The Crooked Wanderer

En Vivo!

Nights Of The Dead – Legacy Of The Beast Live In Mexico City (you are here)

The Book Of Souls: Live Chapter – The Iron Maiden Live Album Series

On December 8, 2023February 11, 2024 By bigbadburchIn Iron Maiden Live Album Series19 Comments

Getting towards the end of the live album series here, though rest assured that the series will grow in the future, we won’t spend long without a new Maiden live album taking up more of my precious vinyl storage space.

The album title here makes things very easy to decode – this is the live album from the tour cycle for The Book Of Souls. The tour ran 2016 and ’17 and the shows here are mostly from 2016, with only two performances being on the 2017 run, for reasons that will be obvious in a minute. I did personally see this tour twice, once each year.

The songs are gathered from a variety of tour stops and represent a good chunk of the inhabited world. Sadly neither show I attended was picked, as nothing from the United States was chosen. The show must go on despite my wounded American exceptionalism. A few cuts come from major metal festivals, one from the almighty Wacken festival in Germany and two from the 2016 Download fest in England. The two Download songs mark the only “repeat” venue across the 15 tracks.

The band line-up is the same as it’s been all through the reunion era – Steve Harris in charge and on bass, Bruce Dickinson singing, the guitar threesome of Dave Murray, Adrian Smith and Janick Gers, and Nicko McBrain doing the drumming.

There was one huge question going into this tour – how was Bruce Dickinson going to sound? This wasn’t just a question of Bruce getting older – he had been treated for throat cancer in 2015, before the release of The Book Of Souls. It was something I was wondering about in early 2016 before the show then, fair to say that any concerns about the illness impacting his performance were quashed early on.

There was also a legal issue that would affect the 2017 setlist. Maiden were sued over songwriting to their magnum opus Hallowed Be Thy Name. The song had borrowed lyrics from the 1973 song Life’s Shadow by Beckett, a band that Maiden manager Ron Smallwood had been the agent for. Camp Maiden had a longstanding arrangement in place with a Beckett member who was billed as the song’s sole writer, but in the 2010’s a new lawsuit emerged from another Beckett band member who claimed he was cut out of a rightful share. This kept Hallowed… out of the setlist in 2017, the suit was settled out of court in early 2018.

This is all relevant here as the live album mirrors the 2017 setlist, despite having been mostly recorded from 2016 shows. There was one other change beyond removing Hallowed Be Thy Name – the BoS song Tears Of A Clown, a tribute to the tragic death of beloved actor Robin Williams, was also cut from 2017 sets. The BoS song The Great Unknown was added in, as was the early classic cut Wrathchild.

A quick note on video – while most live packages up to this point have had a physical video release, this one only got a digital video issue. Everything is freely available to watch on YouTube, so this did mark the likely end of the “old school” video releases from Maiden. Kind of sad in a way but that’s how changes roll.

Let’s do the usual – go ove the tracklist, then get into the music itself. This won’t take too long as it’s the typical reunion era album tour format.

If Eternity Should Fail

Speed Of Light

Wrathchild

Children Of The Damned

Death Or Glory

The Red And The Black

The Trooper

Powerslave

The Great Unknown

The Book Of Souls

Fear Of The Dark

Iron Maiden

The Number Of The Beast

Blood Brothers

Aces High

Going right into the reason for this album being – the songs from The Book Of Souls. There are several pretty obvious inclusions here – opener If Eternity Should Fail, the track Steve Harris knicked off of Bruce’s solo album, also opens the show and works great in that spot. The album’s single Speed Of Light is a quick and shorter number that also easily works live. And the title track Book Of Souls is another just amazing Janick Gers title track masterpiece.

We do also get Death Or Glory, another Maiden airplane dogfight song that is fine but not everyone’s cup of tea. The Great Unknown is another song that I’d also call fine but not necessarily remarkable. I would have preferred having Tears Of A Clown on the live album over either of those but Steve Harris didn’t ask me my opinion.

There is one other BoS song here – the monster epic The Red And The Black. This is the third-longest song Maiden have recorded, beaten out only by Rime Of The Ancient Mariner, and that only by 20 or so seconds, and then Empire Of The Clouds by several minutes. Opinion on The Red And The Black is divided, all I can do is offer mine – I absolutely love the song and I’m glad I got to hear it live twice and also have it on this release. It’s one of those songs that I play and take in every second and feel like only five minutes have passed when it’s over, I just don’t process that it’s as long as it is. So nothing but praise for me there.

There aren’t any real “hidden gem” songs here. We could call Children Of The Damned one – it was played a lot in its day but is kind of a treat in modern setlists, I guess. Powerslave is also one I don’t often expect to pop up, it does eat a few more minutes of stage time than others but I’ll never complain about hearing it.

There is an interesting bit in the encore – we can see by this point that the Brave New World opus Blood Brothers has been elevated to encore status. The song has been one of the most well-received of the reunion era and it’s a rightful Maiden anthem at this point, so it does fit well in this spot.

Beyond that, everything here is obvious picks. They are the same songs on most every other Maiden live release and yes, you do run a lot of the same ground when you release more live albums than other bands release total studio albums. Not a complaint from me, merely an observation.

The sound here is really good – this sounds live and still comes across clear and listenable. It’s a very solid recording that captures things very well and is “put together” out of its several different performances to fashion a very cohesive listening experience. No complaints at all in that department.

Overall this is a pretty remarkable live album. I probably do fawn over it a bit more because I caught them twice on this run, but it’s an impressive display of a band now in total legend status still able to captivate with a brilliant set, and showcase a lot of new material in the process. Big props for this one.

Next week I’ll wrap up the series proper with a look at the most recent live record, a career-spanning set recorded in 2019.

The Iron Maiden Live Album Series

En Vivo!

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

The Book Of Souls – Live Chapter

Bruce Dickinson – Afterglow Of Ragnarok

On December 6, 2023December 5, 2023 By bigbadburchIn Song Of The Week10 Comments

Usually I do a “song of the week” but this week we’ll get two as I have the new Bruce Dickinson single in my hands and, as luck would have it, there are two songs on it. One of them many are already familiar with, but we’ll get to that.

Afterglow Of Ragnarok is the lead single from Bruce’s forthcoming album The Mandrake Project. The album has now had its tracklist previewed and will be released on March 1^st, 2024. Anticipation is high among the fanbase for this one, as this is Bruce’s first solo album since 2005, nearly a two decade wait. This first single was released to streaming on Friday, December 1^st and it was also issued on 7-inch vinyl, which I got in the mail this past Monday.

The single package includes a small comic book which sets up the story being told in this concept album. There will also be a graphic novel running alongside the album that further gets into the crazy story Bruce has set up here. The music video for this song and the small comic inside the vinyl seem to be setting up the same story.

Afterglow Of Ragnarok

The A-side is the title song here so let’s hit that up first. You may notice the video is 8 minutes long, but rest assured the actual song is a more lean 5:40. There is an intro and extended credits cut on the video here.

This is one heavy, heavy song. It does go into some more melodic sections that give Bruce room to shine (well, sort of, we’ll get into that in a second) but this is seriously heavy stuff from Roy Z. It’s honestly a little stark just how hard hitting this one is. Not in a bad way at all, but there’s an edge here beyond what we’ve heard from Bruce or his other outfit.

Lyrically this one is a tough nut to crack. It’s not one of those songs that offer something to the usual human experience and that anyone can take a bit of meaning from. This is a pretty dense affair that has all to do with the story being told. The song functions well on its own but it will require hearing the whole album and knowing more about what the hell is going on to really get into the theme.

There is a pretty big issue here, one that I am far from alone in bringing up. For whatever reason, Bruce’s vocals are fairly buried in the music here. The instruments, which again are heavy as all hell, are somewhat flooding out a guy known as the Human Air Raid Siren. It’s a very noticeable flaw here and one I put down to production. Bruce sounds fine, all concerns about his age and past throat cancer aside. He may not wail like it’s 1984 but he can still carry a tune plenty well enough to do this solo record. But a puzzling choice was made to put his vocals under the music for some reason and it sticks out. It is maybe a bit better on the actual vinyl as opposed to digital but it’s still noticeable. I don’t know how this all works but I’m hoping someone can stealth fix this issue a bit before the full album releases, at least get the digital version of the album set straight. I do still like the song and I’ll gladly play the album but this flaw can’t be looked over.

If Eternity Should Fail (demo)

The B-side offers up a bit of a treat and a song nearly 10 years old now. This is the demo recording Bruce and Roy Z did of this song back when they were first laying plans for this album. The album was supposed to go by this title and this was presumably either the centerpiece or the starting point for the huge story.

Well, something got in the way, and that something is Steve Harris and Iron Maiden. Steve heard this demo and really liked the song, and as you may notice it is the opening track of The Book Of Souls. This led Bruce back to the drawing board and he chose a new title for the album and, after some rewrites on the background story, he also re-christened this song. I presume the track Eternity Has Failed from the album will bear some resemblance to this one but also be its own entity.

But here we have the original demo recording done in 2014. It is pretty well what most would think – it’s a demo version of this song. It is basic in structure though the song is fairly well formed, it hits the same beats as it does in its final form and there isn’t anything missing or altered. It is bare bones compared to the Maiden version but that’s certainly excusable as this is only Bruce and Roy’s demo version, they didn’t even get a chance to finish it. It’s a cool thing to have as a B-side, especially since the song proper didn’t make the album. We also get to clearly hear Bruce speak what is a bunch of distorted vocal gibberish on the end of the finished Maiden version – it’s all stuff that directly relates to Bruce’s story but Steve said to leave it on the Maiden album because “lol,” I guess.

One further note – as of now, this B-side seems to only be available on the physical vinyl single. I could not find it on any official digital service and I’m not gonna bother posting a random YouTube version that will probably get taken down in a day. This is more of a cool bonus track anyway, it’s not something essential to the album itself.

That about covers it for this new single, ahead of one of my most anticipated albums of 2024. The old guard are still flying the metal flag, gotta enjoy it while we can.

Maiden England 88 – The Iron Maiden Live Album Series

On December 1, 2023February 11, 2024 By bigbadburchIn Iron Maiden Live Album Series18 Comments

This week we’re back to 1988 and the celebrated Maiden England tour. This live set comes from two shows at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham, England. The shows were played at the end of November and then put together for a live video and audio package, though we get into some interesting stuff when it comes to the album’s release dates.

This was originally offered on video form in 1989 – even on LaserDisc, the vinyl-sized CD precursor to the DVD. It was not released in audio form until 1994, when a CD was issued. However – neither of these initial packages were the complete show, both omitted the encore. In 2013 the set was re-released in complete form both audio and video, and officially on vinyl for the first time. This coincided with Iron Maiden’s tour through 2012 and ’13, which was a recreation of the Maiden England package with a few setlist tweaks.

I know most people who see this will likely know what I’m about to say, but I do want to offer a caveat to anyone who maybe isn’t all that familiar with the Iron Maiden timeline or release windows – this live set I’m discussing is from the 1988 tour, despite being released in 2013. This is not a live set chronicling the 2012 and 2013 tour – there is no official live material for that tour cycle. I could see where someone new to looking at all of this could be easily confused by it.

The line-up here is the band’s classic era roster – The Captain Steve Harris on bass and bandleading, Bruce Dickinson at the mic, the guitar tandem of Dave Murray and Adrian Smith, and Nicko McBrain on the drums.

We do have another compare and contrast feature here – the cover art for the different versions was changed. Up above I’ve actually posted the original 1989 cover art, a badass image featuring a leather-clad Eddie flying over a concert crowd on a motorcycle. It’s a pretty iconic image of Eddie, no doubt about that. The 2013 reissues saw modified art, with Trooper Eddie in his redcoat uniform leaping on a horse over a cannon. The more recent cover art was done by artist Hervé Monjeaud, while the original cover and other associated artwork in the reissue was courtesy of Eddie’s iconic artist Derek Riggs. The newer art is very worthy by all means, but that original Riggs image is just massive stuff.

Let’s do the usual thing – look at the tracklist, then jump into the sounds and highlights.

Moonchild

The Evil That Men Do

The Prisoner

Still Life

Die With Your Boots On

Infinite Dreams

Killers

Can I Play With Madness

Heaven Can Wait

Wasted Years

The Clairvoyant

Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son

The Number Of The Beast

Hallowed Be Thy Name

Iron Maiden

This is all from the Seventh Tour Of A Seventh Tour, which obviously was in support of the album Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son. This set kind of reads like one of the reunion-era set lists, in that you get six songs from the current album, maybe a few hidden gems, then a grouping of obvious hits. Given that Seventh Son… is my favorite Maiden album, you won’t hear me complain about it being the focus of this package.

We get a good assortment of songs from Seventh Son… here. The singles are here, as well as Infinite Dreams, which would be a single released from this set. We also get the epic and amazing title track, which is a massive treat for a live performance and not one the band busts out all of the time given that now they have a billion epic-length songs to choose from.

We do get a couple of more out of the way songs from the earlier days here in The Prisoner, Die With Your Boots On and Still Life. The latter especially hasn’t been featured in too many other places. The Prisoner and Die With Your Boots On had a bit more representation in other live releases but it’s always nice to hear them again.

The prior album Somewhere In Time gets a bit of representation here, with the obvious single Wasted Years and then Heaven Can Wait, which gets a fair bit of live play. It’s a shame the album didn’t get a ton of play live before 2023 but stuff happens, I guess.

The other songs are a fair collection of the obvious songs Maiden would play live. Killers was a live staple in the early days, and the three encore songs are ones that aren’t getting cut at a Maiden gig. Well, one would, but we’ll get to that next week.

There is a glaring omission on this set – The Trooper was not played. It seems really weird that it got cut for this tour. The song was in the set for earlier tours the same year in other parts of the world, I don’t know why they chose to cut it here. I haven’t watched the documentary of this time period in many years so I don’t recall if it was brought up on there or not. But the song’s absence does stand out.

As for the sound quality – this is good, in parts very good and in others it feels maybe a bit “off.” I don’t know if the band was out of sync early or if the thing just wasn’t mixed entirely right but there is a bit of odd sounding stuff in the first few songs, this does seem to fade as the set goes on. This isn’t the band’s best sounding live album but it’s not unlistenable by any stretch. It doesn’t require being a superfan or a great deal of effort to get into, but it does sound a hair lesser than other live albums.

Talk of sound quality does require a look at the vinyl – the official vinyl release is on picture disc. Now, I’m not an audiophile by any means, but yes, there is surface noise on the vinyl of this that does pick up on playback. I think it’s even more noticeable here than other picture discs I’ve played where I’ve had very minimal noise. The CD and streaming offerings of this album do sound better.

Overall I do feel like this is a worthwhile live album. It does have a few faults but it’s a great set and it captures a tour from my favorite era of the band. It might be tough to call this one “essential” but I feel it’s worth it.

Next week it’s back to the reunion era as we’re nearing the end of the list here. It was Maiden’s first album in five years, Bruce’s return from a cancer scare, and an epic song was left off the set due to legal wrangling. All that and more in seven short days.

The Iron Maiden Live Album Series

En Vivo!

Maiden England ’88 (you are here)

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

Saxon – Hell, Fire And Damnation

On November 30, 2023November 29, 2023 By bigbadburchIn Song Of The Week5 Comments

First off – I haven’t been on schedule this week at all. This was a combination of the holiday weekend and just general laziness. I’ll have a post today, the next Maiden live album tomorrow, then be back to normal next week.

For today here’s a quick and easy one – this is a new song from metal legends Saxon, who are preparing the release of their 24^th album this coming January. 24 records is absolutely staggering and just a great accomplishment, and that the vast majority of them are solid albums is also fantastic.

This new song Hell, Fire And Damnation was released last week and is the title track from the new record. It is a really nice song, Saxon have had a winning metal formula down now for quite awhile so it’s no huge surprise. The music does suit the pretty heavy topic at hand, which of course are also three of my favorite things – hell, fire and damnation.

I am a bit unclear as to one member of Saxon’s present line-up. The following are in place – Biff Byford as the band’s constant presence on vocals, guitarist Dug Scarratt, Bassist Nibbs Carter and drummer Nigel Glockler are all along for the ride. Back earlier in 2023, co-founding member Paul Quinn retired from touring. It was assumed he was going to be involved with future recording endeavors, but here we have an interesting quirk without a ready answer.

To replace Quinn in the touring line-up, Saxon recrutied longtime Diamond Head mainstay Brian Tatler. He was billed as a touring replacement and did state in certain terms that he would also be continuing with Diamond Head. However, the video clearly features Tatler in it and the video blurb touts the guitar duo of Scarratt and Tatler, so going by these bits of information it appears Brian Tatler is fully Saxon’s second guitarist. I’m sure all of this will be made clearer as the album’s release is closer.

That is about all for this one, it’ll be one of many albums I’m looking forward to next year. I’m curious also to see just how much longer Saxon goes on, but at this point I won’t doubt the great British beast to continue for several more years, anyway.

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