Which is Iron Maiden’s best live album?
(After all – with the release of En Vivo – they have released no less than ten…!)
Back in December 1985 Kerrang! had given me two new ways to discover new music: their end of year critics poll (best album: Bryan Adams’ Reckless) and a 20 track K! compilation album.
Both compilation and poll featured spandex-clad Iron Maiden, who I had never really listened to properly before, only knowing them through the Lucozade adverts which featured decathlete Daley Thompson drinking fizzy pop to the soundtrack of “Phantom of the Opera”.
The trouble was, their album covers remained pretty challenging for anyone with even mildly zealous parents. Trying to explain to my parents how a picture of a gruesome skeletal figure holding a marionette of Lucifer under the title “Number of the Beast” was not anti-Christian but merely a healthy and harmless expression of passive rebellion was going to be a more difficult negotiation than….well, you might as well wish for peace in Northern Ireland, the end of the Cold War and for the Berlin Wall to come down.
Hmm. Perhaps I should at least have given it a go…
Take the example of “Sanctuary”. On the cover is a grotesque and hideous figure about to lay waste to the country and snatch milk from the hands of babies: you guessed it – Maggie Thatcher was an early cover star, whom Eddie had knifed for apparently tearing down an Iron Maiden poster! Maiden would take a similar line with bootleg T-Shirt manufacturers outside their gigs in later years…
“Women in Uniform” also featured Thatcher, and also featured a couple of attractive nurses looking perfectly happy at being chatted up by an ugly gargoyle with bad skin. I can’t think why these covers appealed to teenage boys so much…
The covers were superb at antagonising parents who might have been worried about their children getting into Satanism. The things people worried about in the eighties! Nowadays parents would happily allow their kids to worship Satan – just as long as it meant they got into the right school…
The irony was that Iron Maiden couldn’t have been less interested in all that psychobabble. They just liked the hideous grinning slightly-murderous “Eddie” illustrations. I think he reminded them of their fans…
Named after, and to some, sounding like a medieval instrument of torture, Maiden had been influenced by UFO and Deep Purple, but not to the extent of wanting to play interminably long keyboard solos. Instead they played interminably long songs, usually based upon the books that bassist Steve Harris had read, and films he had watched on BBC 2 on Sunday afternoons. The books tended towards sci-fi and occasionally classic literature. The films were often rom coms. Just kidding. They were war films. Die With Your Boots On, Aces High, Where Eagles Dare, When Harry Met Sally – all classic Iron Maiden tunes…
There’s no doubt that my ability to quote passages of The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner has little to do with my studying the poem in English classes aged 13 and everything to do with the chugging riffage of the 13 minute Iron Maiden version on the Powerslave album. Critics might scoff at the long-winded concept, but it was a lot shorter than the actual poem itself. For that we can all be grateful, even if you don’t like their music.
Perhaps this might be a more effective way of teaching?
Dire Straits already did Romeo and Juliet…what next? Def Leppard teaching vetinary medicine? Noel Gallagher’s Learning Guide to “My Family and Other Animals”?
Iron Maiden’s “Aces High” on that Kerrang! Kompilation album was the gateway to all this. It was fast and it was heavy. Perfect. It was even better when preceded by Churchill’s “Fight them on the Beaches” speech on double live album “Live After Death”, an album I initially half-taped off a friend.
(I only had one side of a C90 spare, so not knowing which tracks were best, I recorded every other song and bought it a month later- when I had saved up the money).
At their worst, Maiden were – well, let’s not dwell on that. No-one judges Bowie by Tin Machine 2 or The Laughing Gnome.
But at their best – and they were at their best for quite some time – Maiden were a joy. “Two Minutes to Midnight“, “Murder in the Rue Morgue” (more classic literature), “22 Acacia Avenue” all metal classics…and in the unlikely event that you are new to them you could do a lot worse than listen to “Live After Death” – an album that captures them at their peak. Just don’t let your mum see the album cover…
Record #28 – Iron Maiden – Live After Death
Iron Maiden’s live album and DVD En Vivo! is out now…
Every record tells a story 
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