Iron Maiden in the Studio. Jake Brown
name. The mood was sort of like “Remember Tomorrow”.’
Of the album’s title track and fan favourite, Steve Harris said, ‘Basically that song is about a dream. It’s not about Devil worship … The idea was to get a blood-curdling scream like the one on “Won’t Get Fooled Again”. It worked quite well.’ Addressing head on the rumours that the Christian Right had begun accusing the band of being involved with Satanism, he added, ‘It was nothing to do with the 666 thing; that was exaggerated. We had loads of things going wrong. We had to get a completely different tape machine because it wasn’t recording the stuff properly as it was going down. But I mean, those sorts of things can happen. It’s just that we had more of it this time than any other time.’
‘Run to the Hills’, Harris explained to Stix, ‘is about the American Indians. It’s written from both sides of the picture. The first part is from the side of the Indians. The second part is from the side of the soldiers.’ To VH1’s Classic Albums he added that ‘it’s just basically about the Indian nations being treated badly and taken over really’. Homing in on the song’s rhythms, which producer Martin Birch explained were designed to give listeners ‘that rolling feel, that galloping feel’, Harris added in the same conversation with Stix, ‘I wanted to try and get the feeling of galloping horses. But, when you play this one, be careful not to let it run away with you.’
Following up the fan favourite ‘Charlotte the Harlot’ from the band’s debut, the sequel ‘22 Acacia Avenue’ was, Harris told Styx, quite simply ‘an extension … This is where she’s living in London’s East End.’ He also identified this song as one of his personal favourites on the record, along with ‘Hallowed Be Thy Name’ and the title tune.
‘Children of the Damned’ took the classic horror film as its muse, as Harris told Classic Albums. ‘[Just] as most of our things are really loosely based on anything … it was kind of based loosely on the movie, I suppose … We just take a basic idea and then develop it from there really, and try to put our own twists and turns into it.’
Finally, ‘Hallowed Be Thy Name’, he revealed to Ironmaidencommentary.com years later, remains ‘one of my favourite songs and still one we play live. We’re trying to create a mood with the build-up of the song. The classical guitar-like opening was Dave building the mood, with bells in the background. It’s about someone with only a few hours left to live. In concert the end part of this one takes off. Dave takes the first solo and then Adrian.’
As pre-production wrapped, producer Martin Birch confirmed Harris’s central role in visualising what became British heavy metal’s most influential concept album of the 1980s. Harris, he told Best magazine, had to keep both hands on the creative reigns. ‘Adrian Smith and Bruce Dickinson needed some time to settle down. As for Dave Murray, who’s an excellent guitar player, well, he doesn’t write that much. He writes very little and he’s very demanding. For The Number of the Beast, for example, everything was down to Steve.’
The admiration was mutual. ‘By the time he did Beast,’ Harris told Classic Albums, ‘that was it really. He became our full-time producer and we didn’t think about using anyone else.’
Ensconced again in Battery Studios they worked through tracking each of the album’s tracks. Years later Clive Burr would share his opinion that ‘every song really had something about it that you could say, “Yeah, that part, this part, the whole of it, really worked well.”’
Dissecting the sound that the band captured live during those sessions, KNAC.com would conclude that ‘Iron Maiden is a metal band built around the power guitar chords. With guitarists like Murray and Smith this comes as no surprise but what sets Maiden apart is the use of their rhythm section. Where most metal bands keep their bassist in the background to keep the beat and use their drummer as a point of attack, Maiden does the opposite. Steve Harris uses the bass to lead the attack while their drummer keeps the rhythm.’
Feeling that it was the band’s signature layered guitar sound that set them apart from many metal contemporaries, Steve Harris said to Classic Albums, ‘You’ve got those twin guitars – it’s just a trademark with Maiden. That’s what we try to do, use all those elements.’
Harris also paid Dickinson a major compliment, telling Artist magazine that, during tracking, the singer was ‘so quick in the studio because his ear for pitch is so good. He just gets up there and bang! It retains a great live feel.’
For his part, Dickinson told Billboard that the band had ‘matured massively … the sound of the band … [after] Adrian joined and was writing’.
As principal recording wound down Harris recalled feeling that this was ‘certainly the best-sounding Iron Maiden album, I must admit, but then we have spent a long time on it. I would much rather work this way; maybe not spend quite so long. But at the end of the day it sounds like the best thing we’ve ever done.’
Everyone seemed to know they were on to something truly special. As manager Rod Smallwood recalled to Classic Albums, ‘There was a certain excitement on The Number of the Beast, ’cause we all felt – me especially – that there was something special about that album. Just the way it was coming together, the songs, the addition of Bruce, the extra scope we had to work with. There was a certain feeling on that album that it was something special.’
Dickinson agreed, reflecting that his first LP with the band ‘sounded completely new – people had never heard anything quite like it before’.
Producer Martin Birch also chipped in, telling Best, ‘It’s true that it’s a band whose line-up changes quite a lot … [but it’s] a good thing in this case, as each newcomer brings a certain amount of freshness to each album.’
Steve Harris, too, described a ‘feeling of excitement and aggression … when we went from Killers to The Number of the Beast’. It was a buzz that was shared by fans and critics alike. According to iTunes, Harris had ‘caught lightning in a bottle with an entire collection of tunes that became cornerstones of the Maiden catalogue’. The BBC hailed the album as ‘brilliant’, advising ‘Maiden newbies’ to ‘start their journey to metal hell and back right here’. Iron Maiden’s journey, according to Rolling Stone, would take them to the top of the charts in Britain, initiating ‘a streak of seven consecutive platinum or gold albums in the United States, despite virtually no radio or MTV exposure’.
On worldwide release on 29 March 1982, the band’s achievement was remarkable, considering guitarist Dave Murray’s memory that ‘there were very few radio stations that were playing the band’. In the same interview with Classic Albums he added, ‘Basically we had to go out there on tour and, hence, we go everywhere – East Coast, West Coast and everywhere in between.’
Echoing his client, manager Smallwood recalled in the same interview, ‘We never got airplay so Maiden built completely by touring, not by a song being a hit and being on the radio.’
Happily for the band, they were pushing a sound that metal fans the world over had been waiting for in their millions. The Number of the Beast propelled the band not only to their first No. 1 on the UK album chart, where it remained within the Top 75 for over 30 weeks, but it broke them in America, where it reached the Top 40 of Billboard’s Top 200 Album Chart. Burning like wildfire up charts around the globe, the album went on to crack the Top 10 in Austria and Sweden, and the Top 20 in Canada and Norway. It also produced two Top 20 singles in the UK: ‘Run to the Hills’, which peaked at No. 7, and ‘The Number of the Beast’, which reached No. 18.
After just two albums with the band producer Martin Birch told Best, ‘I am now as comfortable with Iron Maiden as I was in the best moments of Deep Purple.’ What he added was music to Maiden fans’ ears – he and Maiden had ‘agreed to work together again for the next album!’