What Does This Button Do?

by Bruce Dickinson

  When cymbals were struck, and Nick has always liked to spank a nice piece of metal, they were always treated to special intimacies: ‘Fuck off . . . Fuck OFF . . . Feeer . . . Feeer . . . Fuck off . . . Fuck off!’

  Over the years we have considered gagging him in the studio, but live there is simply no concealing the musical Tourette’s that comprises the McBrain damage. His volatility extended to his long-suffering drum roadies. A few months after he joined, I was woken up by a commotion outside my hotel window in San Sebastián, Spain, where Maiden were doing pre-production rehearsals. There was Nicko’s drum roadie sitting in a fountain, clutching a brick and shouting: ‘Kill me. Kill me now.’

  Nicko’s advice had sound therapeutic value: ‘Fuck off and don’t be a twat.’

  Otherwise, it was a very pleasant Sunday evening in the town square.

  We enlisted the services of Steve Gadd to look after Nicko. Steve was also a drummer, and had quite a distinguished career with the band Charlie. He understood the mania that inhabits the drummer’s brain, but for him it manifested in a gently ironic and very relaxed view of the universe. It was as if he had some invisible duck on his head, and all the water thrown on it just rolled off its back. Eventually, Steve got time off for good behaviour and became our most-trusted assistant tour manager.

  In the New Year of 1983, the band decamped to the island of Jersey, together with Martin Birch. We took over Le Chalet Hotel in its entirety. Sadly, it no longer exists. It has been erased from the hillside on which it perched; either that or it fell off. For the next two albums it was our writing home. It had a bar that was open 24 hours a day, so help yourself, and a small ballroom, which we turned into a rehearsal room to write, eat, sleep and breathe music. The internet did not exist and neither did the laptop or mobile phone; there was one television and a pool table.

  The Atlantic gales blew against the windows that faced the storm-lashed, five-mile beach below. At night the Corbière lighthouse shone eerily, and by day (if the tide was out) you could scramble up the causeway strewn with driftwood and seaweed. I couldn’t help but think of Van der Graaf Generator’s masterpiece ‘A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers’.

  With the image of Blake’s Nebuchadnezzar and my two bread rolls firmly in mind, I decided to take my fencing kit with me. My mental salvation from rock ’n’ roll torpor would be to dust off my foils and get stuck in to some training. Incredibly there were two fencing clubs on Jersey. I put a training plan together and showed up.

  Fencing interested Martin. One evening he recounted his struggle with the music business. An engineering prodigy marked for greatness, and with early greatness achieved, he was dragged off on tour with Deep Purple as a live sound engineer.

  He was a black belt in Shotokan karate, and he would take his kit everywhere on tour with Purple and train as an antidote to the madness. He would talk of the power of ‘one blow’. At one stage he came very close to quitting music altogether to study karate full-time in Japan.

  I was busy writing. My little four-track cassette recorder held a few ideas, and I had started a writing partnership with Adrian that would provide Maiden with a seam of material to line up as potential singles or radio tracks.

  Japan had nibbled away at me. I had bought a copy of Miyamoto Musashi’s philosophical The Book of Five Rings. Touted as the go-to text for business warriors, it was written as a treatise on combat, life and art by one of Japan’s most legendary rōnin.

  Musashi’s life has been serialised and put into an epic novel, and as a character he impinges on much of Western movie culture, from The Magnificent Seven to Clint Eastwood and The Outlaw Josey Wales.

  The Japanese ultra-nationalist Yukio Mishima became obsessed by him and caused mayhem when, as one of Japan’s most-revered poets, he disembowelled himself and was decapitated by a faithful assistant during a failed coup d’etat.

  The inspiration for our song ‘Sun and Steel’ came from one of Mishima’s best-known novels. But the lyrics are not about Mishima; they are about Musashi. The song is short and quite simple. I kept the guitar riff straightforward because I am not very good at guitar. Adrian plays it far better than I could have imagined.

  Ross Halfin turned up and we stood on rocks by the lighthouse, windswept and trying not to look freezing cold. ‘Flash bang wallop, what a picture. What a photograph.’

  Steve rolled out ‘The Trooper’ after whistling a happy tune into a Sony Walkman, and I pinched a verse from The English Hymnal for the first lines of ‘Revelations’.

  The opening drum sequence to ‘Where Eagles Dare’ I can take partial responsibility for. It was based on Cozy Powell’s intro to ‘Stargazer’, by Rainbow, although it’s the effect, rather than the notes played, that I was after. We toyed with different things, and I mentioned that there was a terrific tom-tom fill I remembered on an obscure hit from a guitarist called Gordon Giltrap.

  ‘Oh yeah, “Heartsong”. That was me.’

  Of course it was – classic McBrain drumming. We took that fill and infilled it with triplets before it goes into the main riff. The bass-drum part was extreme. It was like Woody Woodpecker having an epileptic beak attack.

  ‘You can’t play that on a single bass drum. It needs a double pedal,’ Nicko declared. I was inclined to agree with him, but that wasn’t the point.

  ‘I bet you Ian Paice could do it.’

  The work rate required to get his single foot to play the pattern was extraordinary. To his eternal credit, he worked at it for days and he succeeded.

  ‘Fuck me, I’m glad that’s done. We aren’t ever gonna do that live – fucking hell.’

  We ended up opening the show with it every night. Oops.

  Rod Smallwood showed up and we all drank heavily. Apart from writing and rehearsing, there was not a great deal to do. Steve organised a pool tournament and arranged for an enormous trophy. There was one rock night per week in a desolate pub down by the beach. When we turned up we instantly doubled the attendance figures.

  In the bar, arguments ensued and questions of philosophy were answered. The meaning of life, according to Rod, was simple: ‘Pride and ego. Pride to do your very best and ego to take it that bit further.’

  I thought there might be more to it than that.

  Martin had also pitched in and Marvin made an appearance, as he started standing on the furniture muttering, ‘Death, one blow,’ and striking one-legged karate poses.

  We thought it might be a good contest to see who would win between karate and fencing. I fetched my foil and we moved the furniture away from the bar. Rod had moved on from philosophy to physics: ‘I was so immensely strong, I could lift five navvies on the end of a shovel.’

  Combat preparations momentarily ceased as Martin and I both looked askance.

  ‘How does that work? That’s bollocks,’ we said.

  ‘No, it’s not. It’s bloody physics, that’s what it is,’ said Rod.

  I failed physics O level, and Rod studied architecture at Cambridge, but clearly not bricklaying.

  Anyway, Martin and I squared off. He bowed, and I gave a fencing salute. After a bit of unsteady toing and froing he unleashed a roundhouse kick that sent bar stools flying; I stopped toing and knocked over a plant pot, and somewhere in the midst of all this two-bulls-in-a-china-shop chaos, the point of my foil had nestled comfortably in the middle of his chest.

  ‘Ahhh . . . ippon,’ Martin said, bowing deeply. The only injuries were caused by collisions with furniture. I think we decided, on balance, that the furniture won in the end.

  More Atlantic gales; the bedrooms were damp and draughty. ‘Still Life’, ‘Quest for Fire’ and, of course, ‘Dune’ came from Steve’s muse.

  Actually, ‘Dune’ wasn’t ‘Dune’ at all. The author Frank Herbert didn’t like heavy metal and caused us no end of problems, so the name was changed to ‘To Tame a Land’.

  ‘Flight of Icarus’ began life in a toilet. Adrian was fond of playing guitar in bathrooms – he liked the ambience from the tiles �
�� and, while he was noodling away, I heard a sequence of chords and started singing along to them. The chorus of ‘Flight of Icarus’ just started flying like an eagle as a result.

  I quickly realised that we potentially had a song under four minutes that could do the unthinkable for Maiden: airplay on US radio. For the lyric, I flipped the story of Icarus on its head and made the father the villain of the piece. Driven by ambition and ego he forces his son to fly, with terrible consequences as his son, in youthful exuberance, flies too high and his wings melt. Basically the pushy parent revisited.

  One of my favourite songs on the album is ‘Still Life’. Atmospheric and dark, it deals with themes familiar to many of Steve’s songs: fear, powerlessness, betrayal and inescapable prophecies. Unless I am very much mistaken, Iron Maiden don’t do love songs. The closest any of us gets is melancholy or anger at lost love or love betrayed. Closet psychologists, eat your heart out . . .

  Anyway, we now had some great songs, but what were we going to call the album? Basically, we have Eddie to thank for the name.

  Eddie is Iron Maiden’s mascot, monster, alter ego – call it what you will. Part supernatural, part primal, part aggressive adolescent, Eddie is a super anti-hero with no backstory. Eddie doesn’t give a fuck. He just is.

  Eddie also gets us off the hook as individuals. Eddie is far bigger and more outrageous than any badly behaved superstar. Eddie makes rock stars obsolete.

  This comes in handy when you get to your late fifties and rather fancy a quiet night in after playing to 25,000 screaming metal fans. Eddie can take care of the after-party, probably by disembowelling them and eating their brains, which is often more than they deserve. He had become an on-stage superstar during The Number of the Beast, all down to a bit of lateral thinking from Dave Lights, our, er, lighting engineer.

  He had seen some giants – on stilts – at an opera, and asked if he could commission the building of a giant walk-on Eddie.

  I remember the unveiling at the Rainbow Theatre. The roller shutter went up and there was a gasp as we beheld the giant. We realised right then that this one piece of theatre was going to be transformative. We could upstage just about anyone on the planet by having our gory ghoul amble on stage for 30 seconds and bob his head around.

  Until then, Eddie had been a rubber mask on a human wearing leather jacket and jeans. Mr Smallwood was quite effective in costume and denied all knowledge, although, actually, he was very good at frightening small children.

  The giant walk-on Eddie opened up massive stage possibilities, and one of them was to remove Eddie’s brain on stage. The heart didn’t feel like the right thing to do, and by removing his brain we could consign him to a straitjacket. The Beast on the Road had been shackled, lobotomised and put in a padded cell. This all seemed to be a promising album cover.

  The top of his skull was Velcroed in place, and the skull casing filled with women’s tights stuffed with chunks of foam, stained bloody brown. Ripping out his brain actually looked more like pulling out several feet of pork sausages, but the thought was there at least. The photo for the gatefold sleeve features the band seated around a banqueting table, regarding a large brain, which we are clearly about to consume.

  The working title for the album was ‘Food for Thought’. It was a pun, but not a very good one and, as is often the case, the answer came one Sunday afternoon in a pub called the Mermaid, just by Jersey airport.

  ‘Why don’t we call it Peace of Mind?’

  ‘Oh, no. That’s Piece of Mind, not Peace.’

  The artwork was sensational – and who cared if it was nothing to do with any of the songs on the album. Although we did slip in a reference to ‘Piece of Mind’ during ‘Still Life’, and the final twist came one evening while watching Omen II in the TV room, full of band and crew. As the credits rolled there was a scrolling verse from the Book of Revelation with the line ‘neither shall there be any more pain, for the former things have passed away’.

  I was rather hoping that a bit of tampering with the Bible might provoke yet more controversy. The Number of the Beast had generated plenty of hot air from the waffling middle classes and religious bigots, so we hoped for a bit more.

  I’m sorry to say it didn’t work. No one seemed to care that ‘there shall be no more brain, for the former things have passed away’. Our adulteration of the Book of Revelation went unpunished, but it made us chuckle a little.

  The great rollercoaster hurtled on and deposited us in the very much sunnier climate of the Bahamas to record the album. Making records in a tax haven was beginning to sound a bit Rolling Stones – but we soon put a stop to that.

  In the early eighties drug-trafficking was ravaging the island, and while out by Compass Point Studios life seemed suitably laidback and beach-hut friendly there were places in the capital, Nassau, that were potentially unfriendly.

  Cruise ships docked and boatloads of either elderly or drunk-and-crazed college kids descended into town at regular intervals. There was still an air of faded colonial splendour, and the British ex-colony just about vied equally with the new American economic colony in a contest for the hearts and minds of whatever remained of island culture.

  It still resembled the island where Sean Connery filmed Dr. No, even if the bauxite mine which doubled for so many other locations in that, and subsequent Bond movies, had been dwarfed in economic significance by the arrival of bags of cocaine and hash.

  Up the road from Compass Point Studios, along the beach, was the Traveller’s Rest. It could have been pulled straight out of a Hemingway novel. Concrete tables, black-eyed peas and rice, conch fritters and smudder grouper were all on the menu. The cool, damp evening breeze flowed through the open windows, and the only entrance was a pair of Western saloon-style swinging doors. The deadliest concoction on offer was a banana daiquiri of such quality that it rendered you both potent and impotent at one and the same time.

  The band all lived and slept in small, neat townhouses by the beach. Only a few yards over the road was the studio. Each townhouse had three bedrooms and the road crew occupied the spare rooms. In the evening the waves broke gently on the beach with a peaceful whoosh.

  My small house had a downstairs balcony with the sea below it. The reef was several hundred yards out and the water was clear. Being close to the equator, the sun rose and set at very similar times throughout the year. If in any doubt as to what time it was, I just had to wait till the stingray flapped lazily past my balcony every day at 4 p.m.

  At night, small ticks nibbled away at us. The locals called them ‘no see ’ums’, for obvious reasons. Sea snakes cavorted around in the shallows and dogs were potentially rabid so best avoided, unless you knew the owner. The one exception was a delightful little mutt called Biscuit, who belonged to our neighbour, Robert Palmer. More of him as the story unfolds.

  Now it was time to do some work. The studio was spacious and comfortable, but with a few eccentricities. Island power was sometimes unpredictable, so there was a backup generator. All well and good, but the power spike when the generator kicked in would send a surge through the magnetic tape heads of the 24-track recorder, erasing or damaging whatever content happened to be in contact with the head at that moment.

  A power cut was therefore a critical moment. The room would suddenly plunge into darkness, and tape operators would lunge for the recorder to pull the tape away from the heads. You had about 10 seconds to do it before an entire swathe was wiped from the tape.

  Except when it came to the power supply, we took our time. Rod had decided to go for broke in the USA, and had gambled on us being able to do the business as an arena headliner. Social media did not exist. It was radio that ruled the roost, and if we could get a radio track away, we were home and dry – hard work and touring would do the rest. I told him that ‘Flight of Icarus’ was the one.

  When we recorded the track I had a stand-up row with Steve over the tempo. He wanted to play the whole thing much faster, almost like a slow shuffle. I stoo
d nose to nose with him and he reluctantly caved in and let me dictate the timing.

  ‘This is nothing to do with getting it on the radio, is it?’ he demanded.

  ‘Oh, no. God forbid. Of course not,’ I lied.

  Well, we did it, and it was a top 10 radio hit, out of the box. As it happens, I think it is the right tempo regardless, but I’m sure Steve would disagree because we haven’t played the song live for 30 years.

  ‘The Trooper’ was a monster, and the galloping bass line and iconic sleeve was like red meat to hungry wolves in Europe. ‘Revelations’ occupied the space normally taken up by a song like ‘Children of the Damned’, and for reasons of musical insecurity I sported a guitar to play the opening lighter passages.

  I was not exactly overconfident playing in front of several thousand people, and I’m pretty sure that whatever I played was never actually broadcast to the audience on the grounds that it might have been crap.

  The laid-back rhythm of island life soon ceased. The hard grind of another world tour lay ahead. The UK was carpet-bombed from Hull to Southampton with shows, Europe similarly, but the big event was the headline tour of America and Canada.

  Organ Pipes

  Singing is hard at the best of times, and doing it with a band like Maiden posed some unique challenges. The vocal strain was intense. We had never given very much thought to vocal monitors, and the longevity of my voice was never considered as a limiting factor when booking the gruelling tours. With the kind of singing I was doing, it was inevitable that my voice would fail.

  The closest analogy to a singer losing his voice is a football player breaking his leg. He may never play again, and the voice is such a precarious instrument that similar emotions prevail. Simple vocal strain can be dealt with by rest and silence. Living like a monk goes with the territory. More critical is disease, and singing while carrying a vocal infection like laryngitis can be career-ending stuff.