There have been subsequent situations that we have had to manage. A more light-hearted one was when the entire electrical supply at Earls Court decided to weld itself together halfway into the set and all power was lost to sound and lights for a full 40 minutes.
The crew did an amazing job of splicing together high-voltage cables and restoring power while we juggled, pulled faces, played football with the audience and generally kept the plates spinning. These are times when you can be truly proud.
In Rio, at the Olympic Arena, an entire section of barrier collapsed in a heap of jagged aluminium. The barrier was a cheap copy of a successful design, but had been built using substandard materials instead of high-grade metal.
I stood with a translator for half an hour as we persuaded the crowd to leave and come back the next day. That they did so and didn’t trash the place is testament to the simple interaction between human beings.
Back in 1988 the Seventh Son tour was all-conquering, but equally interesting for me was meeting video director, editor and auteur in general Julian Doyle, who was initially called in to direct ‘Can I Play with Madness’. Julian and I went on to direct and storyboard several more ideas and, of course, the Oscar-defying feature film Chemical Wedding, starring Simon Callow as the reincarnated Aleister Crowley.
Before Aleister Crowley, though, came Monty Python. Julian was Python’s film guru. He reassembled the film Brazil from the cutting-room floor, having finished large chunks of it himself because Terry Gilliam was ill. As an editor his credits extended to virtually all the Python films, and he taught at film schools and was his own lighting director and cameraman.
After directing Donald Sutherland and Kate Bush in ‘Cloudbusting’, Julian was asked to come up with ideas for ‘Can I Play with Madness’. He managed to engage Graham Chapman to perform in the video.
Graham was sadly quite ill from throat cancer during filming. He, along with Chris Aylmer from my old band Samson and Steve Gadd, our long-time assistant tour manager and friend, would all perish from the same awful disease.
It would be 26 years before my own diagnosis of the same cancer.
I loved the video and was eager to chat to Julian, because I loved to write and because all of my lyrics were pictorial, at least in my head. When I sang, I saw movies of the story unfolding. All my voice did was tell the tale of the theatre in my mind.
Julian regaled me with tales of Time Bandits, Harvey Weinstein and errant Beatles.
‘Why don’t you do an Eddie movie?’ he suggested.
I thought about it, and wrote several treatments, but it was obvious to me that it was neither the time nor the place for an Eddie movie, even if it could have been smuggled past the Maiden gatekeeper Rod Smallwood. It was just not a possibility.
‘What about doing a movie about Aleister Crowley?’ I asked. ‘Nobody’s done one.’
Hold that thought.
Slaughtering Daughters
The album and tour of Seventh Son put us squarely in arena- and festival-headline territory. I had, by the end of the tour, acquired a wardrobe of fabulously potty trousers, hairy shirts and various masks, including a rather fetching Goat of Mendes number with two-foot-long antlers.
To keep ourselves sane on the road I had my fencing, Adrian had his fishing and Steve had his own football team, often imported for matches. Most of us played, and some of the matches were genuinely momentous, especially for someone like me, who was left-footed and, just for good measure, God had equipped me with another left foot as a spare. Adrian was quite a skilful player, and he had some style. He was deceptively tricky. In many respects his timing was remarkably similar to his guitar-playing. Steve, of course, was principal striker – not by right, but by agreed ability.
I enjoyed midfield. I liked close marking and the frustration generated when the opposition saw their passes thwarted or their strikers denied. It was a tactical style, and actually was not dissimilar to playing flanker in rugby union, which was my most successful position when I played the game from 11 to 16 years old. After that I was getting a little small, or maybe other folk became larger.
Iron Maiden FC opened for an international game between Canada and Greece, and I had to mark the singer from a band called Glass Tiger who was quite useful. Sadly for him, the pitch was in poor condition, and after I chased him around for 45 minutes he twisted his ankle and was stretchered off. I never touched him, ref – honest.
We played the Olympic Stadium in Montreal, as a football team, of course, which was pretty mind-blowing, and finally we played the Estonian side Flora Tallinn in 2000, and achieved notoriety in The Times by hospitalising Mart Poom, Derby County’s Estonian goalkeeper who was appearing as a guest in the game.
Stretchered off with ‘undisclosed injuries to his testicles’ was, I believe, the newspaper quotation that tells you all you need to know about the match.
We worked hard and played hard. I would sneak off to train with the Canadian fencing team, or indeed the Japanese team, for that matter. It’s the small, hidden worlds that keep you on the straight and narrow on tour. I had seen far too many casualties along the way, and realised that, as I had thought in that hotel corridor on The Number of the Beast tour, the music business will drive you nuts if you let it.
Returning home after a tour is a bit like rejoining society after a spell in prison, or being a missionary, or living like a hermit and taking mind-altering quantities of adrenalin every day. It is strange.
I moved back to West London from Buckinghamshire and immediately bought a four-foot long radio-controlled U-boat replica. I still have it, and I came perilously close to buying a real sub.
Why a children’s charity would want to purchase a Royal Navy diesel-electric submarine was something I couldn’t quite fathom. Purchase it they did, though, and according to the Daily Mail they were now keen to unpurchase it.
I came up with a plan to start submarine cruises across the Atlantic for enthusiasts. When they got the straitjacket on me and put me in a padded cell, I finally relented and agreed that there might not be a huge market for such a hands-on experience.
After I had calmed down, I went back to having a few pints of beer by the River Thames and watching ducks and swans go by. This is where Janick Gers and I started to get into double trouble.
I had known Janick from his days in a band called White Spirit, who were contemporaries of Samson. We were both Ian Gillan fans, and Janick clearly had quite a bit of Mr Blackmore infusing his style, in particular the spectacular knee-wobbling lunges that would punctuate his dancing antics. Imagine a whirling dervish with a guitar being suddenly deposited onto a red-hot plate and it may give you some idea of the Geordie guitar jive that resulted.
We had, of course, kept in touch, and we kept bumping into each other as I scaled the height of Iron Maiden success and Janick passed through a series of bands. As we sat having a beer, he seemed resigned, somewhat depressed, about the state of the music industry, saying, ‘They’re more interested in your fucking haircut than whether you can play guitar.’
Janick was selling his equipment: his old Stratocasters, Marshall cabs and vintage amps. He was doing a sociology degree and thought about teaching, or, well, anything except music. I admired his sincerity, but he was far too good to be wasted on teaching sociology.
In my tiny brain I hatched a plan. I had a bizarre offer, which might just be a solution to his problem.
Ralph Simon of Zomba Music, you may recall, was our bearded, friendly South African music publisher. Once, while temporarily bereft of a home, I was sleeping on a mattress in a vacant room in his Battery Studios. Ralph leapt into action as he apprehended what he assumed was a burglar.
‘AHA – got you!’ he yelled as he burst into the room.
‘Hello, Ralph,’ I replied.
‘Who is he?’ my girlfriend asked, rather more pointedly and covering up various regions that I wasn’t already covering up.
Ralph thought this all very rock ’n’ roll, and took t
o calling me ‘Mr Libido’ in polite conversation, which could sound quite creepy coming from a middle-aged lawyer with an Afrikaans twang to his voice.
Ralph was also a sort of savant when it came to music as well. After the success of ‘Run to the Hills’ he took me to one side and said, ‘You know, what you have is that high-pitched octave that makes the Americans go raving mad.’
‘Really?’ I replied.
‘Yes. Absolutely. You know, Mutt Lange has the same thing.’
Equipped with this insight I muddled through the next few years, until Ralph popped in to the management office one day. This time, I had my clothes on.
‘How would you like to do a soundtrack to a movie?’ he said.
Having just come off the Seventh Son tour I was completely in the space to do a movie soundtrack. Except it wasn’t actually a soundtrack to a movie at all. It was one song for A Nightmare on Elm Street – number five, I believe, in the franchise.
‘There’s only a small budget.’
‘How much is small?’ I enquired.
‘Small’ was big enough. I phoned Janick.
‘You can’t sell your gear. You’ve got to do a track with me, and if you still want to sell it I’ll buy it off you and you can use it when you want.’
I had never seen a Freddy Krueger film, so I asked someone in the pub, ‘A Nightmare On Elm Street, what’s that all about?’
‘Oh, teenage girls go to sleep and get slashed by this scary old dude, but he only gets them in their sleep.’
A love story, then.
The track was wanted almost instantly, so I had to come up with a tune pretty quick. If in doubt, borrow a guitar and play the first thing that sounds good. I have a totally untested theory that every guitar has a tune in it, and this particular one turned up ‘Bring Your Daughter to the Slaughter’.
It was only the chorus, and the rest of the song was a sort of AC/DC, Bon Scott-style pastiche with a tongue-in-cheek section of mad monks chanting over tolling bells.
We cranked out the song in Battery Studios in a couple of days. We laughed, giggled and drank beer to celebrate, and in general had a relaxed time making music away from the more intense atmosphere that pervaded the Maiden camp.
The track was too late for the movie, but not too late for CBS Records, who heard it and did backflips. They wanted to give me a solo deal.
Ralph phoned me up: ‘Is there any more material like that?’
‘Oh yes, loads,’ I lied.
Two weeks later I was telling the truth.
Janick’s house in Hounslow was right under the flight path of Heathrow Airport. Not just a bit under, but I mean the wheels were almost putting a dent in his roof as they screamed overhead. It meant the next-door neighbours didn’t complain about the odd scream emanating from his lounge windows as we wrote the album.
We had to crack on, so I just made a list of staple rock songs. We already had a sort of AC/DC one, we needed a ballad, an anthemic one, a sort of Rolling Stones groove one, a boogie-type thing . . . maybe a cover, as well.
Luckily, I had recently done a charity show for the Prince’s Trust at Wembley. I was given the Bowie song ‘All the Young Dudes’ to perform, which of course was a seminal track for Mott the Hoople. I was more surprised than anyone that it seemed a natural fit for my voice, although, to be fair, I don’t think we improved on the original.
Then, while having a beer one night, I went for a piss, and there on the wall were the Proustian lines: ‘No muff too tuff, we dive at five.’ A couple more beers and some further stupidity about the legendary children’s TV show Captain Pugwash, and ‘Dive! Dive! Dive!’ was born, or rather submerged. At least I had a four-foot submarine to feature in the video.
The single ‘Tattooed Millionaire’ was written unexpectedly after talking about Graham Bonnet, the onetime singer in Rainbow with an extraordinary high and raspy voice. And then Janick played what is, for me, the best song on the album.
The TV was on in the background, sound turned down, and Jan played the opening chords to what became ‘Born in ’58’. I asked what it was.
‘Oh, something I had kicking around.’
The instrumental portion was virtually complete. I just added the vocal over the top of it.
EMI Records had given each of us in Maiden a one-off option to make a solo album. Now was the time to exercise that option.
Who should show up to make the video for ‘Tattooed Millionaire’ but Storm Thorgerson of Hipgnosis – and Pink Floyd – fame. Storm came via a contact of a new manager at Sanctuary, Maiden’s management company.
Not quite a yellow submarine, but rather a subterranean submarine upping its periscope into the lurid lifestyles of the rich and infamous was the basic premise of the video. I was very enamoured of the submarine control room and wanted to install it in my attic, complete with periscope, but the men in white coats explained that it all belonged to a prop house. Such a disappointment.
I watched Storm direct, and the cheeky thought occurred to me that he was having far too much fun making all these videos.
‘You’re just making it up, aren’t you?’ I whispered to him one day.
‘Don’t let on, dear boy,’ he whispered back at me.
Fault Lines
America turned the page and I re-entered Iron Maiden world, having unwittingly written what would turn out to be our only number 1 single. The reason ‘Bring Your Daughter to the Slaughter’ isn’t on Tattooed Millionaire is because it was requisitioned by Steve for the new album, No Prayer for the Dying. Of course, it had to be rerecorded.
The idea was mooted that we should somehow go back to our roots. We would record everything at Steve’s house and use the Rolling Stones’ mobile studio, which all sounded rather grand. There’s a line in ‘Smoke on the Water’ that immortalised the ancient ruin that pulled up outside Steve’s Grade II listed manor house.
Honestly, I think we had all fallen under the spell of papal infallibility. Why is the Pope always right? Because he is the Pope, and can never be wrong. Well, what if he actually is wrong?
This is simply a difference of opinion, and the only opinion that matters is, er, the Pope’s.
Bands, business leaders, popes and entire countries fall victim to their own circular beliefs. Indeed they become the ultimate victims of their own success. Desperate to avoid uncertainty and surrounded by people who always agree, they cross the line from artistic integrity to artistic stagnation.
Maiden had a double problem, in that it was becoming harder to break out of a core audience without radically changing the sound of the band. The latter was simply not an option. The sound of the band was its identity, unlike other bands who flipped and flopped according to fashion. Maiden’s success was based on reinventing the wheel that drove the heavy metal bus. Its dilemma was how to reinvent the wheel with every new album and tour. Maiden had gone way beyond the third-album watershed moment. The big question was: how would the band sustain its trajectory into being legends, and not start a slow parabola into the dustbin of history?
Our problem, in my opinion, was that no one was acknowledging that big question.
Things were, quite frankly, too good to be true.
For the second time in my Iron Maiden career a major schism occurred.
Adrian Smith quit.
Nobody saw it coming, and I don’t believe Adrian did either, in the same way that no one intentionally steps into quicksand or plays hopscotch in a minefield. A Roman soldier was famously supposed to fall on his sword to avoid dishonour, but I’m not sure Adrian knew there was a sword lying in wait as he voiced his concerns about the upcoming album one fateful afternoon. He clearly wasn’t happy with the current state of affairs, but I don’t believe he wanted out; he just wanted to make it better. Conversation turned into accusation and, in the end, it was our own hubris, fuelled by our seemingly untouchable success, that sealed his fate. He was not fired; he simply walked into a lift shaft when there was no lift.
Manageme
nt, of course, took care of the press fallout in what was quite a surprising story. Maiden’s management have always been fanatically devoted to the band at all costs, which is exactly what is required most of the time. Few bands in history have had such a dedicated manager as Rod Smallwood. I once had to give him an award as ‘Manager of the Year’ at an awards dinner. It was all supposed to be a secret, and it was difficult enough just to get him to turn up. The room was full of his peers plus the great and the good, the bad and the ugly from the music industry.
‘I fucking hate these things,’ he grumbled. ‘Anyway, what the fuck are you doing here?’
I scribbled on a pad under my jacket: notes for my speech.
‘What are you fucking writing? I bloody hate this.’
At which point an eager American music executive flashed his instabrite, 1,000-dollar perfect bite at Rod and said, ‘Mr Smallwood, it’s an honour. I’ve always been an admirer of your work.’
Any minute now the business card would come out.
‘You think I’m in the music business, don’t you?’ Rod said.
‘Why, yes . . .’
‘I’m not in the music business. I’m in the Iron fucking Maiden business.’
With that retort, the young lion retreated, having been well and truly biffed by the old contender from Huddersfield.
The secret of his success was that he was focused entirely on the band, not on the wellbeing of any other creature on earth, save family. His success in guiding our career was enabled by his partner and our lifelong business manager Andy Taylor. With a first-class degree from Cambridge, where he and Rod met in 1969, Andy has navigated and negotiated Maiden’s financial survival and permitted us the creative freedom to play music without looking over our shoulder. But neither Rod nor Andy have ever had any significant input into our musical endeavour. Indeed, there has for many years been a total exclusion zone in the recording studio banning managers, agents, lawyers and record companies from chucking their opinions about. Most of the time I think this is a good thing. Sometimes, though, everyone needs a little guidance, unless, of course, you are the Pope, because then you can always ask God, and he’s never wrong, right?
What Does This Button Do? Page 19
