Talkin' Eds - Seventh Son of a Seventh Son (1988)

1988 in heavy metal

Albums:
So far So Good… So What! - Megadeth
Blow Up Your Video - AC/DC
Savage Amusement - Scorpions
The New Order - Testament
In God We Trust - Stryper
South of Heaven - Slayer
Danzig - Danzig
…And Justice for All - Metallica
State of Euphoria - Anthrax

There are some mentionable omissions here (live albums from Frank Zappa, Motorhead, more of the same slogging from Deep Purple and Ozzy, a reunion of sorts from Pink Floyd), but the list above is evidence enough to show that the scene has changed. The New Wave of British Heavy Metal has passed, and Maiden and their cohorts are beyond being the Establishment and are now rubbing shoulders with younger, faster and heavier acts once influenced by them. Potently, Slayer, Anthrax and Metallica are putting out some of their strongest and most enduring work, while the previous year has seen the rise and rise of Guns 'N' Roses. Iron Maiden are no longer the young men of heavy metal, and their sound is dating quickly.

Fortunately Maiden have a strong fan base, still command large audiences, and creatively are strong. Seventh Son is evidence of the band doggedly sticking to their guns in terms of sound, songwriting and influences, while indulging themselves further with their own influences. Prog rock has been a feature of their albums for some time, but this will be the last obvious nod for a few years from the band, and is in some way the last blow-out before a new sound and lineup is introduced. Crucially, it's also Adrian Smith's final album with the band for nearly ten years, and it's a testament to this relative latecomer that his absence will be felt keenly. 'Classic Maiden' as an entity are in the dying days of their first age, and though the band will never break up, its days as a recognisable element in modern heavy metal are numbered. But for now things are still good. Seventh Son is a strong album, and in terms of sales and unity it does deliver. Like the two albums before it at the time I knew it for one single, having seen the video for Can I Play With Madness (below) on Radio With Pictures - and liking it. But I didn't investigate further, seeing the album cover and easily passing it by. For years I didn't know that it was a 'concept album', and so unfamiliar with it that I was, foolishly misheard the Moonchild lyric "Babylon, the scarlet whore" and wondered why Bruce Dickinson was singing about He-Man's nemesis.

The Album
So to the album itself then. It's prog rock. You've had to hear the word 'prog' a fair bit here and I'm sorry, but that's the best description of it. It is prog in inspiration, intention and execution, and by that yardstick it succeeds and fails.

Seventh Son is largely, mind, a success - and commercially it certainly was, garnering great chart scores for most of its four singles and earning the band a headline at Donnington later that year. Where the album falters is where many prog projects tend to, and that is its execution. Seventh Son is a narrative which really only fills one half of an album, in a similar way perhaps to Kate Bush's contemporaneous Hounds of Love. And like that album its greatest commercial successes lie outside the actual narrative and in some very strong singles. That both Bush and Maiden had an audience more accepting of what by 1986 or 1988 was now a greatly dated and laboured album format was a credit to their success, so on that measure Maiden's indulgence isn't the risk that it might otherwise have been for artists working a more mainstream sound. The narrative in question is the story of the seventh son of a seventh son, and his Cassandra-like efforts to convince his mediaeval village home of an approaching disaster and, assuredly, their ignorance and his ultimate fate. It's a bleak tale skipped over lightly with some virtuoso performances and storytelling on the light side. Maiden fans being as fans are have devoted pages of the internet to deciphering the album's lyrics, the sleeve illustrations see below) and lumping in the usual suspects - tarot, Crowley, fantasy fiction (in this instance Orson Scott Card) to try and make sense of it. I don't think there's much sense to be made of it myself. Opening track Moonchild begins threatening to equal Spinal Tap's Stonehenge for cheese but soon evolves into a thumping and addictive piece, and an obvious live highlight. From there however the tale slips, but of the three intervening songs only Infinite Dreams plods - and even then it lurches to a faster tempo and crashes to another stomping conclusion. Madness and Evil are very sound singles and wise choices, the latter being one of my favourite Maiden tracks of all, simply for the rapid-fire guitar work (carried over from the pacier tracks off Somewhere In Time) and Bruce Dickinson in great form behind the mic.

And then the story returns, with the album's longest tracks filling us in. Seventh Son and The Prophecy are not immediately approachable pieces with their length, timing changes and in some places multiple character voices. Of the two I prefer the former, but Dave Murray's contribution to the plodding latter is significant, and his outro is one of the most elegant guitar pieces of Maiden's golden years, in a way a sign of work to come from him and his future understudy. The Clairvoyant is the album's final single, strangely uplifting in its subject matter (the protagonist's death, vaguely alluded to), and as many have said, actual final track Only The Good Die Young is perhaps too short and much underrated, a refrain of Evil's rhythm but a neat summary of the album's themes. If it wasn't obvious that it is the doomed seer's own words in the lyrics, you could be forgiven for thinking them those of Lucifer, mocking witness to the whole tragedy.

Iron Maiden don't get any more fantastic after this in theme or in places in sound. As an unwitting farewell to 'H' Smith's tenure it's a remarkable send-off, and closes the band's Eighties heights well. After this album everything changes, and the seeds of Maiden's future lineup and sound are being sown. It's almost as if you can imagine the fantasy novels and role playing games being packed away as the Stonehenge acoustic refrain arrives to finish things off. A curious album - in many places a really really good one, and certainly worthy of inclusion for the singles alone.

Album Artwork

Simply Derek Riggs' best, last cover for the band, and as much a nod to prog art designers Hipgnosis as the music is to the genre. Gone are the tumultuous and cloudy skies, the mad moons and murderous streets - everything has been thrown aside and onto its icy powder blue palette. Eddie is now ripped apart by his unborn child, his head a mishmash of Piece of Mind's cranial disfigurement, Somewhere in Time's cyborganics and Live After Death's lightning strike, his spine drips like mercury into a glassy sea, while on the back cover icebergs float above a frozen globe and out of their forms the shapes of Eddie's past incarnations - Satan-botherer, lobotomee, pharaoh, loom. And there's a book - but what book? Amusingly, fans have been at pains to interpret this piece and the equally impressive single sleeves also shown here, only to have Riggs freely admit years later that he just winged it, drawing what looked cool to him, and there was no hidden meaning intended, ever. And that's the side of Maiden I like to see most of all.

Tracks via YouTube:

Moonchild (album track)
Infinite Dreams (live video from Visions of the Beast)
Can I Play With Madness (official video - with Graham Chapman!)
The Evil That Men Do (live Maiden England video - great sound)
Seventh Son of a Seventh Son (as above - long video, obviously)
The Prophecy (album track)
The Clairvoyant (live Donnington track - great video)
Only the Good Die Young (album track)

The Changing Face of the Dalek Cake

The despotic and brilliantly twisted scientist Davros spent decades developing the survival vehicle of the mutant Kaled creature to transform it into a ruthless universal killing machine. My good wife took just a couple of birthdays.

Behold: the Mark IV Travelling Cake on 27/7/95:























And its descendant on 24/7/10:

Video Affects - Shriekback Nemesis (1985)

A rare example of "I know where I was when I first saw this" applied to music videos, my first encounter with Shriekback's Nemesis took place at the house of my friend Derek, during the holidays near the end of 1985. We had been watching his music videos, particularly those of Sting, whom we both were into at the time, and Derek remembered that he'd videoed (ahh, nostalgia) the previous night's Radio With Pictures. So it was obviously a Monday. Probably the first Monday of the summer holidays, a gloriously languid and sun-drenched day as they all were at the time, the air buzzing with wildlife and the footpath outside his parents' architecturally-designed home almost ticking in the heat. I digress. We fast-forwarded idly through the videos - was ZZ Tops' Legs in among them? Unlikely. How about Neil Young's This Bud's For You? Possibly. But the last clip of the night, the last episode of RWP for the year, was reserved for presenter Karen Hay's favourite video of the year, and it was Nemesis. After a few blasts of Synchronicity II we definitely favoured Shriekback's offering in the end, and must have played it until we could remember the whole thing (although it would take years before I could decipher its bizarre lyrics.)

Nemesis represented a curious and infectious collision of worlds in our heads; though I speak for both me and my friend we were very much alike in interests and obsessions. With shaven-headed singer Barry Andrews purring his way through a melange of odd images, looking for all the world like Robin of Sherwood's latter-day villain Gulnar, the clip promised more - a Bacchanalean feast, weird masks of wood and feathers, black glassy eels and most thrilling of all, the Arch-Deviant himself, Pat Mills' comic creation Nemesis the Warlock as a slow-mo phantom swathed in red mist. Shriekback's lyrics are, it turned out, nonsensical, but contained wonderfully arch vocal triggers that caught our young ears - "In the jungle of the senses/Tinkerbell and Jack the Ripper"..."We drink elixirs that we refine/from the juices of the dying"…"Call in the airstrike/with the poison kiss". The music itself is harsher than the band's earlier, dreamlike and more avant garde efforts, with guitars and real drums to the forefront, and Sarah and Wendy Partridge's shrill screamed vocals matching the synthetic strings during the choruses. That it makes no sense either visually or lyrically has opened the song up to various interpretations - is it about the comic strip? Probably not. Is it about mankind's destructive urge? Maybe. Is it about the postulated 'death star'? Some (not me) think so. It doesn't matter though, Nemesis is three minutes and forty-three seconds of sensoral wonder set adrift in the mid-Eighties and in one moment changed my musical tastes from pop to something more askew (ironically, its parent album Oil and Gold is regarded as Shriekback's most commercially succesful). I returned briefly to Sting and the Police, but never let go of Shriekback and still have three of their albums in my permanent collection. And every time I hear Nemesis I return to that day when my mind met something quite recognisable and alien at the same time.

Talkin' Eds - Somewhere in Time (1986)

1986 is a watershed year for heavy metal and its dalliance with popular music. Among the big hitters for this year and some months beyond are strong and commercially succesful entries from the US (Bon Jovi's Slippery When Wet) and Europe (Europe's The Final Countdown). As a short reminder to Iron Maiden from their stablemates in the New Wave of British Heavy Metal their friends have chalked up another strong album with Mutt Lange and will be huge as a result - Def Leppard's Hysteria is mere months away. The Powerslave and Live After Death albums and World Slavery Tour have filled arenas and stadiums and spread the word globally for Maiden, but it seems that the sort of teenybopper crossover that the likes of Jon Bon Jovi and Joe Elliott achieved will not be shared by Bruce Dickinson and company. Success will continue assuredly, but for the most part as it has always done - in exchange for hard work.

For myself this album was almost entirely new territory, being like Powerslave more of interest for its cover artwork than songs. I'd gone off Maiden and had moved onto other stuff - poppier stuff, as it turned out. Maiden seemed to be a bit embarrassing by then, and the ownership claimed by the guys at my school into the band and Metal at the time didn't convince me otherwise - they were welcome to each other. It'd be a few years before I'd even hear my favourite song from the album, as I recall.

The album
The first thing that strikes you is the synth, or rather, guitar-synth. Time is the first of Maiden's albums to employ the instrument and as it goes with these things, the instrument is very much at the front of the band's sound for much of this album. The sound itself is BIG. Maybe too big for low volumes, and it seems designed to replicate a stadium experience, as do some of the compositions within. Everything is larger and more echo-ey, as though the band fell into a tank of reverb on the way to the studio. The two guitarists audibly multitrack their instruments so their attack is fuller, and Steve Harris' bass is turned up to match them. Against them Dickinson wails bravely, but some of the songs aren't his best work - the album opener in particular has him wavering in paces with pitch, and introducing his low cackle between songs, maybe to give his throat some variety. He's still absolutely on form, but an album of this sort of approach gets wearying, to my ears.

Opening track Caught Somewhere in Time introduces a loose theme across the album of the passage of time, displacement and isolation. It’s a mixed bag to begin with - the vocals are typical of the problem I note before, but the the guitars are great, buzzing like wasps during the chorus lead-in. What stands out of course are the opening bars and the new instrument brought into the band's repertoire with this album, the guitar synth. It's not entirely a success, although Caught doesn't suffer particularly from their use. What struck me on listening to the track for the first time was that, having put it into the rather sensitive CD player on our home PC, it skipped while playing, but in such a way as to not be entirely noticeable - I thought it was an extra vocal effect and was even more bewildered!

The centrepiece of the album comes early, with track two Wasted Years being the highlight, The Trooper of Somewhere in Time, perhaps. Adrian Smith's song of longing on the road ("I close my eyes and think of home/another city rolls by in the night") and the existential reality of life on tour bookmarks Maiden at their height, but is a troubled piece, recalling not too subtly the pressure of continued international touring, (From the Coast of Gold across the seven seas/travelling on far and wide/ but now it seems I'm just a stranger to myself/And the things I sometimes do, it isn't me but someone else") and potentially nodding to the band's alumni who fell along the way. Just as potently it predates Smith's departure from the band, and though it ultimately exhorts the listener enjoy the moment ("don't waste your time always searching for those wasted years… realise you're living in the golden years") it's hard not to hear the song as his attempt to call time out. Such personal songs - even songs about relationships, the concerns of one's life outside the fantastic or metaphysical, are rare indeed for Maiden.

Following these tracks are Sea of Madness, a reasonably light track with Dickinson's vocals veering toward Ozzzy Osbourne's in the chorus, eschewing any modulation of the notes sung. Its bridge section is a little odd too, using chorused backing guitar effects and Dickinson singing in the upper register, again resembling another artists, in this instance the Police circa Regatta de Blanc... Heaven Can Wait is a live favourite with a great pace and tricksy lyrics, while The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner has great energy, although the aforementioned vocal approach by Dickinson is better used in the verses than choruses.

Adrian Smith returns to write another single for the album, Stranger In a Strange Land, which owes nothing to the Biblical quote (the Apostle Paul, I believe) or the Heinlein novel, but is instead based on a true story of a lost Antarctic explorer and the discovery of his frozen remains decades after his death. After a strong opening the song loses me. I think the synthesiser stabs throughout speak a little too much of their era, reminding me of Rage Hard from Frankie Goes to Hollywood's limp Liverpool of the same year.

Dave Murray's songs are best classed a guilty pleasure for me. Lyrically he's not the best writer of the band by any measure, but his hooks are usually enough to carry these sometimes weaker songs through. De Ja Vu is my favourite of his, a short and punchy song about ... well, examples of de ja vu, I guess. It worked for Alanis Morrisette providing examples (good and poor) of irony, so why not? Surprisingly it's never been played live, which is a shame be cause there are some enjoyably sing-along parts to it.

In closing the album Alexander the Great continues the same trick as the earlier To Tame a Land. It's a 'list' song, this time of a real world hero, and musically it's got some great structure and invention. Against this though the lyrics suffer a little, being precisely what they are. Some of the composition will be revisited some albums down the track, and for what it's worth I prefer the later.

Album cover
As Powerslave put its hero into a historical, global setting, so Somewhere in Time launches him into the future and something more sci-fi. Introducing Robo-Eddie! I groaned when I first saw this, it seemed so so obvious and derivative, but the cyborg design of our hero has truly endured, spawning model kits, a video game character, a revival for the Somewhere Back in Time compilation (of course) and he was the Eddie of choice for the tour of the same name. The artwork's great, but in 3-D he's even more impressive. There's a lot going on here - beyond Eddie visually referencing the contemporary Terminator/RoboCop trend (was someone listening to the album when Torchwood's Cyberwoman was being designed? They should be introduced), in the background is a Blade Runner-styled city made up of around 40 references to past Maiden albums, songs, venues and people. There's even Batman and a TARDIS, and Eddie's posture and the curled hand of his victim would suggest that this is a futuristic revisiting of Riggs' artwork for Killers. Is it the same street corner a century on, perhaps? Notably, the single sleeve for Stranger in a Strange Land puts Eddie in a Star Wars cantina-type future noir bar, an image that would itself be referenced in a future Maiden video.

Tracks:
Caught Somewhere in Time
Wasted Years (official video)
Sea of Madness
Heaven Can Wait
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (album version)
Stranger in a Strange Land (official video)
De Ja Vu (album version)
Alexander the Great (fan made video)

Penny

Nothing beats a sad animal story like a happy animal story, and I have one!

A couple of weeks ago, roughly mid-way between Moses' last day and about now-ish we had a visitor in our back garden. It was, as is becoming depressingly evident, a pretty typical bloody winter's weekend in the Capital with occasional breaks in interminable rain for truculent blasts of wind. A perfect day to be indoors working on the household budget, then.

Was it on one of those blasts of wind that Penny came into our lives so briefly? Maybe it was. We don't own any chickens, so the appearance of a rather healthy-looking one scratching enthusiastically away at our bale of pea straw (waiting for a fine day to go on the garden…) was a bit of a surprise. We watched her for a while, making her way around the garden, dodging the plentiful weeds and seeking out the likely plentiful worms and woodlice among them - both of us were probably hoping the same thing, that she'd move on and we wouldn't have to worry further. But she didn't - we'd made too good a foraging site, I think.

In the absence of any neighbours we were aware of with chickens we decided we needed to collect her before a car, cat, dog or one of the recently-acquired and party-hard neighbours down the cul de sac did. I went outside and gave a half-hearted "chook chook chook" and was surprised when it was pointed out to me that the hen I was looking for in the front yard was already at my feet quietly clucking. I scooped her up with no resistance and in the garage she went; we got on the phone to the SPCA, hoping that a Sunday mid-afternoon wouldn't be too late for them to pick her up.

It was, or rather, it became so after we had a return call around 4:30 to say they had a dog-versus-car to attend to, so could we look after the hen overnight? We guessed so, so I went out to the garage to find the newly-named Penny and tidy the clutter up to make things a little more homely. When I found her she was in a cupboard under the workbench. I wandered around clearing things up while she followed, pecking away at the spaces I uncovered in moving things. Moses' old cat cage was vacant, so I tipped it on one side and lined it with newspaper and a towel over the top for a hutch, left enough bread and water for her to make the Sensible Sentencing Trust proud of me and left her to it.

That night was miserably cold - two degrees with sleet and wind, so I checked in on Penny a couple of times before bed and once in the wee small hours. The first peer through the garage window saw her still moving around and regarding me and my torch through the glass. Later she was in the same place she kept through the night - she'd spurned the coop and was tucked up against an old wardrobe on the concrete floor with her head buried under a wing.

The SPCA collected her by the Monday afternoon and a later inspection and (necessary) tidy-up of the garage floor around her adopted spot revealed a wee parting present - a small brown egg which I should probably finish this story with by saying we ate and found delicious. Penny it turns out is a Red Shaver and therefore a good and constant layer with a quiet temperament, a great addition to any flock. She was also apparently an ex-battery hen which surprised us because her condition was so good, but one of her wings hadn't been clipped, which may have been the catalyst for her escape and arrival in our yard. Talk about your lifestyle changes!

And that's the story! The happy bit at least. Read on if you want to hear some grumbling...

Moses

Moses came into our lives as a small, mewling ball of fluff in 1994, bought at Petcetera, a now long-gone Dunedin pet shop where he hadn't been my girlfriend's first choice (a smoky grey sibling, possibly a girl), but his on-cue dirtbox demonstration sold him to her, proof that we probably wouldn't need to be bothering too much cleaning up after him. He was a pretty good kitten, although as testament to his eventual size when I came home from work nothing seemed to fit on him - he was all paws and ears. 'Spock' seemed a pretty apt name, but I wasn't having that; similarly, 'Boaz' was vetoed because my girlfriend wasn't going to be yelling that from the back doorstep in the mornings. But we needed a good name for him to grow and grow old into, so Moses it was. His first night with us was a noisy one - he was a constant vocaliser, and when his pitiful mews from our laundry became too much I brought him in to bed with me, sleeping at an odd angle lest I crush this purring bundle next to me, and our training - and my eccentric sleeping posture, took off from there. An early vet exam brought up an issue of congenital knee joint problems which would likely need to be fixed at some stage "How much?" we asked, "About two hundred per knee" the vet said. We decided we'd wait until the problem surfaced and it never really did.

Moses stayed with us, seeing off an intended flatmate, 'Oscar', who went to the flat upstairs instead after which they became firm buddies. He survived a fall off a balcony and made a rapid recovery after breaking into a packet of cat treats while under house arrest, and also survived pursuit by a couple of dogs belonging to some particularly ugly squatters down the road. We moved from Canongate to Opoho and he spent his first 'captive' afternoon in the new flat halfway up the chimney. Somewhere I have my favourite picture of him on a macrocarpa stump behind that flat, snow-white against a blue sky with the wind ruffling his fur and his normally large-pupiled eyes looking suitably spooked.

When we moved to Wellington he flew up with us in the plane's luggage hold, looking even more spooked when unloaded on a noisy tarmac. It was an even smaller Hataitai flat that we had our first big emergency, losing him when he got locked in someone's basement laundry for a week. That was a long week. We'd had him for five years by then and he'd become a permanent fixture, his vet visits and bookings into increasingly harder to find catteries for holidays an essential part of the calendar. Two more homes followed and he spent a month in one cattery while we did our bijou-OE (he came back with a different meow, somehow crosser and more irritated), and a couple of nights in the emergency vet's when a run-in with Monty, a psychotic Burmese resulted in an expensive operation and a rubber hose draining his chest for a few days.

For so many years he'd been such a part of our lives that when his health eventually started to become an issue we began to talk about what we would do for him when it needed to be done. He was on various arthritis pills for about three years (possibly his knees eventually catching up with him), and heart pills which likely started to affect his kidneys for two of those. When he gained a human sibling he took it with great grace, keeping his distance bar the odd curious nuzzle, and tolerating his tail being pulled by very enthusiastic and strong little hands. But in the past year that tail didn't stand up as much as it had used to, 'questioning' everything as he patrolled our back yard. He spent more time indoors, and more time sleeping, and though his kidneys had been in very good health for a while, his weight went down and never returned to the six-plus kilograms of his luxuriant prime. When knots started to develop on his belly fur and around his back legs we knew he wasn't able to groom himself as immaculately as he'd done in the past, and a blood test at the vets confirmed he was well into kidney disease. We knew he was fading, but we hadn't realised how little time we had left.

In the end we pre-empted things, and had him put down before he was too unwell and it needed to be done anyway. In the last three weeks of his life he got into a fight and caught a bird, but unusual episodes even in his prime. Having both had other cats who'd deteriorated and become skittish ghosts before our eyes, we were determined not to let Moses go the same way, so we sadly made an appointment and kept it. I wish I could say it was a peaceful end on the day, but it mostly was, and was still preferable to him ending his life in great pain, off his food and no longer himself. And he wasn't alone, slipping away in my arms, his body impossibly limp and sagged under sedation before the last injection that had him just stop, then sigh, and then cease.

Some pets get under your skin in ways that just break your heart in the end. Moses was described by friends as a 'gentleman' and a real character, words that probably get used for a lot of good cats and dogs around the place; but he genuinely was a great companion, noiselessly joining us on our back deck in our quiet moments or appearing as an unexpected lump, rumbling in the dark at the bottom right hand of the bed (always my side, since that first night). We've patched up and reclaimed 'his' distressed couch, and rediscovered to our surprise that it's the most comfortable place in the whole house. Moses meanwhile is in our cold back room, cremated and sealed in a box which seems far too small for all the affection he gave us and we gave him over sixteen years. When the weather clears he'll go under his lemon tree in the back yard along with a few items of his.

Rest in peace Moses. You were the best cat ever.

Talkin' Eds - Powerslave (1984), Live After Death (1985)

Iron Maiden have conquered the world, and now they intend to enslave it. That may well be the mission statement for this, Maiden's fifth album and second into their 'classic' line-up. We're now a third of the way through the band's discography, including this year's forthcoming (and farewell?) release The Final Frontier.

Powerslave continues a building trend of all the Maiden albums, boosted enormously by the two most recent member's contributions - Bruce Dickinson shares co-writing credits on some of the songs here again, and writes one for himself, while Nicko seriously pounds the drumskins. I don't write that idly - there's a real heft to each hit, and his use of the bigger/louder cymbals in the kit is notable too. Of the rhythm section Steve Harris seem to have turned the volume of his bass up just a tad, perhaps to compensate for the sterling lead work of Dave Murray and Adrian Smith who manage to provide distinct and separate leads for all of the album. Yes, in most cases you can venture a guess as to who is providing which part as both players have a signature style, but there's really no sense of having heard any solo before throughout the eight tracks. This is a band still with a lot of lead in its pencil.

The Album
Thematically Powerslave begins almost as a set of twins - Aces High and Two Minutes to Midnight both deal with the loose theme of war, and after Maiden's last-to-date instrumental Losfer Words (Big 'Orra), Flash of the Blade and The Duellists share the topic of swordfighting. Harris' The Duellists is inspired by Ridley Scott's movie Duel, but it's competitive fencer Dickinson's Flash about a young man's vengeance after his parents' death that is a more fun listen with its tapped intro. Beside it, Duellists owes perhaps too much to the structure and rhythm of the earlier Where Eagles Dare. Back in the Village returns (again, loosely) to Number of the Beast's nod to The Prisoner and is another enjoyable track with a breakneck speed and indulgent "six six six" whispered over the lyric "I see sixes all the way". The title track's a little perfunctory, enlivened by a chugging power chord rhythm and a cod-Middle Eastern chord structure and guitar fill at the end of some lines. Live of course it's added to by Bruce Dickinson wearing a strange feathered mask for God knows what reason. The rest of the album is left to the stand-out track and live favourite, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a devoted re-telling of Coleridge's hallucinatory epic poem. It's… prog. And there's more where that came from, but the construction's sound, it doesn't outstay its welcome even at fourteen minutes in length, and Dickinson carries the vocals off, although his buccaneer rasp in the narrated sections featuring Coleridge's own lines, is a little OTT. On a positive note it probably scored highly for my schoolmate Grant Davies who used it as an example in our high school speech competition defending the intellectual side of Heavy Metal. Grant, what ever became of you, eh?

My first encounter with this album was in admiring its cover art (below), reduced hugely to fit the dimensions of a tape cassette, but enough for me to make out the rude in-jokes in the hieroglyphics, and poring over the lyrics without the benefit of the music accompanying (it was a friend's brother's tape…). Back in the Village made a big impression on me, as did Two Minutes, which boasts some pretty visceral imagery - unusual for Maiden, it must be said, of the casualties of modern war:

The body bags and little rags of children torn in two
And the jellied brains of those who remain to put the finger right on you
As the madmen play on words and make us all dance to their song
To the tune of starving millions to make a better kind of gun

Strong stuff. Powerslave was the last full Maiden album I remember hearing around the time of its release, and even then it was at a woolshed party, so those aren't ideal conditions. With its boastful title and liner notes cataloguing the vast world tour which followed (New Zealand was promised, but never eventuated to my great adolescent disappointment) it seemed the band was one of the biggest things in the world. Nowadays to me the album stands less on its own and more a second half to Piece of Mind - the band spreading its wings further and enjoying its freedom of expression and experimentation. The indulgence of Village's overdubs, like Piece of Mind's mischevious backwards masking, proof that the band's following was more than enough to allow them some fun amid the hard work.

Album cover
As befits the band's status Eddie is now a god-king in Derek Riggs' best album cover, and a composition he would revisit later in the band's history. Gone is the night sky and wispy clouds, the maniacal corpse-like Eddie grinning over his victims; here he's regal, elemental, drenched in desert sun and reimagined as a figure from the Egyptian pantheon. Rather marvellously the band's logo and album title are in gold. In all it's a confident and assured design from a band (and artist) much in demand and easily picked out from record bins everywhere. Variations of the theme - Eddie as a mummy in two contemporary works by Briggs and some subsequent, indicate the popularity of this piece.

Tracks via YouTube:

Aces High (from Live After Death)
Two Minutes to Midnight (from Live After Death)
Losfer Words (Big 'Orra) (album version)
Flash of the Blade (video montage - never performed live)
The Duellists (album version - never played live)
Back in the Village (album version - never played live)
Powerslave (from Live After Death)
Rime of the Ancient Mariner (part one) (part two) (from Live After Death)

Live After Death
A necessary inclusion. Released to capture the enormity and impact of the World Slavery Tour, Live After Death is Maiden's first live album since their debut Live! +1 in 1979. As such, and with the passing of time this is a larger, more accomplished recording with brilliant sound engineering mustering the band's live approach and particularly the twin lead guitars (each has a speaker representing their position on stage - Dave Murray is the left hand, Adrian Smith the right). The tracks are for the most part from the recent three albums, although the longer 1998 reissue CD manages to incorporate some Di'Anno tracks, including Iron Maiden and Running Free. For years this was considered an essential live metal album for its sound and quality of tracks, though I have to say I'm not entirely sold, having come to it from the DVD first, and subsequent performances and therefore somewhat spoiled by the later polish (the most recent live DVD Flight 666 may in fact be better!) In particular Dickinson's in 'tour voice' mode, so to sacrifice vocal range for longevity and volume was probably a necessary evil - the upshot is that the range is contained a little too much in some tracks and he comes across as a bit… barky. That said, Bruce does seem to be saving himself for the bigger shows, if the track order is an accurate representation of the set-list (as it appears to be). Ancient Mariner fares better for him saving his voice, as does the assuredly demanding Hallowed Be Thy Name.