Iron Maiden in the Studio. Jake Brown
up … I wasn’t happy, both with the album and myself, and I really didn’t wanna be there. And if you can’t give a thousand per cent to a band like Iron Maiden, the best thing to do is get the fuck out. I just walked in and told them how I felt and walked away.’
Di’Anno has been more or less diplomatic over the years about the true reasons he left, though these range from his comment to Classic Rock that ‘I left Iron Maiden because they were going too heavy metal and Iron Maiden is a money-making machine, and I don’t give a fuck about it,’ to his claim in the same interview that he left because of creative constraints. ‘Iron Maiden is Steve Harris’s band. It doesn’t matter about anybody else – whether it’s Dave Murray, Clive [Burr], me … it’s Steve Harris’s band.’
To Ultimate Metal magazine Di’Anno was more specific, from a musical perspective, saying, ‘I think Bruce’s high operatic and theatrical-type voice is better suited to Maiden’s later material.’ Ultimately, however, he concluded that, ‘there are still a lot of people who seem to forget that my voice was and still is a huge part of Maiden’s past, and I am both happy and proud of that fact.’
To take the next step forward Maiden’s musical ambitions clearly required a vocalist as technically accomplished as the band. Enlisted to replace Di’Anno was Samson front man Bruce Dickinson. After an audition in September 1981 he recalled in an interview with Billboard that the move to front Maiden made sense because ‘we effectively grew up together, musically, because I was in Samson and all the bands were aware of everybody else. We all gigged together. It’s fair to say Maiden had this momentum about them. It was like standing in front of a truck…
‘Things with Paul hadn’t been going terribly well and they’d made the decision to get rid of him. So they came and took a peek at me. Clive [Burr, then Maiden’s drummer] had been in Samson for three years and Killers was being made at Zomba Studios [in London], which back then was Morgan Studios … We were in Morgan and Maiden were in the [studio] opposite so we used to go to the pub, and have a few beers and chat. I went over and listened to the Maiden record, and Clive would come over and listen to ours … Rod Smallwood offered me the chance of an audition – he didn’t offer me the job – at Reading Festival.’
Already well aware of Steve Harris’s locally legendary role as the band’s head songwriter, Dickinson also recalled clarifying the terms of any potential collaboration from the outset. ‘“First of all,” I said, “if I do the audition, I’m going to get the job so you need to figure out whether or not you want me onboard because I don’t want to be unless I can be a pain in the ass and have some opinions. I’m not going to be like the old guy. I’m going to have disagreements with Steve because I’ve got some ideas about how I want to change things around. So if you don’t want that, you’d better tell me now.”
‘They asked me to learn three songs and I basically learned the lot, both albums. So we turned up to the rehearsal room and let rip. Steve picked up the phone and said, “Could we get him into a studio today?” They were still doing gigs with Paul. The atmosphere was a bit down. When they came back from Sweden, we popped in the studio, recorded three songs and that was it. That was job done. We all went out and got very drunk that night.’
The band’s decision to hire Dickinson, as the BBC would conclude, ‘turned out to be fourth time lucky for them. And for Dickinson, whose sandpapered soaring yowl more than held its own against the blasting and frequently bombastic arrangements.’ Producer Martin Birch added his unequivocal opinion to Best magazine: ‘It’s certain that Bruce Dickinson has improved the band as compared with Paul Di’Anno, who was isolated at the human level and who wasn’t very productive.’
Addressing the question of how the line-up changes affected the group musically, Steve Harris explained to Artist magazine that ‘on the Killers album Adrian was very new and it really wasn’t until he’d been with the band about a year and a half that he really felt he was a full member. He always had been but he never really seemed to accept that it was happening. [Perhaps] because he went from a local band in the East End to Iron Maiden, which, even at the time, was quite a big act. It took him quite a while to settle in, and it also took both him and Dave a long time to get the right guitar sounds … Then Bruce came in and he really did fine things for the band too.’
As the band faced up to recording their new album Steve Harris confessed in an interview with VH1’s Classic Albums that ‘we had no material’. As he explained to journalist Kevin Purcell, ‘On the first two albums we had a lot of material lying around from before we got signed. On the third album [The Number of the Beast] there was absolutely nothing, and we had a specific period of time to write and a load of pressure to write.’ Instead of inviting disaster, however, Harris said, ‘It worked great.’ Setting a precedent that became the band’s norm thereafter, he reasoned that, ‘If you were to allow yourself a year to write, you would get distracted and do a lot of other stuff in between. When you’re stuck into it, you get to it.’
Identified by the BBC as ‘a key weapon’ in crafting the album, Harris detailed to Classic Albums the band’s writing process. ‘Some of the simpler songs are written in minutes, literally. It sounds a strange thing to say but they’re written quite quickly and some songs – some of our best and catchiest – do work like that.’
Of the band’s longer compositions – a strength that the BBC hailed as a ‘convincing use of multi-movement composition’ – Bruce Dickinson recalled in the same interview, ‘Steve likes to go off and do all his stuff on his own and plan it all out.’
Harris concurred, adding his agreement that those are ‘ones you have to work on, especially the longer ones … If I’m writing a song and if it’s just got my name on it, usually I’ve written everything except for the guitar solos.’
When he did introduce his compositions for the album to his bandmates, Harris pointed out another unique difference between Iron Maiden and their metal contemporaries. ‘I just take it to the rest of the guys, show them the parts and just sort of layer it out like that. We don’t do demos and stuff.’
His bandmates then worked on helping one another flesh out the songs’ live feel. As guitarist Adrian Smith explained in the same VH1 show, ‘You take a rough idea in and that’s a great thing about being in a band because, from your seed of an idea, it becomes this big-sounding track. That’s one of the thrills for me of doing it, to actually get in the studio and record it properly.’
Talking to journalist John Stix about some of the collaborative efforts on the album, Harris began with ‘Gangland’, proudly crediting the song as having been written by ‘Adrian and Clive. The intro is very much a drum thing, which Clive got together. It’s probably a bit jazz-influenced and a bit different than things we’d done before. But the basic riff is very much a rocker. It’s a very good song.’
Another group effort, ‘The Prisoner’, was praised by the BBC. ‘[Where] even some of the venerable HM institutions (think Black Sabbath) would struggle to make material that was something more than a collection of minor-key riffs, Iron Maiden pull this feat off with considerable élan. “The Prisoner” could almost pass for a heavy-metal Genesis.’
For the band, the most memorable aspect of creating this song came with its introduction, as Bruce Dickinson told VH1’s Classic Albums. ‘Obviously we wanted to be really sort of dramatic with the intro so we thought, “Well, maybe we can snip the intro off The Prisoner TV series.” Steve Harris added, ‘It was quite funny because we had to get permission from Patrick McGoohan for the intro to “Prisoner” and we didn’t actually realise at the time he owned the rights to it all. So Rod, our manager, had to actually get on to him personally about it.’
Smallwood recalled a somewhat botched call followed in which he tried to explain exactly what the band wanted to use the intro for. ‘After a pregnant pause of around five seconds he said, “Do it.” For people who know McGoohan, that’s very Patrick McGoohan!’
Turning to the album opener, ‘Invaders’, Steve Harris explained to journalist Stix that ‘this