Looks can be misleading. Iron Maiden are not young men—Steve Harris, the band’s founder, bass player and primary songwriter, is 68, and, let’s be quite blunt here, he looks it. But I suppose a life spent pretty much constantly touring and performing some quite alarmingly intense heavy metal will do that to you. And the rest of Iron Maiden are of comparable age. These are men who should be at home having a nice cup of tea.
But put them on a stage together, and you could easily imagine that we were back in the 1990s, Iron Maiden’s heyday. They might be old, but there is no denying the incredibly youthful energy they brought to Auckland’s Spark Arena last night. They ripped through their fifteen-song set—two hours; they do play some very long songs—with a ferocity that men of their age rarely can find.
Let’s put this down to the fact that Iron Maiden are still, nearly fifty years after Harris first put the band together, recording and touring new material. No reformations, no greatest-hits tours, no nostalgia trip—this show was part of their Future Past world tour, with, to be fair, nods to their past, but focussed almost as much on their new material.
The show kicked off with Caught Somewhere In Time, from the 1986 album of the same name. Relative newcomer Janick Gers (he’s with the band since 1989, but still…) tripped and pranced and duckwalked like he’s been watching too much Angus Young on YouTube; Harris swung his bass like a machine gun between foot-on-the-monitor classic heavy metal poses. Dave Murray and Adrian Smith, the backbone of Iron Maiden’s sound, riffed and soloed and tore through crowd favourites like The Prisoner and Fear Of The Dark. There’s not too much to say about Nicko McBrain; so huge was kit that, even though the stage was relatively low, it was hard to see him behind his toms. But we heard him, though; oh, yes, we definitely heard him, driving the music with drumming that was complex and intense in equal measures.
And we heard Bruce Dickinson. His vocal style is such an integral part of the Iron Maiden sound that Harris’ songwriting changed massively when Dickinson replaced original vocalist Paul Di’Anno for the band’s third album, Number Of The Beast, the better to match Dickinson’s air-raid-siren signing. But Beast is an album from well over forty years ago, and Dickinson, now well into his late 60s (not that you’d guess as he marches, bounces, strides, leaps across the stage, moving like he’s still the competition fencer he once was), is not the singer he was then, his voice deeper, and not always the better for it—recent recordings sound like a 45 being played at 33rpm. But on stage, his voice has all the vitality and urgency that it had back in the glory days of Peace Of Mind and Powerslave.
The same is true of much of the music. Iron Maiden, as we’ve noted, were a different band for their first two albums. Their eponymous debut album was woefully underproduced, but it contained such ragged gems as the punk-glitter roar of Running Free and the barkingly magnificent Phantom Of The Opera, but that album is almost completely forgotten; were it not for Iron Maiden itself, the band’s anthem and the nightly opportunity to trot out Eddie, it would likely be as absent from the setlist as Killers, their second and final album with Di’Anno and Iron Maiden’s undervalued masterpiece. But only Harris and Murray remain from the lineup that recorded that first album. But their work since then, in the studio, has had a tendency to err toward the pedestrian—complex works, but a touch leaden, the chugga-chugga riffs and Harris’ trademark bass triplets become a little repetitive, with uninspired and overly-expository lyrics (Alexander The Great‘s “He utterly beat the armies of Persia” a particular egregious example; it read like an overly-literal translation from the original Attic). On stage, however, there’s a dimension to this music that feels like it’s missing in the studio. The translation from recording to performance benefits Iron Maiden’s music enormously; what might sound a tad lumpen on vinyl finds an immediacy that brings songs to life.
A lot of this is, clearly, due to the fact that all six five visible members of the band are quite obviously having an enormously good time playing these songs. The audience—mostly in their 30s and 40s, but with a decent smattering of pensioners, bobbing their heads in time with driving heavy metal they were gently rocking out to—were enjoying the show, but Harris and crew were having every bit as much fun performing it. And perhaps nobody was having as much fun as Dickinson. Almost every song had a tale to accompany it—some, like the Sydney-based, non-more-cockney shaggy-dog story that led into Can I Play With Madness, hopelessly contrived; others, like the history lesson that prefaced Death Of The Celts, a little platitudinous—but Dickinson knew how to connect with his audience. And he knew where he was; greeting the “mad Maoris” in the crowd went over better than I was afeared it might, and he certainly made sure to get on the side of tangata whenua in his intro spiel to Time Machine as he called the rangatira of the great waka “geniuses” for making their way to these islands without modern technology. He knew he had a friendly audience to work with, and he did a bang-up job of connecting with them. Fun was had, on stage and off.
The last time I saw Iron Maiden, they were flogging their fifth album, Powerslave, at Manchester’s Apollo Theatre. That was, I hate to remind myself, forty years ago or more. But unlike many of their contemporaries, they’re sounding every bit as vital, as urgent, as forceful as ever. No, forget that. They sound better. Better than they did in the 1980s. And that’s a very, very rare thing. But then, Iron Maiden are, clearly, a very special band.
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