The pressure on singers in these situations is unrelenting and often self-inflicted. Of course you want to do the show, and the guilt involved in cancelling is enormous. Managers, agents and the like are often unsympathetic at worst, and neutral at best. Thankfully, it hasn’t happened too often over the years, but the work rate and lifestyle for the first five years meant that some degree of incapacitation was bound to happen.
The best way to preserve a voice is to get loads of sleep in a quiet room with no air-conditioning, just an even temperature and good humidity. Preferably take regular rest days, and avoid unnecessary speaking and especially shaking hands with lots of strangers – absolutely the best chance of catching colds and flu. Have an even and unremarkable diet with plenty of fresh vegetables, avoiding too many dairy products and other foods that produce excess mucus.
Excess or sticky mucus is the death of the singing voice. The pathetically fragile vocal chords need only the tiniest blob to adhere to them, and the uneven vibration that results sounds like a piece of paper being played through a comb.
Vocal polyps, essentially callouses caused by harshly rubbing the vocal chords together repetitively (as in shouting for days on end), are permanent manifestations of the same phenomenon.
A German opera singer wrote a treatise on the subject of phlegm in which she identified more than 50 different types – almost as many words as the Eskimos have for snow.
It goes without saying that drugs of most description are eventually fatal to the voice, especially ones like cocaine and speed, which are snorted into the delicate mucosa in the sinus cavities.
Cigarettes and hash appear to work for some people, but certainly not for me. Lucky if you can survive the onslaught, but how lucky not to do it at all and sing even better.
The vocal chords are only the start of the process. My style of singing is very physical, and I am drained at the end of a rehearsal; my belly aches, my head hurts and my eyes feel like they want to pop out of my head.
The diaphragm is the engine room of the voice, and singers breathe in a way more familiar to people who meditate or do yoga. Very seldom will you observe the shoulders of a good singer rise up when he takes a breath; indeed, taking breath may be almost imperceptible.
This is because the singer has trained his lungs and belly to relax and be inspired by simple air pressure from the atmosphere. If the body is relaxed the lungs simply fill up. The interesting bit is that most of the lung capacity is located well below the nipples, in the lower back.
I am the king of the elastic waistband as a result. Restrictions around the belly are extremely uncomfortable and lead to inefficient production of wind from the diaphragm, the bellows of the body.
Singers train their diaphragm to become stronger and train themselves to stand with their lower back slightly flattened to permit maximum expansion of the lung cavity. Eating before a show can thus be a very uncomfortable, even hazardous activity.
Once the diaphragm has metered the amount and velocity of air going through the pipes, the vocal chords add the note to be sung by stretching or relaxing, much like a reed in a clarinet mouthpiece.
That’s not the end of the story. This raw-data note now arrives at the base of the tongue, which shapes and echoes the sound, moving and directing it around the resonant cavities of our soft palate and the hard, bony spaces of the sinus cavities.
With practice, singers find their own sound from within the shape and space of their own bodies. The ground rules remain the same, however, and if you choose to make your idiosyncratic vocal style by vocal abuse, just make sure you know the rules before you try to bend them. That way you stand a chance of having a voice that will survive more than five years.
A voice is, after all, just that. It’s a voice for a story, a way of making people feel something and, to that extent, the end justifies the means.
After this brief description of what goes on, you’re probably wondering how we get beyond our first vowel sound without a college degree. Fortunately there are babies to teach us. We have forgotten how to be babies, to our eternal shame, but they make the most extraordinary noises, as anyone trapped on an aeroplane with one for several hours will testify. The vocal power that comes out of that tiny package is remarkable.
Rock stars, of course, have long had the capacity to act like babies but have not had the sense to sing like them.
Powerslave
The Piece of Mind tour was shorter than our previous one only because the album took longer to write and record. We gambled in the USA and went for the jugular, headlining Madison Square Garden in New York. It paid off.
Piece of Mind was us laying down the gauntlet to America. Even though we had a radio track with ‘Flight of Icarus’, it was clear that we would not last long as American media darlings because we were simply un-American. We disliked limousines and were more likely to be found playing darts than smoking crack.
We despised fashion, hated the cult of celebrity and thought the concept of ‘all you can eat’ as disgusting as its obese participants. In contrast, Canada seemed much more sane, and ice hockey seemed to make much more sense than American football, at least at the time.
We bashed our way round the States and the UK and Europe, and then Europe some more, and finally finished at a German TV festival at Westfalenhallen in Dortmund. It was the end of two years on the road. I had had herniated discs, paralysis of my limbs, laryngitis, bacterial bronchitis and a crash course in cultural assimilation.
The bill at Westfalenhallen read like a who’s who of eighties metal: Ozzy, Scorpions, Whitesnake . . . everyone was there. There were two stages at each end of a huge arena and a scaffold mixing tower in the centre.
I remember being very tired, but the adrenalin kicked in and the show was good, in that unsatisfying way that TV shows are ‘good’. Seldom are they actually really wonderful. TV kills live music. Cameras are the enemy, but people are your true friends.
After the show I got very drunk and abusive. I behaved appallingly. I was swigging from a bottle of champagne as I climbed the scaffold tower to the mixing desk.
A very earnest journalist asked me what I thought of the sound. I responded by pissing on the mixing desk. I was asked to leave.
Unchaperoned and with my willy hanging out, I interrupted a photo session of Quiet Riot and inserted my dick in the singer’s ear, thus becoming a new member.
I was escorted from the building and placed in a car, with the driver given instructions to put me to bed. Unfortunately I was in the front seat, which was bad for him, as I insisted on selecting reverse gear when he was at traffic lights. After I attempted to open the door at high speed I was escorted from the front of the vehicle and put in the back, where there were child-proof locks.
Who said we had forgotten how to behave like babies?
Piece of Mind had given us a new confidence, and a desire to break out of the ‘angry East End punk metal’ identity that we had been saddled with by the media, and which we never were. Fierce, yes. Punk, never. And East End? Well, that was almost true.
I had been busy fencing away, and was taking lessons from the British national coach, Brian Pitman. His son, Justin, happened to be a friend of mine, and he also placed fourth in the world under-20 championships, alongside future world champions. We became sparring partners, and a certain amount of drinking was involved.
Fencing is a paradoxical sport. It has the appearance of some aristocratic past-time, partaken of by a rich elite. This is a very convenient and lazy way of thinking, but since when has rigour ever got in the way of a good cliché for an idle journalist?
The paradox in fencing comes in the conflict between availability and opportunity. It should be taught and trained in the toughest inner-city schools, and not wasted on those who can merely afford it. That is not to say that it should not be inclusive. Merely that the net should be spread far wider than it is at the moment. In many respects, it is similar to tennis in its requirement for dedication and individual
coaching.
It is, of course, a combat sport. The aim in times past was to kill your opponent, and sport had very little to do with it. I have a collection of old fencing books, and books on duelling. There is no more lethal way to dispense with a human being, other than a firearm, than by running them through with a sword.
I took my fencing kit with me on tour, and in every town we played I tried to train and fight at the local club. It made a change from the rock ’n’ roll ghetto of the tour bus. I just turned up and fought, and then we went off and drank beer and talked about fencing, and very little about music, because nobody was bothered one way or another.
I entered competitions if I could prise my way out of tours. I still have some of the bizarre medals I won around the USA. On one occasion I ended up fencing outdoors at the Renaissance Faire in California, amidst a crowd of pointy-hatted wenches and stout gentlemen wearing Elizabethan dress shouting ‘prithee’ in a Californian twang in 100-degree heat. After I cleaned the cow dung off my kit I was presented with a rosette that read ‘For valour’.
Errol Flynn, eat your heart out. Actually I took lessons from the fencing master who taught Errol Flynn, and who doubled for him in several movies. Ralph Faulkner also taught Basil Rathbone and Stewart Granger, I think and, well, pretty much anyone in Hollywood. He had his own studio, Faulkner Studios, out in East Hollywood, in what is now a low-rent district. He must have been well into his eighties and still teaching.
Drumming and fencing have much in common. Both require tempo, but the combat element requires timing, which is quite different, but reliant on tempo. Timing is the ability to deliver the punchline, as the secret of a good joke is . . . wait for it . . . TIMING.
In the space between people’s intentions, or the space between successive actions, there is time to strike. It’s like watching a great boxer effortlessly jab his way to victory, seemingly reading his opponent’s every intention and being two moves ahead.
Ralph wasn’t very mobile, but his hand speed and precision were extraordinary; his hand moved as if guided by a preordained groove in the air, and I struggled to achieve the required accuracy to manipulate the point of my foil around the worn aluminium guard and onto the target, his weather-beaten brown leather plastron.
From beneath his mask he barked commands. His voice was gruff, and it was quite difficult to understand. He would raise his mask and stare through the thick lenses of his wire-rimmed glasses: ‘Parry four, I said.’
‘Oh, yes,’ I’d reply.
There was another club in LA run by former Japanese Olympic fencer Heizaburo Okawa, who was also a Kendo champion and a bit good at golf. Not too much eye-hand coordination at work there, then.
I felt at home with fencers because they were nearly always eccentric, smart and liked a beer. My biggest problem in trying to improve was a lack of consistency in training and coaching. You simply can’t get anywhere without a solid input from a proper coach. We would all be back in Jersey shortly to write the next album, but coaching was limited on the island, so I made plans to import my buddy Justin to spar with.
The Doomsday Clock kept by nuclear scientists was ticking at two minutes to midnight. That sounded like a song title. Ronald Reagan was expounding about the ‘evil empire’ of the Soviet Union and, just for shits and giggles, Steve threw in an epic song recounting The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
In an ironic touch, I wrote the song ‘Powerslave’ as a partial allegory of life as a rock-star pharaoh, taking all the acolytes with him as he goes. In the end it’s all just an empty tomb, so what was the point of it all? Bleak magnificence was the sentiment in my heart, and it was starting to become what I would feel at the end of the tour: ‘A slave to the power of death . . .’
The song started life as a little Egyptian-sounding riff on a guitar, and I always loved the image conjured up by the phrase ‘slave amplifier’. A bit of daydreaming and staring out the window on a rainy day did the rest. The song gave us our album title, too.
What Powerslave really did, though, was give us the gift of Pharaoh Eddie, and the magnificence of the Powerslave stage set. Suddenly we had a walk-on Eddie mummy, plus a giant mummy that rose from the back of the set in a stunning finale. The theatricality was sensational. For ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ we turned the same stage set into on old galleon. This was old-school painted backdrops, trompe-l’œil effects and props. It was proper theatre rather than insubstantial gimmicks. It was theatre of the mind.
When we came to make a video for ‘2 Minutes to Midnight’, the director was keen to show how cinematic his storyboard was, so he met us to show polaroids of locations.
The Greenwich foot tunnel was one of them. It brought back memories of college and walking under the river to catch the bus to the Green Man in Plumstead. He then produced a series of drawings describing the mercenaries’ hangout.
‘We found this fantastic location. It’s disgusting, full of rats and piss – horrible,’ he said.
He flipped over the polaroid.
‘I used to live there,’ I muttered. It was 22 Roffey House. How the world turns.
Iron Curtains
Returning to the Bahamas to record Powerslave seemed almost like coming home. Although we all had homes, none of us had actually spent any significant time in any of them for over two years. None of us could really comprehend that it would be another two years before any semblance of a normal existence began to impinge on us, and even then, only briefly.
We mixed the album in the city that never sleeps, so good they named it twice: New York, New York.
I love New York, and over the years the city has returned the favour. It is a daydream of cinematic proportions, and it is in the smallest details that it reveals itself. The patter of the cops, the hustle and bustle, and the brash vulgarity that in any other city would be gross, but in New York it verges on inspirational. Early morning, winter’s day, cup of coffee steaming out of a paper cup as the dustcarts hammer their axles round the potholes, you are in The French Connection and Popeye Doyle is going to step out of that office building right . . . now. Or maybe not.
I had found a fencing salle (that’s club in English) run by a world-class Ukrainian defector. Stan was a hero of the Soviet Union in terms of sport, and the national coach of Ukraine. He had smuggled himself out and managed to make his way to New York. He was an eccentric and industrious individual and, as well as running a fencing school, he had a business manufacturing and importing fencing clothing from around the world.
I spent hours training every week. I would hop on the subway down to 23rd Street with my kit bag around 11 a.m., warm up, then have a one-on-one lesson for 45 minutes. Reduced to a small ball of sweat and goo, I would go to the local deli and bring my lunch back to watch as he gave lessons to the next batch of modern-day musketeers. A couple of hours of sparring, and that was me done for the day.
Electric Ladyland Studios, where the record was being mixed, is tucked away in a basement in Greenwich Village, which was only a couple of stops down the street, or a pleasant walk. Take a listen back, have an opinion and let them get on with it. Steve loved the process of mixing, but I preferred to leave them to it and come in as a second opinion. It’s very easy to get too close to a mix, so that it becomes very hard to make an objective judgement.
Later on, when I was in the middle of my solo career, I had to get more involved in the mixing process. Nevertheless, I would give guidelines and would always deliberately leave the crew alone to determine their own mix as they saw fit. You can’t paint a picture if all you can see is what’s at the end of the paintbrush. It’s also very easy to get bogged down in technical minutiae, the creative equivalent of quicksand.
With the mix done, we rehearsed for the upcoming tour in a wonderfully tacky nightclub in Fort Lauderdale, and stayed in a cockroach-infested sea-front motel.
Soon enough, the holiday was over. It was time to emigrate to the Evil Empire, behind the Iron Curtain, as it was in 1984, to Poland to open t
he Powerslave tour.
The Tupolev Tu-134 is a small, twin-engine jet airliner, and it was the vehicle of choice to transport us to Poland. LOT Airlines was using all-Russian machinery, and this was the variant that had a bomb aimer’s cupola in the nose, which was all rather thrilling.
We were tucked into the cramped fuselage, festooned with netting instead of overhead bins, while unidentifiable meat products and boiled sweets were delivered by the cabin crew, whose morale could best be described as homicidal.
Warsaw was forbidden fruit. We were received in scenes reminiscent of the Beatles when they landed back in the UK after playing Shea Stadium. We stepped off the plane, initially oblivious to the hundreds of Poles besieging the airport with banners, placards and albums.
The welcome committee was cordial, relaxed and the complete opposite of any preconceived notion we might have had of some Stalinist apparatchik or Stasi-style stooge organising our trip.
We walked down the aircraft steps and shook hands with the promoter’s rep. There were grins all round. We smiled, he smiled, the sun shone, and the heat wrinkled the air around the concrete apron.
‘Where is Rod?’ the rep asked. Rod Smallwood had chosen this moment to make a bold statement. He had purchased a white suit (although, to this day, Rod insists it was beige) and dark sunglasses. As the aircraft door opened, he surveyed the reception committee, who ignored him. We ambled down to the ground and chatted to everyone, but Rod stood on his own, suited and sunglassed.
We had queried his choice of clothing when we boarded the plane.
‘I’ve got to show them who’s boss,’ was his reply. I seem to recall none of us were too sure that a white suit would be the sort of thing to go down a storm in Warsaw.
By the time we had gone through customs and immigration, it was quite clear that the whole apparatus of the state had been infiltrated by Iron Maiden fans. Anyone with a gun wanted an autograph, and when we tried to get on the coach outside the terminal, it took all of my minimal rugby skills to batter my way through.
What Does This Button Do? Page 14
