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Chapter VI: Not Quite a Blaze of Glory: No-one at the Bridge

It’s been very well documented how Iron Maiden’s sound changed significantly following the departure of Bruce Dickinson, the second main member to leave the band after Adrian Smith’s exit a year and an album previous. The first thing the remaining members had to do of course was replace their singer, and after auditioning hundreds of applicants (or at least listening to hundreds of tapes) they settled on Blaze Bayley, vocalist with Wolfsbane. The band was unable to weather the departure of Bayley and so split up. For about four years then, over two albums and two tours, Bayley would become the new voice of Iron Maiden. However it would be completely unfair and indeed untrue to blame the band’s sudden - and thankfully, only temporary - fall from grace on the singer.

The fact is, Maiden had been hit with a couple of bombshells. Two of their longtime and most important members leaving within a year of each other, coupled with the hanging up of his headphones of producer Martin Birch, who had helmed every album since Killers surely must have shown the guys there was trouble ahead, and when you add in Steve Harris’s divorce, which led to the album having a more depressing, darker tone, well, it wasn’t hard to see this was going to be a hard slog. And it was. This, and the next album, charted the lowest of any in Maiden’s career, and received mostly negative reviews from critics as well as the thumbs-down from the majority of the fans. Perhaps naively, new producer Nigel Green gushed excitedly "We all felt that the way things were progressing – the songs, Blaze's new involvement, the sound, the commitment – the new album really would have that extra quality, that bit of magic, that 'X Factor'. This became the working title for the album and we liked it, so we kept it. It is also very apt as this is our tenth studio album and "X" can bring up many images.”

It certainly can, including eXcruciatingly bad, eXtremely poor and even eXcrement. It would, as I intimate above, be easy to blame the lack of interest on the new singer; people had certainly grown up on Bruce, listening to him, going to see him, considering him the face of Maiden, and not having him there was going to be a tough sell. But Bayley performed admirably well, I believe, during his tenure with them, and can’t really be blamed for the rot that set in. That was, probably, mostly down to Harris, who wasn’t exactly in a mood to write punchy rock songs, and opted instead for long-drawn-out, over-complicated, dense and often hard to understand epic tracks, this being the first album since 1986’s Somewhere in Time to feature three tracks over seven minutes, and one of those was eleven! Although he only writes three songs solo he’s involved in the writing of all but one, and the opener is that big eleven-minute borefest, one of his solo efforts, so it’s hard not to lump much of the blame for this on his shoulders.

Even had he not written all the songs bar one, Harris has always been the creative and driving force behind Maiden, and you’d have to assume that he has final say on what goes on the album, so the responsibility would still really be his. The addition of keyboards and, um, Gregorian chants surely only serves to show how this album was headed for trouble. Maiden had always been a guitar band, had little or no use for keys, but now they were slowly beginning to play a part, until by the next album they would be front and centre, perhaps serving as evidence of a betrayal by the band of their core principles and their promise never to use synthesisers, proudly displayed on the back of 1982’s classic The Number of the Beast.

I feel personally that the first order of business should have been to reassure the fans. Here we are, Maiden should have been saying: Bruce is gone, but we’re still the same band. We’re not going to insult you, and his memory by saying “Bruce who?” but we want you to know we can continue on without him. Had they launched into a fast, short rocker in the vein of “Aces High”, “Run to the Hills” or “Flash of the Blade” even, I think nerves might have been settled. Instead, they seem to have chosen to try to reinvent themselves, or maybe that’s just how it appeared to me.

Either way, intentional or not, it didn’t work.



The X Factor (1995)


In the interests of clarity, it should be understood that this album was released long before Cowell’s show was even dreamed of, so they were not taking his copyright or allying themselves in any way with the music so-called talent show. That came much later; but the phrase “the X factor” has been in the English language for a long time, perhaps best expressed by, of all people, the French, when they say someone has a “je ne sais quoi” - literally, I don’t know what - to indicate there is something special, different, even unique about them. I guess the band could also have been using it to represent the unknown, a new and perhaps (sorry) brave new world into which they were going, or it could even have referred to Harris’s divorce, I don’t know. All I do know is that from then on the majority of Iron Maiden fans would equate it with a rubbish album which preceded another one, and a desperate holding pattern until Dickinson returned in triumph as the twenty-first century began.

Incidentally, I’ve used the “further away” cover, not because the original is more graphic, but simply because that’s the one I have on my copy, and so it’s more familiar to me. It does the job, certainly - Eddie being torn apart as a metaphor for Harris’s world being ripped asunder by his divorce. I don’t know the details, how acrimonious or vicious the separation was, but I guess we can assume it was not an amicable split, given the tone of the album. I suppose divorce is never easy, and Phil Collins went the same path when he recorded his debut solo album Face Value. Can’t imagine anyone is too happy about splitting up from the person with whom they have spent some of their life, and possible expected to spend all of it.

Sign of the Cross (11:16)

As I said above, kicking off this album with a short, snappy tune from the golden age would have been my preference. Get the fans on side with a singalong headbanger before, if you must, you hit them with the slow, doomy, crunching epics. But no: Harris decided (I assume it was him, unless we can blame the running order on the label) to open with their longest song since “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, one that in my opinion is not fit to lick the bare, sun-scorched toes of that song, and right away we’re bogged down in over eleven minutes of claustrophobic, crushing, indulgent self-pity. I think it’s the first Maiden album to open so darkly, slowly, morosely and take a fuck of a long time to get going. Gregorian chants? Do me a favour! I think Eddie would rather take vivisection!

It’s almost a minute before we hear Harris’s bass, and our first introduction to Blaze Bayley’s voice is a low, muttered mumble that can hardly be distinguished, while Harris slowly goes about his business, surely making a new listener wonder if he or she has put on the right album? There are a few flashes of guitar around the edges but it’s not until the fucking THIRD MINUTE that the song gets going in any sort of appreciable way and becomes something vaguely resembling an Iron Maiden one. Even then, it’s more in the slower vein of songs like - well, I don’t know to be honest: it’s almost unlike any Maiden song I’ve ever heard. And not in a good way, of course. We’re five minutes in and still no solo you could talk about, the drumming is slow and pedestrian, the bass thick and moody, the whole mood a downer, man. This ain’t the Iron Maiden I’ve known and tried to continue to love!

Now it all stops as Harris executes a moody bass solo, similar to and yet nothing like the one in the midsection of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, while what sounds like strings and may in fact be a synthesiser come into the - still plodding - melody. It’s kind of like listening to some old Biblical movie soundtrack or something. The words GET THE FUCK ON WITH IT! Are leaping from my angry lips, and finally - finally - at the seventh minute there’s a solo, but it’s a poor, weak, almost apologetic one. At last the tempo picks up and the guitars seem to gain a little confidence and break out almost as we expect them to. Getting better, but we’ve had to wait over three-quarters of the length of the song for this to happen?

At one point - with about a minute to go - you can hear the melody develop to the point where you can anticipate the “Woh-oh-oh!”’s, but they never materialise, instead the guitar takes the tune just about to the end, with one more chorus, bringing to an end a very unsatisfactory opening to what will prove to be far less than a satisfactory album. Harris can’t even resist twiddling a bit of dark bass at the end, as if the song wasn’t already bad enough. Luckily - or not, depending on which way you look at it I guess - there’s a serious upswing for the next song, but to my mind it is the only decent song on the album, something that might not have been out of place on Somewhere in Time or even Seventh Son of a Seventh Son, and you certainly could not say that about the rest of the tracks!

Lord of the Flies (5:02)

The thing that sets “Lord of the Flies” apart from the rest of the dros - sorry, tracks on this album is something Maiden have built a career on: the hook. There’s not a single song here - “Sign of the Cross” very definitely included - that I could even envision singing or hell, even remembering after the album ends. Most, I will be thankful to forget, and that is primarily because they are all shit but also because not one of them has a decent hook. The reason you remember a song, the reason it sticks in your head is the hook, be it in the chorus, bridge or even verses. It taps out its rhythm, melody or lyric - a really good song will impress you with all three - onto your synapses and you sing it to yourself, or hum it, or tap the rhythm with your fingers or toes. Look at songs like “The Trooper”: from the galloping drumbeat to the stop/start verse and the whoa-oh-ohs, everyone remembers that song. And it didn’t really even have a chorus! Or how about “Two Minutes to Midnight”? Or “Fear of the Dark” even. Songs you can sing in your head.

“Lord of the Flies” isn’t one of those, but the chorus does stick in the brain and it has at least a rocky opening on choppy guitar and thumping percussion, gets right to the point, no faffing around and definitely no fucking Gregorian chants! Based on the book by William Golding, it shows Harris’s love of both literature and somewhat of the macabre, and it’s a song you can nod your head to, if not actually bang it. I can’t say Blaze is as good as Bruce - his voice is more restrained - but he does a decent job on it. I’d be interested to see how Bruce handled this on stage, though I believe they perform few if any songs from this era these days, both they and the fans preferring to draw a discreet curtain over this period in Maiden history.

There’s a decent solo, but I mean let’s be honest here, it’s basically using the melody of the chorus, but there are at least “Woh-oh-oh”s so it seems much more a Maiden song than the previous one was. It’s also very simple, which is something you kind of expect from Iron Maiden, or did, up to this. Nowadays they’ve gone all prog and it’s hard to get a decent straight forward rocker out of them. Ah, salad days!

Man on the Edge (4:10)

Another decent song, and unsurprisingly selected as the lead single from the album, this has the chugging guitar, galloping percussion and sense of exuberance we’ve come to expect from this band. Another simple chorus, a half reasonable hook, but it’s not a song I ever remember, or probably ever will. At least the boys get to cut loose on the guitars here, and the song does suit Bayley’s voice a little better. Building up to a solo? Yes. Finally, the kind of fret-burning we want to hear from Dave and, to a lesser extent, Janick. Sails a little close to “Gangland” for my tastes, but the only one in which Harris has no input, so maybe it’s just coincidence, as it’s written by Gers and Bayley, the latter of whom does, to be fair, make a respectable contribution to the songwriting here, collaborating on five of the eleven tracks.

Fortunes of War (7:25)

We’re back to the long epic plodders though, as Harris takes sole writing credit for this one, another muttered vocal to start off with, then Nicko McBrain’s drums punch in hard, but then drop back out of the mix before the guitars whine in, and to be fair they’re not bad but this is still way way below standard for a Maiden album. Bayley’s voice is strained here; I can’t help thinking that Dickinson would have taken this in his stride, but I guess we’ll never know. Now it begins to pick up speed, thank fuck, and some energy is injected into the song. Can’t argue with the solos here, pretty special, though lyrically there’s virtually nothing here. Come on Steve: you can do better than this.

Look for the Truth (5:10)

Now the opening of this one has “Children of the Damned” stamped all over it, with its introspective guitar and soft bass, and once again we have a barely-audible vocal from Blaze, like he’s whispering or something. Come on guys! Where’s the punch in the face? Where’s the kick in the balls? Musically speaking, I mean, of course. Where’s the guitar riffs and thundering drums that set your teeth shaking in your head? It’s come to life now, but again it’s a slowburner, something we haven’t up to now been used to with Maiden, though they will continue to follow this practice on later albums. This song gives me the impression it’s just waiting to burst into life, but sadly it never gets the chance.

The Aftermath (6:20)

And another long introduction, though it does at least have a little punch to it. There’s certainly a theme of war going through this album, which I suppose Harris sees as a metaphor for his struggle with his marriage, and a theme which will surface again on later albums, particularly 2008’s A Matter of Life and Death. The imagery here is pretty visceral, and seems to reference World War I, and when Blaze sings “What are we fighting for? Is it worth the pain?” you have to nod and think these thoughts must be going through Harris’s head as he reads letter after letter from his and his wife’s lawyers, and wonders what it’s all about? Again, it sounds like the boys are trying to let loose on the frets but are held back till almost the end of the song when they do get to go into action, and it’s pretty good, but a little too late I fear.

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Judgement of Heaven (5:10)

Two more solo Harris compositions coming up, with - for this period anyway - typically morose subject matter. Once again the vocal is low and indistinct, the guitars almost rock and roll in a way, then they punch through and the vocal comes up, but my question is why does it take so long? Why can’t these songs start off going for the throat, instead of creeping up on you and sussing you out first? We want the mad killer from 1981 who stalked the streets spreading terror, not some fucker cowering on the ground, raising his fist to the sky and cursing god. Fuck that. Having said that, once this song gets going it’s not without its charm, but still not a patch on even anything from Fear of the Dark. At least though there is some life in it and we hear the familiar twin guitar attack, which does help.

Blood On the World’s Hands (6:00)

And here’s his other one. Another bloody epic - well, six minutes plus at this stage of their career would have been considered an epic for Maiden. Opening on an almost jazzy bass line which makes you wonder if a piano is about to join in, it’s almost a bass solo, which, to be fair, Harris has never to my knowledge attempt - oh wait. Isn’t there “Losfer Words”? Is that a bass solo? Can’t remember. Anyway, the song does eventually get its shit together, but it hasn’t in any way been worth waiting for, slouching along with its hands in its pockets and head down, one of Maiden’s politically-themed songs, in case you hadn’t guessed. It retains a very proggy/jazzy feel in the melody, and I can’t see too many people headbanging to this. Well maybe: there are people who, if drunk or out of it enough, would probably headbang to “Fur Elise”. But it doesn’t elicit that kind of reaction in me.

The solo is a bit confused, as if Dave or Janick aren’t quite sure what they’re supposed to be doing, or what’s expected of or to be tolerated from them, and the song proceeds along without any real direction that I can see, with a fairly obvious chorus, but at least a good performance from Bayley. Sounds very progressive metal to me. Hell, at least there’s some aggression here, something that has been mostly missing from the album.

The Edge of Darkness (6:39)

Whatever about the wisdom, or not, of including two tracks with the word “edge” in them, this is another slow starter, very moody, very sombre - reminds me a little of Bon Jovi’s “While My Guitar Lies Bleeding in My Arms” from These Days - and again we have a barely-heard vocal from Blaze, a slow introspective guitar and bass opening, though Bayley’s vocal does start to come into its own here once the song gets going. For a short time, yeah, you could convince yourself this is Bruce. Not for long, but for a while. It’s a very familiar Maiden riff once it gets going, though I can’t quite place my finger on it. Sort of an almost Celtic feel to it maybe.

I do like the solos, though they kind of remind me of first Big Country and then Thin Lizzy, not something I’ve ever said about Maiden to this point anyway. I still hear no hook, and in fact to be perfectly honest I don’t even hear a chorus or any real kind of song structure, which is fine: plenty of artists throw the rules out the window. But Maiden are not known for doing this, and while I don’t insist they stick to verse-verse-chorus-verse, their songs, even “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, do tend to observe some sort of rules, and this doesn’t. Makes it very hard to follow it.

2 AM (5:37)

Has anyone else noticed that since “Man on the Edge” every song has been at least over five minutes, many over six? That’s not the norm for a Maiden album, though as I think I said earlier it does point the way towards how their work would develop over the next decade. Another low vocal which thankfully explodes fairly quickly, but this is pretty much a self-indulgent song as Blaze sings “Here I am again on my own”. Yeah we get it Steve: you’re hurting, and we sympathise, but you have a job to do here, and it’s somewhat unprofessional and not very fair to use the album that was supposed to confirm Iron Maiden as still being a force in heavy metal to pour out your troubles to us and cry into your beer. Do that on your own time, guy, yeah?

In terms of tempo, it’s a slow, marching sort of thing, with heavy drums and grinding guitars, which makes an attempt to kick itself up the arse late on, some all right guitar solos spilling out into the tune, but they’re almost incidental, and gone as soon as they begin. Even an extended instrumental section just more or less marks time till Blaze comes back in to whine again in Harris’s words about how cruel and miserable life is. Heavy metal Morrissey? Not far from it.

The Unbeliever (8:05)

Sigh. Yes indeed. An eight minute closer. But wait! What’s this? A lively, sprightly guitar riff to open the song? Could it be… surely not. Now that sounds like keyboards there though they’re gone as quickly as they come in. Oh dear. The rhythm is poor with a hurried vocal. Oh no wait. That dramatic bridge is not at all bad. But then we’re back to bouncing along and then back to drama. Where in the name of Bruce Dickinson is this going? Little riff there almost reminiscent of the debut album, then it turns into something from Seventh Son with a little “Two Minutes to Midnight” thrown in. A pastiche? Perhaps. A mess? Possibly.

If this is building to a big solo then maybe there’s hope. But no. It stops and goes to a bass part, with a sort of apology for a solo - more a rhythm part really in the background, bass definitely taking the lead. Oh and now there is a solo, and hey it’s really not too bad. Is it too little too late? Maybe not. Where do we go from here? If it ends well then it might not be the worst closer. Okay, back to the bouncing rhythm of the verse, dramatic bridge, and still basically no chorus. I suppose I could be generous and say the bridge is the hook, and it kind of is, but it doesn’t really go anywhere. Bridge to nowhere? Sorry. But it should have led to a big chorus or something and it doesn’t, so I’m left waiting. And it ends on some sort of mad “chopsticks” thing. Oh dear.




I didn’t have preconceptions originally when I came to listen to this album. Like most Maiden fans, I expected and hoped to like it. But as I slogged through it - and it’s the only description that fits really - I began to realise something was very rotten in the state of Maiden. You might be surprised to hear that I was not testing Blaze Bayley, ready to light up the fire and pile up the wood (or is that the other way around?) as soon as I could declare “he’s no Bruce!” No. I didn’t expect him to be as good, but I wasn’t too bothered. What was done was done, and as long as he didn’t sound like, I don’t know, George Michael or yer man from Air Supply or someone, I would have been happy.

What I did feel crushed about was the poor quality of the songs, the overlong running times, the dark, pessimistic, self-pitying atmosphere emanating from the music, and the fact that only about two tracks - if that - impressed me sufficiently that I could remember them when the album was finished. I laid the blame for this, as I saw it, gross failure directly at the feet of Harris, McBrain, Murray and Gers. They were the ones who should have known better. Bayley was the new guy: what did he know? Of course, he ended up taking much of the flak for the album’s dip in quality from previous releases, but that was I think projection. People were unwilling to blame the boys, and didn’t have far to look for a scapegoat.

What The X Factor proved to me was that Iron Maiden actually could not continue without Bruce Dickinson, and their next offering only served to confirm this. It was going to be a long five years.

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Chapter VII: Play the game, lads! Cheer up: it might never 'appen! On the ‘ed, son!

And so we come to the second and final album on which Blaze Bayley takes vocals, their last before the triumphant return of both Bruce Dickinson and Adrian Smith as a new millennium dawned, both literally for the world and figuratively for the band. Whether it’s intentional or not, it seems to me a lot has changed. Gone is the dark, doomy, smothering and claustrophobic album cover, so dark that it could be easily mistaken for being an offering from a band in the atmospheric black metal genre. Hell, even Eddie smiling! Well, grinning, but it’s a major improvement on the painful grimace he wore on the previous album, perhaps indicative at the time of how many Maiden fans, including myself, felt on listening to that dark slab of metal boredom. This cover returns to the bright blue (and red) background we haven’t seen since Seventh Son of a Seventh Son ten years previously. It wouldn’t of course be fair to level the usage of dark covers at The X Factor alone - Maiden’s first four albums all either show scenes taking place at night or in some sort of darkness - but somehow it works better with them. Even after Seventh Son, when they went back to the dark covers, it was justified: No Prayer for the Dying is set in a graveyard while Fear of the Dark, well, you don’t need that explained to you, now do you?

But whether it was the absence of Derek Riggs, their longtime artist on such iconic covers as The Number of the Beast and Powerslave (though in fairness he did not create the cover for Dickinson’s last hurrah at the time, Fear of the Dark) or even later Melvyn Grant, who had worked on that cover, and here returns, there was something just, I don’t know, depressing about the cover for The X Factor. Given that it could be seen as a visual representation of Steve Harris’s life and marriage being torn apart (Eddie is literally being vivisected) as he went through his divorce, maybe it was just too dark. One thing you could, and pretty much still can, say about Maiden is that there was always a sense of fun about them. Certainly, they took their music seriously and often wrote about serious topics, but never with any real sense that they were trying to change the world. If it happened, then yeah, great, but mostly they were just out to do what all metal bands use as a mantra, have a good time. Nothing wrong with that.

Virtual XI sees something of a return to that easy camaraderie (even if forced or feigned), with a much more cartoonish cover and a cheerful shrug. The very title of the album tips the wink to football fans, and gamers, as Steve explains: "We figure our fans are pretty much the same as we are, with pretty much the same interests, so we thought, 'It's World Cup year in '98. Let's get the football involved in the new album.' And we were already working on a computer game at that time, so we thought, 'Well, let's bring that element into things, too.'" And no bad thing. Your average Iron Maiden fan, I would venture to suggest, is really not that interested in your personal feelings and sufferings, Steve - sorry to be brutal, but I do believe it’s true - they just want to enjoy themselves, and this album showed them, maybe, that the dark days were over and they could get back to having a laugh.

The cover is bright and garish, perhaps the most cartoonish (as I said already, but it’s worth repeating) of any of their albums and certainly the brightest since Seventh Son or Powerslave, the title is tongue-in-cheek, sort of an in-joke, and the overall mood is much more cheerful. The cover, to me anyway, says let’s not take ourselves too seriously boys (yes, and girls, if you must) - life’s too fucking short. Whose round is it? And it’s not just the cover where there are major changes, though this is often where a record buyer will begin, making his or her choice. Of course, in the case of a Maiden fan, they’ve already made that choice. I must just mention though, before I move on from the cover, the smart little poke at the religious right as the band possibly remember how The Number of the Beast was burned in churches probably when released in the US of A. That little circle at the bottom right, wherein the numbers XI are, does look awfully like a pentagram! Oh ho ho!

Note: for those who somehow don’t know, the title is pronounced “Virtual Eleven”, and refers to the eleven members of a football team, or soccer to you.

The music has changed, too. Gone are the long, droning, epic trac - what? They’re not gone? There’s an almost ten-minuter, a nine and an eight? Well, you can’t have everything. But at least the dour, doomy, black and pessimistic mood of the previous album has been exorcised and none of the darkness from those songs carry over to this one. That said, it should not be forgotten that in a general way, this album is still shit. I may seem to be bigging it up and praising it here in this introduction: I’m not. It’s still terrible, just not quite as terrible as the previous one, as if anything could be. But they did try, and you have to give them that. While the songs may not be all short and snappy, they’re more, what’s the word? Happy? Maybe. Upbeat? Definitely. Enjoyable? Debatable that one now, son, but were you to put a gun to my head and force me to choose one of the two albums to listen to, I would go for this one every time.

Some of this lifting of the pall of darkness has of course to do with Harris sorting his divorce and getting it out of his system. It quite often happens that the relief of getting it over and done with can result in a much happier album to follow - witness Phil Collins on Hello, I Must Be Going - but it could also be down to the fact that this time Harris shares out some of the songwriting duties. Blame for The X Factor has to be laid pretty squarely on his shoulders, as he wrote all but one of the songs, so it follows that if he collaborated with other band members - in one actually staying out of it altogether - the songs could be more varied and, well, better. And that’s what happens here.

Not really. The songs are still generally pretty shite. I want to again make it clear that the only reason I’m talking positively about Virtual XI is in a sort of Bush/Trump comparison. It’s still awful, but it’s not as awful as the other one. It has its moments, as we’ll see, but like The X Factor it was also panned, and actually did worse in the charts than its miserable predecessor, not even scraping into the top ten in the UK, though it did slightly - slightly! - better in the USA, both albums remaining well short of the Hot 100. This gives Virtual XI the dubious distinction of being both the lowest-charting Iron Maiden album in the UK and the second-lowest of their releases to chart in the USA. Normal service would be resumed after this, but this can only be seen as the nadir of Maiden’s chart performance.

Fans and critics united in their disappointment in the album. The main issue at least one critic had was that the songs were just forgettable, and while I wouldn’t entirely agree with this - there are at least two songs I can remember from this whereas there’s only one on The X Factor - of all the Maiden albums I’ve heard, it certainly has the least catchy songs, always assuming the caveat of its predecessor. It is perhaps telling that four other tracks written during the sessions for Virtual XI never made it onto the final product, but would resurface two years later on Brave New World. They are "Blood Brothers", "Dream of Mirrors", "The Nomad" and "The Mercenary". Maybe if they had been included this album would have been a better one, but they weren’t and it isn’t.



Virtual XI (1998)



On the surface, there’s nothing really wrong with this album, to quote Steven Thomas Erlewine of Allmusic: it’s just that there’s nothing really great about it either. It starts off well - Maiden had obviously learned some lessons, among them the idea that you do NOT kick off an album with an eleven-minute plodder, particularly when you’re trying to win back or retain fans after your talisman has left - and we get a short, punchy all-out Maiden rocker, and in fact the next one is one of my few favourites on the album. But the problem is that, all through this release you’re waiting. Waiting for the kick, waiting for the killer riff, the screaming solo, the stunning lyric - waiting for the standout track. And, well, it just never happens. I suppose, to stretch the metaphor the lads used to title it, this is like waiting for a game that promises goals and incidents galore, and ends up as a boring nil-nil draw with few chances for either side. One of those games, maybe, where you begin wondering if you’re supporting the right side.

Futureal (3:00)

Three minutes is a decent length for an opener. You want a taste, and you want the immediacy of a starter that might end up being a single (it was, for all the good it did them) and you don’t want to have to slog your way through over ten minutes of dark, doomy drivel. So “Futureal” kicks off the album well, and is an unapologetic, no-frills and no-nonsense rocker with which Maiden, I believe, try to blow away the cobwebs from the previous album and (to mix the metaphor a little) cut and hack their way through the choking jungle darkness towards light, sun and air. And it works. Mostly. I think Maiden fans were at this point both nervous and also putting the band on notice that they were not going to stand for another self-indulgent piece of crap like they had had to suffer through three years ago. We get it, Steve: you’re sad, and angry, and confused. Happens to us all. Don’t take it out on us.

Let’s be honest here: this is nothing special, but at least it does have the familiar Maiden riffs, and as the shortest song on The X Factor was over four minutes, and the only one that short, it’s a welcome relief from the epics on the previous album. But you’d have to say it owes a lot to fare from The Number of the Beast to Seventh Son, really. Nothing new here, but sometimes the familiar is more welcome.

The Angel and the Gambler (9:51)

While I will freely admit this is one of my favourite tracks on the album - that list isn’t long - it pisses me off because of the unnecessary length of it. I’ve written about this before, but for a song which just falls short of ten minutes (and so hovers dangerously around X Factor territory, especially being the second track) it’s basically repetition for about half of the song. There’s not a lot in it, with the chorus repeated an incredible twenty-two times, most of these over a five-minute period that closes the song and really, just gives Harris (who wrote the song solo) a chance to indulge (there’s that word again) himself on something that Maiden once trumpeted they would never use, keyboards.

I mean, I do love the song, but I’m not blind or biased enough to fail to see its major shortcoming, as addressed above. There’s a guitar solo but it seems almost tacked on; this is, by any other name, an Iron Maiden song on keys. Who would ever have thought it? Come on: even the second verse is just the first repeated. God, how lazy.

Lightning Strikes Twice (4:49)

One of only three songs on which Harris shares songwriting duties, here it’s Dave Murray collaborating with him on another basically short track, with a sort of deceptively balladish opening before it kicks into the expected power rocker Maiden have built their reputation on. Reminds me of “Heaven Can Wait” from Somewhere in Time. Hmm, let’s see… written by Harris, but solo. Interesting. The chorus, though simple, is to be fair quite catchy. Murray and Gers are given their head here again, first time since the opener, and we’re back in familiar territory. I mean, again, it’s nothing to write home about, and again in fairness “The Angel and the Gambler”, despite, or perhaps because of, its flaws is a more memorable tune, but this is not bad and it does have some teeth.

The Clansman (9:06)

We’re back with a Harris solo composition, and we all know our Steve does love his history as well as his films, so it comes as no surprise to find that when the two collide, he may feel compelled to write a song about it. As he does here, taking Braveheart (though not the actual historical story of William Wallace, interestingly) as his template. It’s the other song I rate on this album; it has all the classic Iron Maiden tropes: a sort of introspective opening on guitar, a slow burning run up to the main riff, a catchy as hell chorus that would surely have fans punching the air at the gigs and screaming “I am the Clansman! Freedom!” especially, one would imagine, north of the border. I guess the Scottish fans must have been delighted that after more than two decades of writing about English history and events, their hero finally decided to approach the history of bonnie Scotland and give them something to sing about.

And it’s a good song, there can be no doubting that. It’s hard to find anything wrong with it, as lyrically it looks back to songs like “The Trooper” and “Sun and Steel”, which musically it’s almost a peek into the future(al) of Iron Maiden, as they began to embrace longer, more intricate songs and turn in an almost progressive metal direction. For all I castigated him for his work on The X Factor, and indeed here, particularly on “The Angel and the Gambler”, he really pulled this one out of his hat, as opposed to out of, well, somewhere else. Yes, for the last three minutes or so it’s something of a rerun of “The Angel and the Gambler”, as he just more or less repeats the same phrase to the end, but hey, he gets in the “whoa-oh-oh-oh”s, which up to now have been missing. Steve, you old sentimentalist, you!

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When Two Worlds Collide (6:13)

Written, according to Harris, mostly by Blaze Bayley in an attempt to try to sort out his feelings on taking over from Bruce Dickinson, this is only the second of three the soon-to-be-former singer writes on the album, and only one of two that has three authors, Dave joining Steve to help the burning one out. It has a kind of dramatic opening, which I feel is somewhat keyboard-led, another faux-ballad start, which to be fair to him showcases Bayley’s vocal abilities, which are not inconsiderable. It soon sparks into life and trundles along nicely, but there’s something - I don’t know - basic, about it. Some nice guitar work for sure. The lyric is somewhat prophetic in respect to him - “When two worlds collide/ Who will survive?” Not you, mate, that’s for sure.

The galloping drumbeat set up by Nicko McBrain really gives the song a sense of urgency, even panic, and though Bruce wouldn’t announce his intention to return for another year, I have to wonder if Bayley realised he was living on borrowed time, that he was just filling in until the master stepped back into the studio and back onstage? Ah, look! More “whoa-oh-oh!”s. Cute.

The Educated Fool (6:46)

Harris takes control now almost to the end of the album, writing this and the penultimate track solo, and again we’re looking at the longer side of his writing, with this nearly seven minutes and the next one over eight. I have no issue with long songs - you’re talking to a proghead after all! - but I do have a problem with songs that are long just for the sake of being long. As I said to an annoying degree above, “The Angel and the Gambler” is a prime example, but it’s not the only one, though I can’t in fairness point to an example from the pre-Blaze era. Maybe that’s because I know and love all those songs so well, but I don’t think so. Certain songs I consider somewhat throwaway exist in this era - “Gangland” off The Number of the Beast, “Quest for Fire” from Piece of Mind and maybe even either “The Duellist” or “Flash of the Blade” on Powerslave - did they really have to have two songs about fencing? But none of them are long songs, certainly not epics. When Maiden did epics - and it was quite occasionally, back before these albums - they did them right. Who could find fault with “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, “To Tame a Land” or even “Hallowed Be Thy Name”? All right, that’s hardly an epic, but it’s as long, longer in fact than this one.

Is this anything like as good? You seen any flying pigs recently? It utilises that kind of “Fear of the Dark”/ “Afraid to Shoot Strangers” slow acoustic-sounding riff but has some interesting phrasing to be fair and I would say it’s possibly the only longer song on this album on which the length is actually justified. It seems to progress through a number of movements, and so in ways again it’s looking forward to Maiden’s partial reinvention as a progressive metal band, pretty much starting with the next album and, um, progressing from there. Good fluid solo from Dave or maybe Janick, never sure and it ends as it began, which is another trademark of this band.

Don’t Look to the Eyes of a Stranger (8:11)

Discounting the previous album, I don’t think you could ever look at a Maiden record and see a song eight minutes long and yet not the longest track, but here it’s not even the second longest. An interesting premise, the old stranger danger idea, though Harris should know, as most/all parents do, that sadly it’s not the strangers you have to beware of when considering your child’s safety, but those who are well known to you, those you trust. It’s too often the case that an abduction of or attack on a child is perpetrated by a family member, friend or acquaintance. Be that as it may - well actually, maybe that’s what he’s saying here: DON’T look to the eyes of a stranger, look to those you know? As I say, be that as it may, it's a somewhat brave theme to tackle.

Wow. It really has an odd, almost carnival-like opening, so much so that for a moment I thought I’d clicked on the wrong album! That is weird. I don’t remember that, but then this is only about the third time I’ve listened to this album so not that surprising really. A sort of sotto voce vocal from Bayley as the guitar riffs build in a kind of almost pizzicato way. Okay no: he’s definitely talking about being wary of strangers. The song pumps into life now, with a sort of not quite but almost nod back to 1981’s “Killers”, a sense of being pursued and stalked. I must admit, I find this very stilted and hard to follow the melody on; there’s just something, well, off about it. Being a Harris song, it’s not at all surprising that we get an expressive bass solo in the first third of the song, with keyboards leaking in too and the vocal taking it to a big crescendo as the choppy guitar adds its muscle.

I feel at this point this could be half as long as it is, and not lose much. There’s a lot of repetition again. I repeat, there’s a lot of repetition again. It sort of looks back to “The Angel and the Gambler” in its overuse of the chorus, such as it is, though here at least the lads get to cut loose with some decent solos and Nicko has a bash at it too, though much shorter in his case. Yeah, definitely stretched way beyond breaking point.

Como Estais Amigos (5:26)

The closing track is the only one on which Steve Harris has no input (he probably had to approve the song but he is not involved in the songwriting) and the only one on which Janick Gers gets a songwriting credit. He shares this with Blaze Bayley, so whether written as such or not, this turns out to be Bayley’s final song both in terms of writing and singing. After this he would depart the band to make way for the return of Dickinson. The song is apparently based on the Falklands War, in perhaps the same way as “Afraid to Shoot Strangers” is set in the Gulf War. It has a nice ringing guitar opening which does kind of put you in mind of Mexican folk songs, and the keyboards play a pretty prominent role in the song, but just as you thought “they wouldn’t, would they?” the track shows its teeth and it’s certainly not Iron Maiden’s third ever ballad of their career to date.

It’s definitely less energetic and frenetic than any of the other songs on the album, but it punches and thrashes too, and while it’s maybe not the ideal closer, it could I suppose in ways be said to be a farewell from Bayley to the Maiden fans, with its main line “No more tears/ If we live to a hundred years/ Amigos, no more tears.” Kind of touching in a way I guess. But it is a downbeat way to end an album that started on high-octane energy and with surely the intention of banishing the memory of The X Factor. This kind of, almost, recalls those darker days and makes you wonder where exactly Maiden might have gone had their vocal god not come back?



Like I say, this is the third time I’ve heard this album. When I first heard it, I was very disappointed. I gave it another chance some years later in my journal, in the section I titled “Last Chance Saloon”, and was equally unimpressed. This third time, I may have gained a slightly better appreciation for what it is, but I’m still leaving it down the bottom of my list of favourite Maiden albums. I suppose the only thing you can say about it is that the boys did seem to learn a little from past mistakes, tried to resurrect the glory days, mostly failed, and had to, to paraphrase one of the song titles, look to the eyes of a friend to manage their comeback.

You can also give it this: it’s not the X Factor. Perhaps, in the final analysis, that is its saving grace. It’s not much, but it’s something.

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