as the wooden sticks whirl around their head. Some drum as if in a trance, while others act more like madmen trying to batter their way out of a prison cell, and others still look like accountants until you close your eyes and listen rather than look. Nicko was a dead ringer for Animal from the Muppets. His face would light up as he started to play, and the drums would each receive their individual encouragement vocally, very similar, in fact, to Steve’s nocturnal mumblings on The Number of the Beast.
What Does This Button Do? Page 12
