Part three: The Virtual X Factor: Blaze and the wilderness years
Following the departure of Bruce Dickinson, Maiden were left with the job of finding a replacement for the charismatic frontman. This was no mean feat: Dickinson had helmed the band for ten years, and fans had got used to his powerful presence, and voice, so it was really no great surprise that the idea of someone taking over from him was greeted with mostly scepticism and in some cases outright anger by the faithful. Nonetheless, on October 2 1995, three years after Bruce's departure, Iron Maiden released their tenth studio album, the aptly-named “X-factor”, featuring new singer Blaze Bayley, recently of Wolfsbane.
The album was quite a departure from standard Iron Maiden fare, and much different to the last few releases. It was, for a start, a lot darker, something that might be expected given Dickinson's mostly unexpected departure, and Harris returned to writing most of the material, with input from the new guy and the “other new guy”, guitarist Janick Gers. I found most of it not to be up to scratch, and whereas “Fear of the dark” had suffered from its share of problems, I could find few songs on this album I liked.
It probably doesn't help that the guys turned their usual practice upside-down, having the longest track at the opening of the album rather than closing it, and the eleven-minute “Sign of the cross” just didn't pique my interest, leaving me with a long time to wait, getting more and more frustrated as the song went on, and on, and on, before the next track up hit my ears. That was “Lord of the flies”, and to be fair, I really liked that, more like the Iron Maiden I knew. Following that was “Man on the edge”, the first single from the album, and to be fair it's not bad: kind of reminds me of “Back in the Village” from Powerslave.
It's not that the album is
terrible, but given the heights Maiden were capable of reaching (and
had reached), this just felt like a very lacklustre album. I also personally felt (and I wasn't the only one by any means) that Blaze Bayley was no replacement for Bruce Dickinson. Oh, he could sing, sure, but to replace THE voice of Iron Maiden they were going to have had to come up with someone very special indeed, and he wasn't it. Always felt to me like he was constantly dealing with (as he probably was) the stigma of being Dickinson's successor, and trying to live up to that. I would not have wanted to have been in his place, that's for sure.
It was three years later before Maiden tried again, with the release of “Virtual XI”, the last album they would record with Bayley. To give him credit, the guy seemed by now to have found his place in the band: he sounded more confident, more sure of himself and probably felt like he belonged. Rather ironic then that after this album he would leave the band. My problem with the “Blaze” Iron Maiden was twofold: first, there's no Bruce Dickinson. I only really got into Maiden via “Number of the Beast”, and then backtracked, and whereas I could tolerate Paul Di'Anno, he wasn't a patch on Bruce. The second problem I have is that in a very real way they seemed to be retreading old ground, taking bits from previous songs and recycling them into new ones.
There was a third problem, although personally I didn't see it as such, but it was something of a surprise to see the sudden emergence, even dominance of keyboards on Maiden albums. You can hear this very clearly on “The angel and the gambler”, where the guitars are pushed very firmly into the background, with the result that what you get is a very commercial-sounding song, but then Maiden had had great commercial success with singles like “Flight of Icarus”, “The Trooper” and “Run to the hills”, to mention but a few. And they had never had to compromise on their sound. Here, they begin to sound more like a seventies prog band than a hard-hitting veteram heavy metal legend.
This album was also the shortest, in terms of tracks, since 1988's “Seventh son of a seventh son”, with only eight tracks, although on overall length it was well up there with the best, at just over fifty-three minutes, yet still nearly twenty minutes shorter than its predecessor. Still, every album to follow it (so far) would be much longer. There's also another point: listening now to the almost ten-minute “Angel and the gambler”, I notice that of those ten minutes, the closing THREE are taken up with the same refrain, with a few guitar solo bits in there, but come on! Did it
need to be that long, if all they were going to do was repeat the same line to the end? Like I say, lack of imagination and originality, which had never previously been a problem for the boys.
It's probably quite possible that I'm doing “Virtual XI” a disservice, as I only really listened to it the once, didn't like it, and am only listening to it for the second time now for this piece, so maybe my opinion would change on repeated listens. The fact remains, however, that every album, from “Iron Maiden” to “Fear of the dark”, I was able to get into on the first listen. That did not happen with either of these, which is why I was overjoyed to hear the announcement in 1999 that Blaze was out, and Bruce was back!