..........On August 9, 1984, Iron Maiden hit the road in support of their fourth album, Powerslave. Dubbed the World Slavery Tour, it was an undertaking of massive proportions, requiring five buses and six 45-foot trucks to transport the band, crew and equiptment from show to show. By the time they returned home 11 months later, Maiden had played a total of 190 concerts in 24 countries, traveled nearly 100,000 miles, used 6,392 guitar strings and, perhaps most impressive, comsumed over 50,000 cans of beer.

.........."That tour was monumental," says guitarist Dave Murray. "The size of the shows was justified by the amount of records that we were selling. Every concert was like a festival."
..........Ever since their arrival on the scene in the late Seventies in their native England, Maiden had been steadily expanding their cult following. Powerslave, they hoped, would be the album that would vault the band back into the rock and roll stratosphere. Certainly, their days of playing to drunken punters in seedy pubs of London's East End were behind them forever: Iron Maiden had become bona fide, stadium-devouring, international superstars.
..........For all its glorious excesses, the World Slavery Tour was by no means the pinnacle of Maiden's career--it was more like a taste of what lay on the horizon. Althought the band entered the 1980's lumped in with the short lived collective know as the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, they left it as one of the decades most sucessful acts, with a string of multi-Platinum albums and sold out tours under their belts. In an era that saw the heavy metal movment blossom both artistically and commercially, Iron Maiden led the pack with their ferocious, epic tales of medieval mayhem wrapped up in an explosive blend of razor-sharp riffs, galloping bass lines and twin-guitar harmonies. Perhaps the one thing more impressive than the 50 million albums the band has sold over the last 18 years is the fact that they have done it completely on their own terms, with virtualy no support from radio, MTV or the mainstream rock press. Today, although the stages may be smaller, and the arenas may have morphed back into clubs, Iron Maiden's reputation as one of the biggest and most influential metal bands of all time is one thing that can never be diminished.
..........Originally, the dreams of the young Steve Harris, Iron Maiden's founder and sole surviving original member, would have led him down a much different path. Like a host of other English rock stars from Rod Stewart to Def Leppard's Joe Elliott, Harris dreamed of playing professional soccer and had even signed on as a member of a youth team.
..........But like thousands of teenagers before and after him, the 15-year-old soon fell under the spell of rock and roll, particularly progressive English bands like Jethro Tull and Genesis. In 1973 Harris shelled out 40 pounds for a copy of a Fender Telecaster bass and formed his first group, Influence, which played a mix of originals and covers, like "Paranoid" and "Smoke on the Water." When the band packed it in after just six gigs, Harris joined a boggie-rock outfit named Smiler. A more professional group, Smiler giged extensively around the East End pub circuit and even performed and early version of Harris' "Innocent Exile," which later appeared on Maiden's 1981 Killers album. Smiler rejected his next original, however, and made it clear that they did not expect their bass player to be a creative force in the band, jump around onstage, play intricate, lead-style bass lines or write songs.
.........."A lot of people think that I have a very unique approach to bass," says Harris, "but to me, my style is just natural. I never consciously decided to play a certain way. By the time I joined Smiler, I was writing more and mroe of my own stuff, and the other guys didn't really want to play it. They thought there were too many time changes."
..........In 1975, Harris decided that the only way to realise his musical vision was to start his own band. He chose the moniker Iron Maiden after seeing the 1939 movie The Man in the Iron Mask.
..........Iron Maiden's inaugural lineup featured Harris on bass, Ron "Rebel" Matthews on drums, Paul Day on vocals and the twin guitars of Terry Rance and Dave Sullivan. For the next year and a half, the band underwent almost constant personnel changes. Paul Day was replaced by Dennis Wilcock, Steve's bandmate from the Smiler days. In turn, Wilcock, unhappy with the guitarists technical skills, suggested bringing in a fleet-fingered blond haired kid he knew named Dave Murray. The problem of having three guitarists was quickly solved when Rance and Sullivan, insulted by this not-so-subtle critique of their ability, quit the band.
..........Ironically, the next man to leave was Murray, who was fired by Wilcock after the two had an argument. "I was driving over to Steve's and my car caught on fire," Murray recalls. "Luckily, I had an extinguisher in the back and I put the flames out. So when I showed up at the house, I was covered in oil and ashes--and I got my marching papers as well. Needless to say," he laughs, "it wasn't a very good day." Harris, who'd recently fired the band's other guitarist, Bob Sawyer, brought in Terry Wrapram, who'd played in a band called Hooker.
..........By this point, Steve had become completely disillusioned with the two guitar idea. Instead of looking for another guitarist to play with Wrapram, he decided to go a different route. Enter Tony Moore, Maiden's first, and only, full time keyboard player. After just one gig it was obvious that synthesizers were not going to fit in with Maiden's raw, no frills metallic sound, amd Moore was relieved of his duties. Surprisingly, this promted Wrapram to jump ship as well, claiming he couldn't play without a keyboardist.
..........Near the end of 1978, after several more firings, quittings and recruitments, Maiden again found itself as a four-piece, with Murray back in the fold, ex-Smiler drummer Doug Sampson and new singer Paul Di'Anno, who got the gig after a spirted audition performance of Deep Purple's "Dealer." It is this line up that would appear on the band's first demo tape. "Actually, there is a second guitarist on that demo," reveals Murray. "I think his name was Mad Mick, or something like that. Who can remember. But he was a right decent player."
..........Iron Maiden's line up may have been somewhat shaky during those early years, but their belief and conviction, particularly Harris', in the music they were creating was unwavering. Early ads for Maiden shows at East End dives like the Cart & Horses and Ruskin Arms were often emblazoned with slogans like "Rock Kings of the East End," and the eloquent "We break, shake, shock and rock, we make the rest look average stock." Particularly noteworthy was the ad placed by the boys in Melody Maker as they prepared to return from a six month hiatus. "Iron Maiden are not only the best visual, high energy, original, loud-but-talented, good looking, tasteful, heartbreaking, hardhitting, bloodsucking, mind blowing hard rock band in London! We're also very nice blokes, kind to fans & our families, hostile to other bands, but above all we're brilliant, ace superstars and we're honest! And we're BACK!!!"
.........."We used to do that just to have a laugh," explains Harris. "It wasn't that we were so confident, it was just that there were alot of bands at that time who thought they were the bee's knees, so to speak, so we just wanted to wind them up a bit."
..........Unfortunately, not everyone saw the humor in Maiden's "wind-ups." In response to this last ad, members of rival East End bands bombarded a Maiden show and doused their monitors with beer. Harris does point out that it was the last time the band was confronted by dissenters.
..........maiden began attracting a hard core following throughout the East End, thanks to their intense, blitzkrieg style of heavy metal, combined with a spectacular stage show that featured a blood-spewing head, and embryonic version of their soon-to-be mascot, Eddie. Soon enough, they also began garnering attention from local record lables. Around this time in 1977, however, the punk/new wave revolution was just getting underway, and any lable that did show an interest in Maiden's gritty, working-class heavy metal tried its best to persuade them to cut their hair, lose the stage show and adopt a more "punk rock" image. Maiden, of course, being true punks at heart, told them all where to stick their contracts.
.........."The thing from the very beginning was to be uncompromising," stresses Murray. "From around 1977 to 1980, when the whole punk thing was happening, people were always telling us to chop our hair off. But we weren't going to change, and we weren't going to just jump at any record deal. Because at this point we all still had our day jobs. So we weren't going to lose that security just to sign some piece of paper that would make us stars for five minutes."
..........Encouraged by the growing crowds at their East End shows, and certain that no label was going to touch them without trying to change their sound, Maiden decided that, in order to reach a larger audience, they would have to record a demo on their own. On New Years Eve, 1978, the band headed up to Spaceward Studios in Cambridge for two days and recorded four Steve Harris originals: "Prowler," "Invasion," Strange World" and "Iron Maiden." Busted by the 200-pund cost of the recording sessions, the band couldn't return to Spaceward to mix the tracks until they had more cash. Unfourtuately, when they returned to the studio a few weeks later, they found that the master tape had already been wiped clean. The band had no choice but to take the unedited and unmixed tapes as they were.
..........Despite the demo's rawness, it was easy to see that the songs--melodic, heavy, fast and furious--were special. Dave Murray took his copy over to Neal Kay, the visionary heavy metal DJ who worked at the Soundhouse in North London, hoping to get a Maiden gig.
..........We didn't hear from Neal for a couple of weeks," remembers Harris. "But then he phoned us up one day and said that it was the best demo he had heard in a long time, so he started to play the tracks at the Soundhouse. I remember one night me and Paul went down to the club--nobody knew who we were--and we just stood at the bar, watching people react to our songs, headbanging and playing air guitar. We just couldn't believe it. So by the time we began playing there, people already knew two or three songs from the demo, and they would get completely into it."
..........The tape also made its way into the hands of a man named Rod Smallwood, who would soon become an integral part of the Iron Maiden family. Smallwood, who'd recently endured a messy split with the band he was managing, had just made the decision to leave the rock and roll business for good. He was concidering a career in law when an old rugby chum passed him a copy of the Spaceward demo. Smallwood liked what he heard and contacted Harris about coming down to one of Maiden's shows. Impressed with the bands onstage charisma (they had to perform minus Di'Anno, who'd been arrested for carrying a knife just prior to showtime), Smallwood began acting as their manager, officially signing the band to a contract a few months later.
..........Like Harris, Smallwood had a cocksure attitude when it came to his band's music. On one occasion, he bet the manager of the London Marquee that Maiden would sell out their show by seven o'clock that night. Needless to say, Smallwood won the bet. But the big winners turned out to be the band themselves, as Smallwood had also persuaded John Darnley, an A&R man for EMI Records, to come down to the show. Darnley liked what he saw and, a month later, Iron Maiden signed with EMI.
..........Before entering the studio to recordtheir major label debut, the band decided to release three songs from their extremely sought after demo tape--"Prowler," "Invasion" and "Iron Maiden"--on their own label, Rock Hard Records. The EP was titled The Soundhouse Tapes. Only 5,000 copies were printed, and it was made availible by mail order only. Due to overwhelming demands for Tapes (3,000 copies were shifted in the first week alone), the band began getting calls from major music chains. But Smallwood declined, opting to keep the records printing limited, as a special gift to Maiden's hard-core following. As a result the much sought after EP now fetches hundreds of dollars for an original copy. During this time, the band also recorded two songs, "Sanctuary" and "Wrathchild," for EMI's Metal for Muthas compilation album, and had their first radio session broadcast on London's Radio One Friday Rock Show.
..........After experiancing another series of line up changes, Iron Maiden became a five-piece again with the addition of guitarist Tony Parsons, who was quickly fired and replaced by Dennis Stratton. Doug Sampson was traded for ex-Samson drummer Clive Burr, and Maiden got down to business, entering the studio to record their debut album with producer Will Malone. Before releasing the record, they set out on a 12-date Metal for Muthas Tour. It was during this time that EMI released the band's debut single, "Running Free." The song entered the UK charts at Number 44, and the band was offeren a spot on Britian's prestigious Top of the Pops, Smallwood accepted under the condition that his group be allowed to perform live, not lip synch, and Iron Maiden became the first band to do so since the Who played on the show in 1972.
..........After finishing up a guest spot on Judas Priest's UK British Steel tour, Maiden released their eponymous debut on April 14, 1980. It shot straight into the UK charts, debuting at Number 4. "We were quite surprised," says Harris. "We expected it to go maybe Top 30. The thing was, we had already done alot of shows around the UK, including the dates opening up for Priest. So we had a huge fan base, and I think that was a big reason for the album's success. As a result, EMI started shipping the record out around the world, which was something we never expected. We just thought that we'd do a few gigs around England."
..........The album included scorching live standards like "Prowler" and "Iron Maiden," as well as "Phantom of the Opera," the type of sprawling, multi-passage song that would become a Maiden trademark. the band took off on their first headlining tour of the UK, which culminated in a slot at the Reading Festival supporting UFO, whose Pete Way was one of Harris' biggest influences.
..........Maiden finished out the year supporting KISS on the latter's European tour. It was during this time that internal problems began surfacing between Stratton and the rest of the band, and at the end of the tour he was dismissed. Once again a four-piece, Iron Maiden called on a young guitarist named Adrian Smith. They'd wanted to recruit Smith once before, but at the time he had been fully invovled with his own band, Urchin, and so declined. But Urchin had recently disbanded, so this time Smith accepted the offer. Had he turned them down again, Maiden's second choice was Girl's Phil Collen, who would go on to achieve international fame with another New Wave of British Heavy Metal band, Def Leppard.
..........Dave Murray had been a friend of Adrian's since their childhood in the East End and had even spent a brief time with him in Urchin after Dennis Wilcock had kicked him out of Iron Maiden. The pair proved to be the perfect twin-guitar team that maiden had always been searching for, with Adrian's more thoughtful, composed solos perfectly complimenting Dave's no-holds-barred, imporvisational approach.
.........."Adrian and I had known eachother since we were about 14, and we had begun playing guitar around the same time as well," says Murray. "So there was a chemistry between us that went beyond the music. You could take the two best guitarists in the world and put them in the same band and it wouldn't happen. There has to be something more, and Adrian and I had that."
..........After embarking on another brief British tour to break Adrian in, the band headed back into the studio to record their second album, Killers, this time with Martin Birch at the helm. He would go on to produce every Iron Maiden album up through 1992's Fear of the Dark.
..........Killers was released in February 1981, and the band geared up for their first world tour, including inaugural visits to Japan and North America. The three Tokyo concerts, which sold out in lass than two hours, were captured on the live Maiden Japan EP. From there it was on to the States, where the band met firm resistance from American radio every step of the way. Unwilling to pander to stations by releasing an AOR-style pop song, Maiden set out to conquer America city by city. By the time the US leg of the Killers tour was over, the album had sold an impressive 200,000 copies--four times that of their debut--and reached Number 78 on the Billboard charts.
..........Although the Killers tour marked a high point in Maiden's career and extened their fan base worldwide, they once again found themselves headed for line up troubles. This time the unfortunate catalyst was lead singer Paul Di'Anno, whose whole hearted embrace of the rock and roll lifestyle was jeopardizing his ability to perform onstage.
.........."Paul just kind of got caught up in the success," reasons Murray. "There was quite alot of pressure on us and he just wasn't prepared to handle it. It got to the point where it would be right before showtime, and he wouldn't even want to go onstage."
.........."It was very difficult because we didn't want to get rid of him," adds Harris. "But in the end, we had no choice because I think that if he had stayed in the band, we wouldn't be here now." Becoming increasingly dissatisfied with Di'Anno's singing as the tour wore on, Maiden finally decided to give him the boot. They chose a singer named Bruce Bruce, with whom Clive Burr had played in Samson, to replace Di'Anno. Wisely, Bruce returned to using his original surname, Dickinson, and the band headed off to Italy for some quick shows to break him in. "It was a very big change for us," says Harris. "Suddenly, we went from a band who had nothing to lose, with no where to go but up, to a band who had everything to lose."
..........Iron Maiden could have played it safe by hiring a Di'Anno copy, so as not to upset their rapidly growing legion of fans. But Bruce Dickinson could not have been more unlike his predecessor. Whereas Di'Anno emitted a raw, street-urchin croak, Dickinson possessed a multiple-octave range with a wide, operatic vibrato. It wasn't just by coincidence that fans took to calling him "The Air Raid Siren."
..........Having shared stages with the band while fronting Samson, Dickinson had always admired maiden, and knew that he voice would be the perfect fit for their majestic sound. "I was a big fan of the Killers album, and my one regret was that I never had a go at that thing. I mean, the band was fierce, and when I saw them, I thought, 'God, I could really rip something apart if I were singing for them.' So one day they grabed a hold of me and said, 'We're going to fire our singer, do you want to audition?' And I said, 'Yeah, I'll audition, and I bet you I'll get the job.'"
..........Any doubters who thought Maiden wouldn't survive the loss of Di'Anno were quickly silenced with the release of the "Run to the Hills" single in March 1982. Still seen by many as the definitive Iron Maiden song, "Hills" is an all out scorcher from the start to the finish, opening with Thin Lizzy-style guitar harmonies before kicking into overdrive with a barrage of Dickinson's banshee wails. The single was Maiden's first UK Top 10, and the accompanying video gave them some much deserved American exposure via the newly created MTV. When The Number of the Beast album was released later that month, it debuted at Number 1 on the UK charts and reached Number 33 in America. Besides selling out shows around the world, the Beast on the Road Tour also included a headlining slot at the prestigious Reading Festival.
..........But as happened countless times in the past, the tour ended in another line up change: this time, drummer Clive Burr decided he had had enough and amicably quit the group. In his place came Michael "Nicko" McBrain, who had been the drummer for the French rock band Trust. Along with his excellent drumming, McBrain's vocal prowess is featured on his first outing with the band, 1983's Piece of Mind, where he can be heard drunkenly reciting the backwards message, "Don't meddle wid t'ings you don't understand."
.........."That was in response to all the stuff that was going on with Priest and Ozzy, the backwards subliminal messages, the Satanism, all that bullshit," laughs Nicko. "Maiden had gotten a little bit of it as well, with The Number of the Beast album. So we just figured out we'd put one of there blatantly, sort of our way of giving the middle finger to these fanatics. It didn't mean a thing."
..........With the acquiaition of McBrain, maiden entered into their longest period of line up stability, which would last them all the way to 1990. The band was also headed for their most lucrative period, both creativly and economically. In 1984 Iron Maiden released the awsome Powerslave, and followed it with the World Slavery Tour, which sold out arenas all over the world.
..........They documented the tour on the live double album Live After Death, recored at sold out performances in London and California.
.........."A lot of times a live record demonstrates how dull things can be in the studio," coments Dickinson. "We wanted people the be able to experiance the power of Iron Maiden in concert. For example, people listen to Deep Purple's Machine Head and say, 'Wow, what a great album!' But it's kind of like snooze rock compared to Purple's live album, Made in Japan. That's the spirit of the band coming through, and that's what we captured as well."
..........Over the course of the next few albums, Maiden began to experiment more within their music. On Somewhere in Time (1986) and Seventh Son of a Seventh Son (1988), they began incorporating synthesizers into their sound and taking a more streamlined, mainstream approach to songwriting on tracks like "Wasted Years" and "Can I Play With Madness."
.........."Live After Death kind od ended an era for Iron Maiden," says Murray. "Everything about that tour was enormous, and we took it as far as we could go. But afterwards, we didn't purposely say, 'We've got to do soemthing different.' It was just a development, really. If you want to sustain a career for 20-plus years, you have to be willing to experiment and grow."
..........One thing that did continue to grow was the bands world wide popularity. In August 1988, they headlined the legenary Monster of Rock festival at Castle Donington in England, before a record crowd of 102,000, with such rock heavyweights as KISS and Guns N' Roses supporting them.
..........the following year say another first for Iron Maiden--the rested. Well, at least some of them did. Both Dickinson and Smith used the time off to work on solo projects. Smith's album was more of a mainstream rock affair, while Dickinson's Tattooed Millionaire hearkened back to the sound of early Seventies hard rock, and even spawned minor hits in both the title track and a cover of Mott the Hoople's classic "All the Young Dudes."
.........."the whole idea behind Tattooed Millionaire was not to make some grand artistic statement," says Dickinson. "The thing was, Janick Gers, and friend of mine from the Samson days, had been unemployed for about four years and was thinking of selling his equipment and giving up the guitar. And that pissed me off, because he's a pretty serious player. So we got together and made an album in about 10 days. Basically, it was done just to keep Janick off the streets! And now I have a Platinum album on my wall."
..........While Bruce's solo success might have been a sign of things to come, Adrian was actually the first to hand in his resignation to Maiden. Just as the recording sessions for No Prayer for the Dying were getting underway, Janick Gers quickly stepped in, and that band played on--but not for long. During 1993's Fear of the Dark tour, Bruce Dickinson, Iron Maiden's frontman since they had attained superstardom, announced his intention to leave the band to concentrate on a solo career.
..........Steve is very stubborn about what he wants, while I'm more interested in experimenting," explains Dickinson. "I have a lot of respect for him, but we just see the world differently. I mean, we were touring, having fun, and getting paid well, but I felt like I needed to strech creatively and try different things. I needed a bit more angst, and I just wasn't getting it with Maiden," he laughs. "So I provided it myself by quitting the band."
..........Harris is more diplomatic about the split. "I think that when a band tours as extensively as we do, you're always going to have people leaving. And it's always disappointing, no matter who it is. But if someone's not enjoying themselves in the band, then there's no reason for them to be there, and that's fine."
.........."One thing that was odd," says Dickinson, "was that when my last single with the band, [from 1993's A Real Live One], was released, the sleeve had a drawing of Eddie putting a spear through my chest. I said to Rod, 'Now that's curious, innit?'"
..........At the end of the year, Iron Maiden had announced they had hired Blaze Bayley, formerly of the English punk metal band Wolfsbane, to be their new lead singer.
.........."Blaze had always been at the top of our list," says Murray. "When Bruce left, we decided it wasn't time to pack it in yet, so we gave him a call. And the fans have been really good about it. On the X-Factour [in support oftheir first album with Bayley, 1995's X-Factor] there were a lot of banners and signs in our audience welcoming him."
..........Iron Maiden celebrated its 20th anniversary in 1996, marking the event in grand style with the release of Best of the Beast, a double CD greatest hits collection that featured, for the first time on CD, two songs from the early Soundhouse sessions--"Iron Maiden" and "Strange World."
..........Now, two decades later, Iron Maiden are still forging ahead, constantly challenging themselves within their music as well as with outside projects. In addition to Ed Hunter, the 3D video game that the band is designing in conjunction with Synthetic Dimentions, Harris and Rod have started their own record label, Beast Records. Their first signing is Dirty Deeds, who are currently supporting Maiden on their 1998 World Tour.
..........Bruce Dickinson has also completed a new solo album, A Chemical Wedding, which he describes as "a monster, the heaviest thing I've ever done." Maiden fans will be happy to note that it is his second release to feature Adrian Smith on guitar.
..........In early 1998 Iron Maiden recorded their second album with Bayley, Virtual XI. In today's metal unfriendly environment, they are one of the few remaining bands form that golden era of the Eighties who continue to release albums and tour the world year after year.
..........According to Dickinson, the secret to Maiden's long lasting appeal is the bands sheer integrity. "We never let people down and we were never cheesy. No matter how enormous our shows got, we always kept a very English sense of decorum about things, even while snarling like a savage beast onstage!"
..........McBrain offers a slightly different explaination for the band's ability to soldier on even as so many fell by the wayside. "You always hear about groups who can't stand one another, and how when the concert's over, they split. With us, we like to hang together after the show and go for a drink or something. We've kind of calmed down a bit from the real wild parties, but we still enjoy eachother's company. And that's always been our key to success."

-------by Richard Bienstock--------