The Crooked Wanderer

En Vivo!

Maiden England ’88 (you are here)

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

En Vivo! – The Iron Maiden Live Album Series

On November 24, 2023February 11, 2024 By bigbadburchIn Iron Maiden Live Album Series18 Comments

Let’s get this first bit out of the way – En Vivo!, as it translates from Spanish, means “as it happens live.” I don’t actually know this myself as I don’t speak Spanish even though I took it for two years in school 100 years ago, but I’ll trust Wikipedia on this one. Google seems to confirm that it has something to do with “live,” so we’ll go with that.

And live is what we have, once again we are on to a reunion era album and its corresponding tour. The feature album this time is The Final Frontier, which was released in August of 2010. The studio album was pretty well received both commercially and critically, though it did “dip” a bit in perception and maybe was under the radar compared to other reunion albums. All of that is relative, of course, I can only speak to what I’ve witnessed over the years.

This album, which also received what is to date the last physical release of an equivalent video component, was released in March of 2012. This concert was recorded in Santiago, Chile in April of 2011. This is another case of a single, complete concert being released officially. While in the end that’s no huge deal, it is cool to have complete documents of shows.

This audio release did chart in many countries, though not all that high in most cases. The video release did chart extremely well. The song Blood Brothers was nominated in the Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance category at the 2013 Grammy Awards, Halestorm was the winner of that one.

I’ll do the normal thing here – post the tracklist, then get into the nuts and bolts of it.

Satellite 15

The Final Frontier

El Dorado

2 Minutes To Midnight

The Talisman

Coming Home

Dance Of Death

The Trooper

The Wicker Man

Blood Brothers

When The Wild Wind Blows

The Evil That Men Do

Fear Of The Dark

Iron Maiden

The Number Of The Beast

Hallowed Be Thy Name

Running Free

So there’s not a whole lot to talk about in terms of song selection, we know by now what we’re getting with these reunion era live albums. It is several tracks from the new album, here we have a sprinkling of other reunion era cuts, and then a whole list of very obvious Maiden live inclusions.

We do get two songs from Brave New World as well as the excellent title track from Dance Of Death. Those are really nice songs to hear still included years later. The Wicker Man is one of the more recognizable and energetic songs from BNW, and Blood Brothers is a Maiden anthem at this point.

The real judgment of this album comes from the songs picked off of The Final Frontier, and on this the band hit a home run. I’d say every critical track is here – the singles like the title track and El Dorado, the quite underrated quasi-ballad Coming Home and two of the album’s epic cuts – The Talisman, and the nuclear war song Where The Wild Wind Blows. Some might quibble about El Dorado but I think everything here works.

Some might also vent over the inclusion of Satellite 15, which is an intro cut. The main issue people seem to have with the song is that it was placed on the studio album as one track along with the first proper song. Here is was a separate track and also different in form. I personally don’t care that much if bands do intro stuff and I simply have other things to care about, it doesn’t bother me.

I could pine for two songs that didn’t make the set – Isle Of Avalon and Starblind. The former might be a bit much to work with live as it is in contrast to the rest of the band’s material, but Starblind would have worked. It would have been super cool to have them but the band typically does about six off the recent album so this pretty well fits the mold.

The performances here all sound good, nothing is off or bad. It’s a good quality recording and probably wasn’t edited, it has a very “in the moment” feel. Maiden generally don’t edit their live stuff but have been known to do so a time or two, but this sounds pretty solid and untouched.

Maiden do again keep more to the songs’ original paces here, maybe sped up by a hair in some cases and honestly a bit slower in others. The band were getting long in the tooth entering the 2010’s and many wondered if the album title hinted at the band’s impending demise. Well, its 13 years since The Final Frontier released and no, Maiden certainly did not intend to quit in the 2010’s.

Overall En Vivo! Is a fine live package from Maiden. The main highlights are the inclusions from the album being featured on the tour. Those who aren’t necessarily out to get every Maiden live album would have to decide how much they want to hear live stuff from The Final Frontier to judge if this is worth a pick-up.

Next week we’ll go back in time for one final visit to the band’s golden 1980’s era and a deluxe offering of a set that showcased Maiden at the end of their peak, or at least their first peak..

The Iron Maiden Live Album Series

En Vivo! (you are here)

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

Flight 666 – The Iron Maiden Live Album Series

On November 17, 2023February 11, 2024 By bigbadburchIn Iron Maiden Live Album Series23 Comments

This week we head to 2009, when Iron Maiden released a live album to coincide with a theatrical documentary release. The band had been approached by Banger Films to do a documentary and Iron Maiden: Flight 666 was the result of that. The film was widely celebrated among fans and also helped truly nail down the group’s legacy. That legacy had been growing exponentially through the reunion era, to a degree that people might not have even realized.

I’ll go over the film in the future, but will fully recommend it to anyone, Maiden fan or not. Today’s focus will be the accompanying live album. These songs were recorded during the band’s Somewhere Back In Time Tour in 2008. As the name implies, the setlist was purely focused on retro material. Every song is from the 1980’s but one, Fear Of The Dark from 1992. This was a hits set and was billed as such. In and of itself that is no problem at all, though it did cause a curious issue regarding what we didn’t get for a live album.

Maiden had come off the tour cycle for A Matter Of Life And Death before this tour. Those shows were unique in that the band played the entire new album on stage, followed by a small encore of signature hits. The emergence of this Flight 666 film gave the band the opportunity to release a live album for that, clearly not a bad idea at all.

But – we lost on an AMOLAD live album, and I would guess it’s because of this. I presume that the film was what kept the group from releasing the “entire album” live set. There is fan speculation that Maiden were taken aback some at the not always enthusiastic response from the crowd at the AMOLAD live shows, and further speculation that this is what caused them to shitcan the live album idea for that tour.

Now, it is true that some people didn’t really know what was going on when Maiden were playing their new album live front to back. People die hard into the band like me would not only enjoy the premise but also eat up the content, but a lot of people at shows haven’t heard or don’t like the new albums. There are plenty of people out there who adore Maiden and will go see them in concert but just don’t like any of the reunion material. Add in groups of fans who weren’t really keeping up with the group and I can see where some were thrown off by the AMOLAD performances.

So the point in all of this is that, perhaps, Maiden chose to write off the AMOLAD stuff due to fan backlash. I don’t know if that’s true, I feel the more practical matter of having a film tie-in led the band to focus on it. But it very well could be true that the band shuffled the deck a bit after not getting as glowing of a reception as they wanted for AMOLAD’s tour. Some guess that all of this was the reason for the Somewhere Back In Time tour in the first place, but again it’s all just a guessing game and we’ll likely never have concrete answers.

So with all the background and speculation and a missing reunion era live album all covered, let’s get into the details of the live album we did get. Flight 666 covers the Somewhere Back In Time Setlist and is a compendium of different stops on the tour. Each song is from a different venue and the locations selected were every inhabited continent except for Europe. It was a really cool way to spread the love as far as possible, so now places like India, Australia and Costa Rica have at least a song documented on a Maiden live album.

Maiden had decent-ish success with sales and album charts on their prior few live albums, but this one really ignited attention. The audio portion charted reasonably well across many territories, including being the first live Maiden in awhile to land on the US Billboard 200 at number 34. The video package, including both the film and concert video, was a smash success, hitting number 1 in 22 separate countries.

Let’s have at the tracklist for this set and then get under the hood of it.

Aces High

2 Minutes To Midnight

Revelations

The Trooper

Wasted Years

The Number Of The Beast

Can I Play With Madness

Rime Of The Ancient Mariner

Powerslave

Heaven Can Wait

Run To The Hills

Fear Of The Dark

Iron Maiden

Moonchild

The Clairvoyant

Hallowed Be Thy Name

As for the sound quality – it is very good. I will say it’s maybe a step off of amazing capture quality, but it all sounds good and is not in any way an unpleasant listening experience. I can see where it would be challenging to get a cohesive set out of 16 performances all in different venues, but it is stitched together pretty well.

As for the performances themselves, they are Maiden in good form and executing things well. They do actually seem to be more on normal tempo here than they often are live, I guess they left the truck stop pills at home for this tour. There generally isn’t anything wrong with their accelerated pace but it is interesting to hear them dial it back a hair on this one.

Now into the song selection. This one is pretty obvious given the nature of the tour. This was a greatest hits set and thus all of the songs are pretty obvious choices. Of course we’d get Aces High and The Number Of The Beast, and of course they’d close with Hallowed Be Thy Name. And really nothing here is a “hidden gem” or deep cut – these are all beloved songs that have been played live a lot before and have been again after this tour.

Some might consider Revelations a bit of a “secondary” track that did get played, but it’s a pretty revered cut and they’ve played it over 600 times live so it’s not a … revelation. The true “treats” on this one might be Rime Of The Ancient Mariner and Powerslave. Both have been on multiple other live albums but their length often keeps them on the sidelines, at least compared to how they’ve played the song Iron Maiden at every single gig.

So what we have is a nice hits package that is played well, sounds good and represents the band’s most popular songs very well. There’s nothing to knock here – some might call this an unnecessary set due to these songs’ proliferation across other live albums, but it’s still nice to have a document of this tour and movie. I have no issue with it and consider it a welcome addition to the catalog. If you’re gonna have this many live albums, might as well have one that runs down the highlights.

Next week it’s back to the reunion era live album cycle, as a possibly underrated studio album got some live light shined on it.

The Iron Maiden Live Album Series

Flight 666 (you are here)

En Vivo!

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

Death On The Road – The Iron Maiden Live Album Series

On November 10, 2023February 11, 2024 By bigbadburchIn Iron Maiden Live Album Series17 Comments

This week’s Iron Maiden live excursion goes back to the reunion era. This album is culled from the 2003 tour for the album Dance Of Death. This was the band’s second album in the reunion era, which at the time was still growing legs but as we know 20 years later has been the most enduring era of Maiden.

Back on one of these earlier live album posts I said something like how there were only two or so of these live albums taken from a single concert. Well, I think I’ve covered four of them by this point that are single-show complete concerts. This one is also a single show concert that features the complete setlist. It was recorded in Dortmund, Germany in November of 2003 and the songs featured on the live record are the same as those they played that night, so this is a complete show.

Now, I don’t know if they did or didn’t cut some things out. I doubt they cut music but they may have trimmed some stage banter or other stuff. I can’t get definitive sources on this so I won’t commit to saying one way or the other, just that it’s an argument I see going around on fan forums. I don’t have the source material of the original concert and I wasn’t there, so I can’t offer personal testimony. But the setlist is the same, from what I can gather.

The audio release of this was in August of 2005, which was right on a year before they’d do their next studio album. The video of this took longer to get out and was hung up on technical difficulties, which I’ll address down the line when I cover the video series specifically. Today it’s just the audio live album.

Our line-up on this album is the same as it’s been through the reunion years – Steve Harris, the capitan on bass, Bruce Dickinson on the mic, Dave Murray, Adrian Smith and Janick Gers on guitars, and Nicko McBrain handling the drums.

We also get original Eddie artwork on this album cover courtesy of Melvyn Grant, who is the general “number two” behind iconic Eddie artist Derrick Riggs. This is a pretty cool cover with Eddie still in his Grim Reaper guise, leading a haunted stagecoach. What this cover isn’t is the eyesore that Dance Of Death is so it automatically wins a lot of bonus points just for that. But it’s also a cool cover art that should be enjoyed on its own merits.

Here’s the tracklist, then we can get into the meat of the album.

Wildest Dreams

Wrathchild

Can I Play With Madness

The Trooper

Dance Of Death

Rainmaker

Brave New World

Paschendale

Lord Of The Flies

No More Lies

Hallowed Be Thy Name

Fear Of The Dark

Iron Maiden

Journeyman

The Number Of The Beast

Run To The Hills

I’ll lead off with sound quality – this one sounds fantastic. In the 2000’s it was far easier to capture good live sound than in the past, so there’s no production issues or wonky sound quality. There’s nothing here to criticize or point out, it’s all great sound.

Song selection does get to be an issue on these reunion live albums, as four of them all follow the same formula – a pile of stuff from the current record, one or two “oddball” selections, then a compilation of the obvious hits. That’s what we have here, as six of these songs are from Dance Of Death. One is from the prior album Brave New World (guess which one!) and one is from the Blaze album The X Factor. And that one, Lord Of The Flies, is a very welcome addition from my perspective. It’s one I always liked from that period and hearing Maiden keep it alive is very nice.

All of the other songs are dead ringers for Iron Maiden setlists. They are the band’s most known and celebrated songs and it’s no surprise they would get aired out live. It does stand to reason that these songs are also on most other live albums so it’s running a lot of the same ground, but there isn’t any real way around that.

So the heart of these reunion live albums is the material taken from the current album Maiden are touring on. Of the six picks here, all are good selections for the live set. Dance Of Death was a bit varied in scope but did have some clear bangers on it and the record is well represented here. And as this live set is a showcase of the album, it is where the live album’s highlights also come from.

The title track is the first real showstopper moment. This song is a masterpiece and it doesn’t disappoint live. Another massive moment is the live airing of Paschendale. Bruce introduces the song with a passage from a 1917 poem by Wilbur Smith called Anthem For Doomed Youth. The song and poem are both about the horrors of World War I. This song is one of Maiden’s best and has for quite some time reigned as my favorite of the reunion era. It would have been criminal, at least to me, not have this in the set and thankfully it was.

The final highlight is a bit of a departure for Maiden. Journeyman is the band’s only acoustic song and they brought it out live for this tour. Maiden going acoustic sounds like an odd choice but the song worked out very well, and it’s evident that the crowd is into it as they sing along with the chorus. It’s very nice to have a memento of this song being done live, might not ever hear it again on stage.

Death On The Road is a very nice live package. It might have some “limitations” in terms of having a lot of the same obvious songs as other live albums, but this one does have a great selection of songs from Dance Of Death and it’s a good performance to boot. It’s not the first one a person just starting out their collection should grab, but it is a worthwhile document of when the reunion era when from being a stint and showed it had staying power.

Next week, it’s somewhere back in time – literally, as the band culled a live set from that tour to accompany a motion picture about them.

The Iron Maiden Live Album Series

Death On The Road (you are here)

En Vivo!

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

Beast Over Hammersmith – The Iron Maiden Live Album Series

On November 3, 2023February 11, 2024 By bigbadburchIn Iron Maiden Live Album Series22 Comments

Up next in the live series is a gem from 1982. This live set took eons to see release – it was originally sent out officially on CD in 2002 as part of the Eddie’s Archive box set. It was then put out on vinyl for the first time officially in 2022, bundled with a re-issue of The Number Of The Beast. This vinyl copy is the one I possess, I do not have the CD box set. This is also available on streaming services. I’ve never really looked but I would assume this was bootlegged to all hell before 2002 and even beyond on vinyl.

This album is cut from from a single performance and is the complete show, at least as I understand it. The gig was on March 20, 1982 at the esteemed Hammersmith Odeon in London. This building, now known as the Apollo, has been host to a staggering array of shows over the decades and a great many of those acts have released live albums from the venue, so Maiden joined pretty elite company with this release.

As a brief note, some video does exist of this gig and was released on Maiden’s Early Years DVD set. I’ll do a video series some time down the line and go over it then.

The line-up for this gig was the same that recorded The Number Of The Beast and also toured behind it – Steve Harris in charge and on bass, Bruce Dickinson singing, Dave Murray and Adrian Smith on guitars, and Clive Burr on drums. Also pretty much part of the line-up is cover artist Derek Riggs, who offered this image of Eddie planting the Union Jack through the Earth, presumably right through London but I can’t tell. The CD issue of this was rendered with a huge white space on the front which kind of detracts from the art, while the vinyl package shows the image in full on the back cover.

There’s a whopper of a tracklist here with 18 songs so let’s have a look at it then get into the meat of the meal here.

Murders In The Rue Morgue

Wrathchild

Run To The Hills

Children Of The Damned

The Number Of The Beast

Another Life

Killers

22 Acacia Avenue

Total Eclipse

Transylvania

The Prisoner

Hallowed Be Thy Name

Phantom Of The Opera

Iron Maiden

Sanctuary

Drifter

Running Free

Prowler

The song selection is pretty straightforward, this was the stuff they were playing on this tour. There were only three albums to choose from so that’s what we get. It covers stuff from all three albums pretty well and there are a few treats to be had. Another Life is a cut from Killers that did get played a fair bit in Maiden’s early days but isn’t otherwise represented on a live album. Drifter and Prowler are early standards but having a Bruce rendition is pretty cool. Drifter is also a very extended jam at nine minutes, with Bruce doing the same aping of Walking On The Moon by The Police that Paul Di’Anno used to do.

There’s also Total Eclipse, which wasn’t an album track when TNOTB came out but Harris and company wish it would have been. It is a far better song than Gangland, which made the studio album but not this or any other live record. Note – the 2022 reissue of TNOTB does replace Gangland with Total Eclipse, this is the same vinyl version that has this live album with it.

To describe the recording and performances in a word – absolutely shit hot amazing. Everything here sounds spectacular. There isn’t a bad note to be found, and the show was captured brilliantly. The performance is rock solid from start to finish, Maiden were in fine form here and it carries over on the recording.

There isn’t a ton of banter here, Bruce does engage the crowd briefly between songs but none of his famous rants he would later become known for. Besides the extended jam of Drifter, there is also an extra guitar solo played after Transylvania. Otherwise the songs are played in their usual forms, which is just fine given the sheer scope of quality found here.

This is a total banger of a live album. While my ranking of all these is still a ways off, make no mistake that Beast Over Hammersmith is one of Iron Maiden’s best live albums. It has been in the same conversations with Live After Death and Rock In Rio as the top pick in many fans’ conversations, and some do choose this as number one. This easily could have been Maiden’s first officially released live album and it would have been more than fine, but the band chose to hold off until 1985 and two more studio albums to pull that trigger. But no one even remotely interested in Iron Maiden should miss this barnburner of a live set, it is insanely good.

Next week it’s back to the reunion era and a fantastic proposal – the music of Dance Of Death without having to look at that shitty album cover.

The Iron Maiden Live Album Series

Beast Over Hammersmith (you are here)

En Vivo!

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

BBC Archives – The Iron Maiden Live Album Series

On October 27, 2023February 11, 2024 By bigbadburchIn Iron Maiden Live Album Series18 Comments

The live set this week explores a box set released in 2002, but the material itself goes back to the earlier days of the band. The first material is the BBC Archives, which serve as a compilation of a few different early Maiden gigs. This is also the only official full-length live album to feature someone besides Bruce Dickinson singing, though Bruce is also on this one too.

This set was released as part of a 6-disc box set called Eddie’s Archive. The set was released in 2002 and reissued a bit later as the first edition was limited and people were clamoring for it. 4 of the 6 discs featured previously unreleased live material while the other 2 discs were a B-sides compilation. This live set and the B-sides comp are only on offer physically in this box as of now. This is digitally available on streaming services, so no one has to hunt down a collectible box set to hear this stuff.

And, as I was dumb and never bought the Eddie’s Archive box when I had plenty of opportunity to 20 or so years ago, this is the one live Maiden album I don’t own in physical form. I’ve only heard this stuff in bits I’ve played off YouTube or wherever over the years. Now, the Eddie box is not actually horribly expensive, it did not spike in price the same way some other rare Maiden offerings have. I may pull the trigger on one as this is one of my big collecting regrets. It’s always possible this live set gets a vinyl press at some point since it never has and the other live set from the box got one last year, but we won’t know until we know.

This does have some cover art, it is Eddie tearing up a BBC building. Pretty cool stuff. This one has a whole bunch of songs so I also snagged a pic of the back cover for easy reference to the tracklist.

Today’s live set has 4 separate gigs on it so I’ll be breaking each thing down by section.

BBC Radio 1 Friday Rock Show – November 14, 1979

Up first is a 4 song set Maiden did for the BBC. This was just before Maiden signed their record deal with EMI and about 5 months before the release of the debut album. The band played songs that would all be on the record – Iron Maiden, Running Free, the instrumental Transylvania and Sanctuary (Sanctuary was not universally available when the album first released)

Looking through the line-up for this gig is pretty interesting. Steve Harris, the bassist and founding member, is of course around. Dave Murray is in on guitar and Paul Di’Anno is the singer. It is Doug Sampson on drums, who did figure on a few other early recordings but would leave the band before they set out to do the first full-length. Also on guitar is Tony Parsons, who was in the band for about two months, this gig was probably right before he was sent away. Mick Wall’s Run To The Hills biography mentions Parsons as a “temporary guitarist” and says not much more about him.

This is a really good sounding set, the material here doesn’t sound radically different from how it would be presented on the album. The band was pretty well primed at this point even with turnover in the second guitar position. The recording quality is very nice, no shock since it was a radio broadcast. It’s a neat little bonus find from the earlier days of the band, not a ton of stuff exists to document Maiden back then.

Reading Festival – August 28, 1982

We now jump ahead a few years and into the Bruce Dickinson era. This was the band’s festival set and is nearly complete, only a cover of ZZ Top’s Tush is left off. We are into the first “classic” Maiden line-up here, so Harris, Murray, Smith and Dickinson with Clive Burr on drums.

This is a pretty cool set to have, it’s the complete set from the day. It is not a 100% fine-tuned performance in terms of production, it is soundboard level stuff and the music is a bit noisy and all over the place. It’s not bad at all, it’s just not “mixed” or whatever and that may not have been a real option depending on source material anyway. It does document the performance pretty well as it probably sounded then.

Bruce is pretty powerful here, he really stands out in his performance and at a few points is almost too much of a human air raid siren over the rest of the music. He has a pretty funny and insightful rant between Run To The Hills and Children Of The Damned about the Satanic Panic surrounding Maiden at the time, he invites the Vicar of Huddersfield to shove his head into a toilet over comments made about Maiden.

The setlist is nice, at the time the band had 3 albums to work with so they did. It is very heavy on The Number Of The Beast, as 6 songs make appearances here. And, as usual, it’s worth mentioning that Hallowed Be Thy Name sounds especially awesome here. Overall this is a cool set to have for this fan-collectible release.

Reading Festival – August 23, 1980

Disc 2 goes straight back to the Reading Festival, except this time it’s two years prior. This means a different line-up, this is Harris, Di’Anno, Murray and Burr, also with Dennis Stratton on guitar. This is not a complete set, the band played 10 that day but only 6 are on this recording. I assume that CD length is the reason for the trimming.

This is a pretty good sounding set. It is a bit rough in spots in terms of recording quality, but still a perfectly listenable presentation. The more rough and tumble Di’Anno era stuff sounds fine in a less than sterling recording environment so it all pans out. The song list is good, nice to see Killers on there several months before the album released. Maiden were already playing their stuff a bit off the rails tempo-wise here so that was a thing from the get go, apparently.

There isn’t a ton of Di’Anno era live stuff out, just stuff scattered across a few EP’s and single B-sides. Other than this release, it’s all bootlegs for the band’s early years so it’s nice to have this as an official release, even if it’s not exemplary sound quality.

Monsters Of Rock – August 20, 1988

The final piece of this live offering is a selection of songs from Maiden’s headlining stint at Castle Donington in 1988. There are 8 songs presented here, whereas the band actually played 19 that day. It would take 2 CDs to cover just this set and also there’s no clue if the source material allowed for that, so we get a portion instead.

It’s also easier to truncate this since there is a full release to chronicle this tour – this is the Seventh Tour of a Seventh Tour timeframe, so the Maiden England release does cover this material. It does seem more fitting to offer up some stuff from different time periods on this release rather than rehash the same ground again.

The line-up here is the band’s classic formation, with Harris, Dickinson, Murray, Smith and Nicko McBrain on drums. It’s also true that this is their current line-up sans Janick Gers.

Everything here sounds really good, it’s no shock that this is the best-captured performance of this release. It is a good selection of songs, a mix of stuff from the most recent album and stone cold classics were chosen here. Maiden are in top form here and this last portion of the live offering is a real treat to end on.

Overall the BBC Archives offer a very cool selection of material – the only real glimpse of Paul Di’Anno live material beyond early EP stuff, an early Bruce festival and then capping off with the prime performance in 1988. This isn’t the definitive live album by any stretch, nor was it meant to be. This is an offering to fans who always clamor for more and were given a very nice set spanning a few different portions of the band’s career, and some live stuff from band members who are long, long gone. This is exactly what it was supposed to be and it’s a very well-assembled offering. Even if not fully “produced,” it’s easily a good enough sound to fully enjoy.

Next week sees the other live portion of the Eddie’s Archive box, which oh by the way might be the greatest live set of the band’s entire career.

The Iron Maiden Live Album Series

BBC Archives (you are here)

En Vivo!

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

Rock In Rio – The Iron Maiden Live Album Series

On October 20, 2023February 11, 2024 By bigbadburchIn Iron Maiden Live Album Series21 Comments

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

Rock In Rio (you are here)

En Vivo!

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

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)

En Vivo!

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

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)

Roc k In Rio

En Vivo!

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