The live series is finally out of the early 1990’s slog and it leaps over the Blaze Bayley years as no official live album was ever released from his tenure. Instead we jump to 2002 and look at the first of many live albums from the Maiden reunion era.

The “reunion” era, which is Iron Maiden’s longest-running time period with a consistent line-up, kicked off in 1999 when singer Bruce Dickinson and guitarist Adrian Smith rejoined the band. Smith’s replacement in the band, Janick Gers, was kept on and Maiden became a three-guitar line-up. Along with bassist/band leader Steve Harris, guitarist Dave Murray and drummer Nicko McBrain, Maiden reformed their classic ’80’s line-up with a plus one. This line-up is the band’s current formation today, nothing has changed since ’99.

The band quickly set out to expand on their legacy rather than rest on it – the album Brave New World was released in 2000 and was a very celebrated record. Maiden toured behind the album and that’s where we are at – a live album representation of the Brave New World tour.

This release is a single show, taken from a festival performance in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on January 19, 2001. It was the final show of the Brave New World tour, after this the band would take a break and then head off to record a follow-up album.

This wasn’t just any festival, the Rock In Rio festival is a huge, HUGE gathering in what is summer in Brazil. The crowd in 2001 was 250,000 – this marked the second largest crowd Maiden had played in front of – the first being 350,000 at the 1985 edition of Rock In Rio. It is a mixed genre festival that isn’t held every single year and thus the anticipation becomes red hot, especially among the South Americans who are indisputably the world’s most passionate music fans.

Side note – Iron Maiden have played several subsequent editions of Rock In Rio but attendance figures aren’t readily available for those, so I don’t know if the “largest crowd they’ve played in front of” stats are still accurate.

Let’s have at the tracklist then get into song selection, which isn’t that much of a chore since this is a single performance.

Arthur’s Farewell (intro)

The Wicker Man

Ghost Of The Navigator

Brave New World

Wrathchild

2 Minutes To Midnight

Blood Brothers

Sign Of The Cross

The Mercenary

The Trooper

Dream Of Mirrors

The Clansman

The Evil That Men Do

Fear Of The Dark

Iron Maiden

The Number Of The Beast

Hallowed Be Thy Name

Sanctuary

Run To The Hills

The setlist is nearly identical to what they ran on the general Brave New World tour, it is in the exact same order as the show I saw in August 2000 with one exception – they didn’t play Run To The Hills when I saw them. That song was apparently added in for the special occasion at Rio. They did thrown in a few different songs on the South American stops of the tour so it does track.

There are six songs from Brave New World, which was pretty cool. The new material was well received and allowed the band to present themselves as relevant and current. There are two cuts from the Blaze-era albums on here, one from each album and the two songs that many cite as the best from those records. Bruce didn’t bring an ego back in to the band, he gladly performed the stuff he didn’t sing on and has done so on occasion in the years since. The remaining songs are a fairly standard collection of the band’s biggest “hits,” or at least what you would expect to find in a Maiden live set and many of which we’ll find again and again in sets as we go through the rest of the albums.

The performance here is pretty great, the band is firing on all cylinders. Bruce does sound like he’s at the end of a tour but it doesn’t really come up all that much and isn’t a huge distracting factor, in general he carries on as usual. The songs are performed with the general vitality and accelerated pace of their live shows, though here nothing feels off the rails like the group occasionally finds themselves.

It’s honestly hard to cite one standout track here when the whole album is as good as it is. I’ll go ahead and throw Blood Brothers out there, to me it’s the centerpiece of Brave New World and the song works especially well live too. It’s sort of an unofficial anthem for Maiden fans even though the song’s theme is quite dark.

One note here – generally, Iron Maiden have not engaged in much actual editing of their live albums. They tend to present them as they were recorded, just with production (and occasionally without). But Steve Harris made a call on this one to cut and paste some of Bruce’s vocals over parts that the crowd were left to sing on but didn’t do a terribly great job of. So this is edited in that respect. It’s not a huge deal though it gets discussed in Maiden-centric areas of the web quite a bit. There is actual broadcast footage of the show out on YouTube. I personally don’t worry about it that much.

Rock In Rio was a very welcome package from Iron Maiden. It did reasonably well on international charts, though not so hot in the US in terms of the audio edition. While an actual consensus opinion is hard to gauge based on idle online chatter, this one does rank very highly among fans. While I and many others came up on Live After Death, for a younger generation of fans, this one is the definitive live album that they came up with. And even among older fans it’s not all that hard to find some that prefer this one to the first. No matter exactly where it ranks, there’s no doubt that this first reunion live set is very highly regarded by the Maiden fanbase.

That about covers it for this week, next week and the one after there’ll be a bit of time-hopping courtesy of a limited box set released in 2002.

The Iron Maiden Live Album Series

Live After Death

A Real Live One

A Real Dead One

Live At Donington

Rock In Rio (you are here)

BBC Archives

Beast Over Hammersmith

Death On The Road

Flight 666

En Vivo!

Maiden England ’88

The Book Of Souls – Live Chapter

Nights Of The Dead – Legacy Of The Beast Live In Mexico City

The Iron Maiden Live Album Ranking

The Maiden Live Album “Wishlist”