IRON MAIDEN: WHAT’S IT ALL ABOUT, EDDIE?

Heavy Metal. Now—wait. Before you all go screaming off into the night, crossing yourselves and mouthing prayers to the soul of Michael Jackson, read on. Heavy Metal is rock ’n' roll's bastard child; it is a term that has been used to classify and therefore sweep into the cupboard a style of music that has never been totally accepted—not only by society at large, but also by supposedly knowledgeable and open-minded music fans as well. It don't get no respect.

While the stereotypes attending rock ’n! roll may be bad (outlaws, irresponsible, corrupter of youth), the stereotypes attending Heavy Metal have been worse, making it the victim of possibly the worst knee-jerk reactions since Captain Bligh. People pick on it because they know they can get away with it.

Stereotypes: Granted, a lot of HM music is offensive— sexist, violent, etc. So is a lot of rock ’n’ roll: "Little T&A." "Flesh For Fantasy.” "Hot Legs.” Granted, a lot of HM imagery is offensive. So is a lot of rock ’n’ roll's: Prince, Madonna, Billy Idol, Toto. It's all a matter of taste. Loud, thundering, aggressive, guitar-based and tough music: loud, aggressive, tough and leather-coated images. The difference between, say, Judas Priest and the Ramones is not as great as an elitist musicologist manque might hope. The Ramones' "Mama's Boy” is actually a lot nastier than "Jump.” Boy George and Dee Snider could exchange make-up tips with each other and bitchy remarks with Joan Rivers.

It's time to stop worrying and learn, if hot to love, at least to understand and tolerate Heavy Metal. A very good band to start with in search of Truth and Justice in the Heavy Metal Way is Iron Maiden.

This five-piece British band has been around for nearly 10 years, bravely starting out and growing up when punk was starting out and growing up. Surviving punk’s extinction of many hard rock bands, and gaining popularity along the way. the Maiden now has five albums to its credit, each more and more successful; the latest. Powerslave. has gone gold and is right under platinum at this very moment in the States. Hitting its stride in the post-punk brave new world has earned for the Maiden the rather dubious and humorous sobriquet of the New Wave of Metal.

Iron Maiden, with songs about mythical heroes, legends, bravery, wars and dying with your boots on, follows in a line of classic adventure material from Edgar Rice Burroughs to John Wayne to Conan. In a sense, Heavy Metal is like Gothic novels for adolescents, full of melodrama, excitement, adventure, passion, impossibly heroic situations and plenty of vicarious thrills supposedly good for the catharsis of the troubled soul.

Heavy Metal is also largely a live phenomenon, so this questing reporter caught up with Iron Maiden during the band's 13-month. 28-country "World Slavery Tour,” first talking to singer/songwriter Bruce Dickinson before a show in Worcester, Massachusetts, and catching up with bassist/songwriter/founding member Steve Harris during the band's five-night sold-out run at New York City’s Radio City Music Hall(originally scheduled for seven, two were cancelled due to illness).

Though Dickinson is the more eloquent of the two, he also had a bit more of a chip on his shoulder, seemingly about the press. A very well-read and well-spoken kind of guy, Dickinson can just as easily discuss the finer points of Jung, the psychological aspects of fencing (of which sport he is a devoted competitor) and the allegorical implications of the TV show The Prisoner as he can the more visceral and certainly more simple elements of Heavy Metal.

TURN TO PAGE 54

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 25

You started your tour behind the Iron Curtain, to extremely well-received shows. Why do you think people there are such enthusiastic hard rock fans?

BD: I think you find that wherever the media hasn’t had much of a chance to get its teeth in, people tend to take to hard rock naturally. It’s loud, raucous, entertaining, covers a variety of interesting topics and facets of life, and therefore it’s extremely popular. And despite the efforts of the media to kill it off—I mean, we must be about the only form of music in the world where the media, the press and the radio, have virtually a conspiracy in some countries, in the world—

You still say that?

Oh, yes.

But since 1982, let’s say (when Iron Maiden had its first huge commercial .success with the LP The Number Of The Beast and the single “Run To the Hills’’), Heavy Metal has become, while not fashionable, much more accepted.

Yes, I’m glad it has become more accepted, but there are still the journalists in—it’s become more accepted in that it’s got its own magazines.

And they sell very well.

Yeah, sure, but they sell to rock fans. There’s been no attempt on the part of what I would call the rest of the media to accept it. What do you call the rest of the media?

Newspapers—hey, look, somebody will go along to see a David Bowie show, and he brings on a big scary monster onstage or something and they go, “It was wonderful, it was very entertaining and everybody had a party.” They go along to an Iron Maiden concert and we bring a big scary monster and suddenly we’re worshipping the devil or we’re scaring small children, or whatever particular bogey you want to lay at the door of music. People love to lay it at our door.

Some groups actually use the whole devil worship thing for publicity, some groups play up to it, which we never have done, but it’s been more or less thrust upon us and we’ve been trying to debunk it for the last two years, after the release of Number Of The Beast. The whole concept was so absurd. And Piece Of Mind was intended almost as a Monty Python version of Number Of The Beast. What can we do? Yes, let’s saw his head off and take his brain out and eat it. And if they still take that seriously, and we’ve still got people going, “Iron Maiden, they’re blood and gore, terrible covers, you know, desecrating small children...” (He laughs).

Well, you do have a little blood and gore in your lyrics.

Oh, sure. Some of it harmless, some of it not so harmless. I would argue that the not-soharmless stuff is there for a reason. I mean, for example, “2 Minutes To Midnight” deals with a very gory subject (possibility of nuclear war through the arms race) and some of the lyrics there are distinctly unpleasant, but that’s just as it should be, because it’s a very unpleasant subject.

Whereas “Iron Maiden”—“Won’t you come into my room, want to show you all my wares,

I want to see your blood, I want you to stand and stare”—there’s no way that frightens me one little bit. I mean, you can go home and watch it on any Vincent Price movie. So there’s all kinds of different shades and nuances of blood and gore within the band and even so, we’re not entirely devoted to blood and gore. Especially with Powerslave.

Yeah, but we never have been. People have always refused to notice that. They always notice the more sensationalist things in order to get a good angle so they can write about something. The thing about the media is they can’t accept music on its own terms. They have to relate it to “pop” music. Something like country-and-western music, people accept it on its own terms. I mean, it’s not my favorite form of music by any means, but nevertheless a lot of people like it and there’s a definite style of music that goes with it. And I wish people would realize the same thing for hard rock and heavy metal.

One thing I’ve noticed is that the English Heavy Metal crowd is quite different from the American. Generally they’re much less nastily rowdy. Seeing three arrests and one ambulance before the show even started is annoyingly par for the course here—not to mention a friend of mine who was kicked in the face during a Judas Priest show.

SH: We don’t generally get that sense from the audience when we’re up there. Quite often, unless we see a fight or something, we don’t really get much feeling of there being tense situations going on. I suppose you’d feel it more being in the audience. I think the problem with American audiences is they tend to get too drunk or something, sometimes, before the shows. They go into liquor stores and start drinking in the parking lot, and I think in England they don’t tend to do that. They might go down the pub and have a couple of pints of beer, maybe, but generally not. They just go and have a good time, see the band, hear the music; and they don’t tend to get really out of it. I think it’s really—well, it’s not what we’re into. We’re not into drugs and stuff, anyway, especially drinking beer before a concert. But I suppose it’s different people’s ideas of having a good time. Sometimes in Europe it happens, in Italy. But I think it’s really in the States where they seem to be associating concerts with getting out of it. It’s a shame, really.

☆ ☆ ☆

Being that this is the first time I’ve heard an artist be so honest about his audience, Harris deserves a special commendation. And by the way, this is not a criticism of America, so all your jingoistic yahoos who’ve been brainwashed by Sammy Hagar put your crayons down. Now back to the interview, already in progress. ☆ ☆ ☆

Do you still get annoyed with Heavy Metal not being taken seriously? Why do you think that happens?

Well, I wish people would look at it a bit differently— at least give it a chance and look at it. A lot of people dismiss it without really knowing what it’s about. I wish they would give it more of a chance.

I think a lot of it has to do with the image, the studs and everything else. People sort of get frightened off by that. But we don’t really wear too much of that stuff (and they don’t). With the name, and being a Heavy Metal band or whatever, and what’s been put to us with Beast and all this business, if people don’t know anything about us, really, except what they see on the surface, then they freak out, you know (he laughs). Really, it’s not like that at all. We’re not devil worshippers. We’re normal blokes.

Have you ever thought, then, of changing; for example, not playing ‘‘The Number Of The Beast’’ anymore?

No, ’cause it’s a good song. You know, with the cover of Number Of The Beast, we didn’t think anyone could take it too seriously, but a lot of people did. I mean, if you look at the cover I find it hard to see how people could take it too seriously.

Maybe it’s because you were so close to it and knew the thought processes behind it.

, Yeah. Maybe it’s just our sense of humor. I don’t know. Like on Piece Of Mind, for instance, we actually put a backwards message on the end, just to sort of mess people up, really. It was like our in-joke.

What’d it say?

It was Nicko did the voice. He does a really good version of Idi Amin, so he did it in an Idi Amin voice. The basic message was, don’t meddle with things you don’t understand. It’s just our warped sense of humor. A lot of people don’t pick up on it.

Speaking of humor ever since I heard and saw Monty Python’s “Albatross’’ skit I haven’t been able to think of “The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner’’ in the same way (Maiden does a 13-odd-minute long version of the classic Samuel Taylor Coleridge poem).

(laughs) Yeah. When we did five nights in London, what we were going to do was each night get a different person— our manager, a couple of our friends—to actually walk in the audience shouting, ‘Albatross! Albatross!’ In the end it didn’t come about, but we should’ve done it. It would’ve been pretty funny. tY ☆

Dickinson says about Iron Maiden’s appeal to its fans, “They have to have outlets, and we’re their outlet. And not only that, with us you can also escape on different levels, whichever area of your imagination you want to go to, you can.”

When you think about it, that’s really not so different than what any music fan gets from whatever genre to which he/she may be partial. So that’s one stereotype and argument shot down. Now it’s up to the audience—o.n both sides.