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Live At Donington – The Iron Maiden Live Album Series

On October 13, 2023February 11, 2024 By bigbadburchIn Iron Maiden Live Album Series20 Comments

The past two weeks were spent looking over Iron Maiden’s two live albums from the early 1990’s, a period regarded as one of the band’s weaker segments. Today we shift gears and head to – oh wait, this is yet another live album from the early 1990’s.

This one is a bit different, as we get an entire single concert presented on an album. While there are 13 live albums in total, there is only one other that is also a single, complete show presented in full. All of the others are either tour compilations or selections taken from several nights in the same city. It is kind of nice to have a full show on offer.

This show was the headlining spot for the 1992 Monsters Of Rock festival at Castle Donington. Monsters Of Rock had been a huge thing in the ’80’s but was starting to lose its luster in the ’90’s. Maiden was top of a bill that included Skid Row, Slayer and W.A.S.P. The Monsters Of Rock concept had a few more tries after this one but sputtered out, it would be replaced at Donington grounds by the Download festival in the early 2000’s.

This particular show was well attended, with a crowd of around 80,000. Iron Maiden compiled both audio and video from the show and released it, though only in a handful of territories. The video format was only ever issued on VHS, no known official copies of DVD or anything newer exist. The audio portion was released as a 3 record package and a 2 CD set, with a rather plain white cover. The CD was reissued in 1998 and given an actual cover taken from a promo flyer for the show, the cover you see above. This is the version of the album that I possess.

As with other ’90’s live Maiden, getting a hold of this on vinyl is an expensive chore. Prices are in the hundreds. It is one I’ll hold off on until a reissue hits or I win the lottery, I can’t really justify shelling out that much for a damn record. I’m not even sure they will ever reissue it but this era’s vinyl is just too rich for my blood.

This is a monster tracklist so I’m going to just post the back cover then I’ll get into the particulars of the album.

There’s honestly not much to say about song selection here – this is a full concert so there was no picking or choosing for the album. It’s a representative setlist of the tour in 1992, which again is the same tour A Real Live One was pulled from.

Speaking of that live album and its companion A Real Dead One, that’s where we can go to do some comparisons. This album has every single song that also appeared on A Real Live One and all but two that are also on A Real Dead One. Granted, the other albums draw from different performances, but we have three live albums that cover nearly identical ground song-wise. It begs the question – what’s the point of all these albums and which one stands out above the rest? The quick and clear answer is this one.

The sound quality of Live At Donington is fairly good overall. The performances sound like they were captured well, but no effort seems to be in production. Steve Harris is listed as the producer on the audio side of things so he would need to answer questions about it, I don’t think he will given how far removed he is from this era.

The performances come off well – it sounds pretty well spirited and energized. This version of the band maybe doesn’t handle the older material as well as they do the current songs but it’s not anything bad, just more basic than what the classic line-up would have delivered. I don’t have any real qualms about the execution here though, I think this live set works fine.

It is maybe a bit tough to pick out actual highlights, though two stand out. The first is the performance of Fear Of The Dark, their current album’s title track that has become a staple of most every Maiden set since release. It’s definitely worth the price of admission here.

The other true highlight comes at the album’s close. It’s not unusual for Maiden to perform Running Free, but it is unusual for former guitarist Adrian Smith to join them onstage while they do so. This brief “reunion” was a nice tip of the hat to the band’s 1980’s heyday. And while we didn’t know it at the time, Adrian being onstage with his replacement Janick Gers was a preview of the Iron Maiden line-up we’d have from 1999 until the present day.

Overall there’s a lot to like about Live At Donington – it is a rare complete show from a band who releases live albums like water but rarely hands out complete one-night performances. It was a good energy show at the festival and only suffers from questionable production choices that don’t entirely ruin the listening experience. This album is a good summation of Maiden as they were winding down Bruce Dickinson’s first tenure in the group.

The only real question I have isn’t even about Live At Donington, it’s about the two live albums from the same era and mostly even tour that preceded it – with this complete package, why did A Real Live One and its companion even see the light of day? I don’t know, but what I do know is that I’m finally done talking about ’90’s era Iron Maiden in this live series.

The Iron Maiden Live Album Series

Live At Donington (you are here)

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A Real Dead One – The Iron Maiden Live Album Series

On October 6, 2023February 11, 2024 By bigbadburchIn Iron Maiden Live Album Series18 Comments

On we plow through the 1990’s live Iron Maiden stuff. I didn’t pull punches last week when discussing A Real Live One and its awful sound quality. Does its companion album have something better in store?

A Real Dead One is in very similar fashion to its predecessor – this is a collection of songs from different stops on a tour. Most of the songs are culled from the A Real Live One tour in April and May of 1993, while 3 of the songs are taken from the same August 1992 tour that the prior live album was made of. 2 more cuts are from the same Helsinki, Finland show that was well represented on the prior album. The newer shows feature 2 cuts each from the same shows in Germany and Switzerland, while everything else is from shows represented once.

On to the cover art, again from the artist who brought Eddie to life, Derek Riggs. This features Eddie as a radio DJ in what I think is a very awesome piece of art. I always really liked this cover and total props for this cool art that’s a bit out of the way for typical Eddie portrayals.

The line-up is the same as the prior album, with Janick Gers in place at guitar in succession of Adrian Smith. There was a dark cloud over this tour however, as it had been announced previously that Bruce Dickinson was leaving Iron Maiden. He was burned out and wanted to truly explore a solo career, but he agreed to this tour so as not to leave the band hanging and also to bid farewell to his mammoth era in the group. In fact, Bruce was out of the group by the time this release hit store shelves in October of 1993.

The other quirk of this album is that it bookends its predecessor A Real Live One by doing the opposite of what the prior one did – while the former only featured songs from albums after Powerslave, this release only featured songs from that album and before.

I discussed last week how A Real Live One isn’t the cheapest set around – an original CD is easy to get, but the vinyl is not at all easy or cheap. This one is even worse by a fair magnitude – it’s a few hundred dollars in recent Discogs listings. These have never been reissued so the scarce ’90’s vinyl is the only option outside of unofficial copies if you want this on your turntable. Also there the double CD reissue with A Real Live One, called fittingly enough A Real Live Dead One. Great way to get both at once but that CD set is a bit more than the average CD.

Here’s the tracklist, then I’ll get into the song selection and the actual content.

The Number Of The Beast

The Trooper

Prowler

Transylvania

Remember Tomorrow

Where Eagles Dare

Sanctuary

Running Free

Run To The Hills

2 Minutes To Midnight

Iron Maiden

Hallowed Be Thy Name

The song selection is pretty cut and dried, this contains a fair few of the obvious Iron Maiden hits. A lot of these songs are in every setlist or are featured most of the time during tours even to this day, this is a foundation of Maiden classics.

But about half of this stuff is off the beaten path. Having songs like Prowler and Remember Tomorrow is pretty cool, those don’t pop up a lot. And the instrumental Transylvania is a very curious and also welcome choice, that is very out of the way and it’s something that makes this a pretty cool set.

The main knock on A Real Live One is the horrible sound quality – it doesn’t sound good at all. Those issues were rectified on this go around, as this stuff all sounds pretty nice. It’s clear and resonant, it isn’t a muddy mess like the first one was. It’s a massive improvement from the one before.

And the performances here are all solid, too. There’s nothing off or uninspired, every song sounds good. Bruce gets in some banter during Running Free as he usually does, and him introducing Transylvania is pretty funny as he has no role on that song.

The live stuff comes to a fitting conclusion with Hallowed Be Thy Name, long the consensus pick for Iron Maiden’s greatest song. The performance from Moscow is great and this was released as a single, finally giving the song a long overdue single release.

It could be said that the performances sound a bit basic or “meat and potatoes” compared to Iron Maiden’s more epic delivery in other eras, though that was the style they were operating in through the early ’90’s so it’s fair to expect that to come through live. It’s not anything really distracting but it is noticeable.

A Real Dead One didn’t set the world on fire sales-wise, but this was Iron Maiden’s career low point so it’s to be expected. Bruce was out by the time this hit shelves and a lot of classic era fans were left disenchanted, not only with Maiden’s happenings but with heavy metal’s fall from grace as a whole. This particular set does give some highlights from a dark time in the band’s history and helps cleanse the aural palette after the awful noise of A Real Live One.

The Iron Maiden Live Album Series

A Real Dead One (you are here)

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A Real Live One – The Iron Maiden Live Album Series

On September 29, 2023February 11, 2024 By bigbadburchIn Iron Maiden Live Album Series18 Comments

I’m now on to the first of three 1990’s live Maiden releases. Maiden England will be covered later on as I’m recognizing the 2013 release, this is purely for simplicity’s sake.

A Real Live One was released on March 22, 1993. The cover art, again done by Derek Riggs, features Eddie playing with some power lines. Eddie can do this because he doesn’t have the mortality thing to worry about. It’s a pretty cool piece of art and one of the final pieces Riggs would do for the band.

This a collection of songs taken from various stops on a 1992 European tour in late August and early September. Out of the 11 tracks 9 are from different venues, with a stop in Helsinki, Finland having 3 tracks on offer.

This release is a bit different in a few ways. It was the first of two companion live albums – this one features only songs from Somewhere In Time through Fear Of The Dark, at the time the band’s most recent album. The companion album A Real Dead One would feature tracks from albums before and is obviously the focus of next week’s post. I personally have no problem with the approach, Maiden had 9 studio albums out by this point so doing this split era kind of thing is no skin off my back.

One other curiosity about these – getting them isn’t the easiest thing in the world. CD copies aren’t bad, and the odd cassette from the original release can still be tracked down. Vinyl, though is another story. This was only released on vinyl in some territories originally and has not been reissued to date. This one is fairly expensive to get, it’d probably set someone back $200, though some deals can be had if a buyer wants to risk shipping from countries with noted unreliable mail service. The release next week is another story in terms of price.

These two initially separate albums were combined in 1998 for reissue purposes, this is the CD I have in my collection. This was widely available in 1998 but is actually kind of scarce now, this 2 CD set is more expensive than just obtaining the separate original CDs. I am very much hoping that camp Maiden will see fit to put out a vinyl reissue of both these albums, I’m honestly uninterested in paying the high prices for scarce ’90’s vinyl.

That about covers the background info, I’ll post the tracklist then get into the gritty details of this release.

Be Quick Or Be Dead

From Here To Eternity

Can I Play With Madness

Wasting Love

Tailgunner

The Evil That Men Do

Afraid To Shoot Strangers

Bring Your Daughter … To The Slaughter

Heaven Can Wait

The Clairvoyant

Fear Of The Dark

First up, the song selection. Everything is from the four most recent albums. At the time that’s not a bad play, their only UK number 1 song is on here as is a wealth of stuff from their 1990’s output. Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son is also well-represented with 3 selections, while Somewhere In Time suffers with the lone cut Heaven Can Wait. But that was a function of most Iron Maiden tours before 2023, that stuff just wasn’t played much so there aren’t any other performances to put on a live album.

In retrospect the 1990’s are considered Maiden’s weakest period, but I won’t use that as a metric for judging the song picks here. That wasn’t really a consideration in 1992 when this tour happened and the songs were picked. I don’t fault doing a ’90’s era live album and I don’t mind the songs picked here. If anything, it’s kind of cool to have a few tracks from No Prayer For The Dying on here. While I’m not over the moon for that album I still don’t really mind it and honestly I don’t think they’ve played a single thing from that record since these early ’90’s tours. And the 5 cuts from Fear Of The Dark are stronger songs from that record, thankfully they didn’t air out any of the crap they also put on that album.

Now it’s on to the quality of the album itself. To be honest and blunt, this album sounds like shit. It is not a quality recording. It is very muddy and not clear at all. This isn’t universally true, some songs do sound a bit better than others, I think it was a reason they reached for more material from the Helsinki show. And a few songs work fairly well even in pretty bad sound quality – I thought From Here To Eternity was pretty enjoyable even in the muck, while Be Quick Or Be Dead seemed to really suffer for the recording quality.

There is a lot of talk from this era about the band themselves being down, there was stuff slung around about Bruce mailing it in and stuff like that. I don’t necessarily hear anything like that, nor would I blame new guitarist Janick Gers for a slip in quality. I think this album’s fatal flaw is the recording quality, the performances themselves honestly come off fine and the crowd sounds like they’re into it all. These might be more basic outings than the more epic feel Maiden had live in the ’80’s but the albums they did around this time were stripped down and basic anyway, so it’s not a surprise that such things would come through live performances to.

It’s hard to pinpoint one real highlight here. I do think that the stuff from Fear Of The Dark comes off a bit better than the other songs, but that’s more a vibe check than anything. And the low points aren’t songs in and of themselves, it’s more that the recording is a bucket of ass and some of these songs get lost in a buzz that shouldn’t be there.

Truth be told this album shouldn’t have been released. Quality control really wasn’t there. It’s nice to have as a document of an unheralded era, but as we’ll see in two weeks, we already have that in better sounding form. For me A Real Live One should be on the scrap heap. We’ll see next week if its companion album fared any better.

The Iron Maiden Live Album Series

A Real Live One (you are here)

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Live After Death – The Iron Maiden Live Album Series

On September 22, 2023February 11, 2024 By bigbadburchIn Iron Maiden Live Album Series21 Comments

The Iron Maiden live album series kicks off with the first official full-length live release and it is a doozy. Live After Death was recorded during the band’s World Slavery tour in 1984 and 1985 and has gone on to be a hallmark of Maiden’s catalog as well as live albums in general.

The band line-up was the classic Iron Maiden configuration – Bruce Dickinson at vocals, Dave Murray and Adrian Smith on guitars, Steve Harris on bass and Nicko McBrain behind the drums. The band plowed through 187 concerts in 331 days, a total marathon that would later lead to exhaustion and tensions, with a break that would inform the band’s following “synth” phase. The stage set and production were replete with Powerslave-themed pieces and of course the band’s revered mascot Eddie.

The bulk of the album comes from four performances at the Long Beach Arena in California from March 13^th through the 17^th. The final five tracks are from earlier shows at the Hammersmith Odeon in London, England from October 8^th through the 12^th.

Figuring out what song came from what show is an arduous task. It’s back to the primary source for Iron Maiden information – the tome Run To The Hills – The Authorized Biography by Mick Wall. In order to tell this story quickly, Steve Harris states that audio was recorded on two nights and video was also recorded on two nights, but apparently not the same two nights. Bruce references Sunday and the fourth performance during Running Free, the only clue present on the album. Video cues offer different suggestions but again, video was reportedly done on other nights so it isn’t a good source to identify the audio. It’s a little bit of a mystery with some other sources indicating that more than one night’s worth of audio is on the Long Beach portion of the album, but it’s too much detective work for me.

Also from Mick Wall’s biography, Steve Harris emphatically states that the band did not make any corrections or overdubs on the live recordings. Producer Martin Birch mixed the album while Maiden were still on tour and the band would get a few tracks at a time to approve. While overdubs are a very common part of live albums, things had been taken a bit far at times. Judas Priest’s Unleashed In The East found Rob Halford re-doing all of his vocals in studio due to source tape issues, and there was a fair bit of buzz about that and other live albums that weren’t quite “live.” Maiden were bold in their stance that this be a truly live album – produced for the best possible content, certainly, but not corrected after the fact.

Before getting into the album itself, it’s mandatory to discuss the cover art, done as usual by Derek Riggs. This is a classic piece of Iron Maiden art, with Eddie bursting out of his own grave, and even getting the full name “Edward T. Head.” There is plenty more to check out on the back, as the piece wraps around with plenty of tombstones inscribed with various easter egg phrases. It is yet another iconic entry into the Eddie art gallery and one of the more popular Maiden posters around.

Live After Death was officially released on October 14, 1985. While most versions include all 18 tracks, it is worth noting that some older CD editions cut off the London portion of the set to save space. Most any modern-era CD reissue presents the concert in full. To my knowledge, any official vinyl and cassette releases present all tracks in full. The track list is as follows –

Churchill’s Speech (intro)

Aces High

2 Minutes To Midnight

The Trooper

Revelations

Flight Of Icarus

Rime Of The Ancient Mariner

Powerslave

The Number Of The Beast

Hallowed Be Thy Name

Iron Maiden

Run To The Hills

Running Free

Wrathchild

22 Acacia Avenue

Children Of The Damned

Die With Your Boots On

Phantom Of The Opera

After all the build up and speculation about exactly what performances these songs came from, let’s actually get into the songs. The song selection is absolutely stellar here. Maiden had the advantage of being only five albums into their career at this point so it was far easier to present a “please everyone” setlist than it is now with them being seventeen albums deep. All of the essential cuts are here from this point in the band’s history, and there some excellent secondary songs presented as well. Stuff like Die With Your Boots On and Children Of The Damned are real treats, as they only get aired out sporadically.

The performances on this album are fantastic, the band is playing with great energy. In what has become Maiden tradition, the songs are amped up a bit and they go by at a faster pace than their studio versions. Take the band’s epic Rime Of The Ancient Mariner – on Powerslave it is a 13:45 track, while here it clocks in at 13:03. The band are truly plowing through the songs here, which has been a criticism for some fans but a selling point for others.

It is in this frantic pace that the band’s magnum opus truly shines – Hallowed Be Thy Name is a spectacular cut from this live album and it has a whole new energy not present on the original studio version. It stands to reason that what is widely considered Maiden’s best song would shine here, but it truly opens up and becomes an even greater entity on this record.

There are some unique moments to be found beyond the songs themselves. Opening the set is the famous speech Winston Churchill gave to English Parliament in 1940 as World War II was in full swing. This has become “married” essentially to Aces High, itself about the Battle of Britain. And for stage banter, look no further than Running Free. Instead of getting the song overwith in a few minutes as it typically runs, there are about five extra minutes added on. This is a long section where Bruce plays with the audience to see who can scream the loudest and he has quite a bit of fun with it. At the end of other songs Bruce famously implores the crowd to “Scream for me, Long Beach!” This is now a common part of Iron Maiden and Bruce Dickinson lore.

Live After Death did very well on release. It charted at number 2 in the UK, number 19 in the US and appeared on charts in 11 other countries. It has been certified platinum in the US and double platinum in Canada, as well as gold in the UK and in 4 other countries.

And beyond the welcome sales numbers, Live After Death is a true hallmark in both Iron Maiden’s lexicon and in live music in general. This was praised by critics and is hailed by fans as one of the band’s best works. A few other live records coming up also vie for the title of “Best Iron Maiden live album,” but the general consensus holds this one up as the winner.

That just about does it for the first entry in the live album series. A few more months of sorting through Maiden’s quite extensive live catalog lay ahead, then at the end we’ll all see if I think this one is the best or if I have a rogue pick. Until then, scream for me, Internet!

The Iron Maiden Live Album Series

Live After Death (you are here)

Rock In Rio

En Vivo!

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