First a little context - where many English children growing up in the seventies attended C of E schools, mine was apparently NW of BHM which, as all former Sounds readers will recall, stood for New Wave of British Heavy Metal. Unfortunately for myself and maybe six other kids, I wasn't massively keen on the form, meaning I was essentially gay 'n' stuff, preferring the rampantly homosexual music of Joy Division, the Ruts, Devo, and a load of other funny haircut bands, as the genre was known at our school. I didn't even like Queen or Judas Priest, for Ozzy's sake! What a massive bender I was!
My unreservedly heterosexual pal Crispin attempted conversion therapy by forcing me to borrow the first two Iron Maiden albums, and to my surprise I found that I actually sort of liked them. It was like the heavy metal I heard blasting from every bedroom window in town, from every garage and milking shed, and yet it had a punky edge which appealed to me; and thus were my ears jimmied at least a little way open. The Number of the Beast followed and I was grudgingly forced to admit that it too was not without merit, even with the addition of a more traditionally hairy rock vocalist who did that wobbly scream thing with his voice and sounded as though he might be wearing silver trousers.
Years passed and I lost touch with anyone who might expect me to borrow further Iron Maiden albums, and so life became much easier in terms of my musical palate. Then one day, probably late nineties, I happened to pass a junk shop when I noticed a box of records outside perched on a table - actually just seven records, the first seven Iron Maiden albums - excluding the live one - for a quid each and in what looked like good condition. The tidiness of the transaction was hard to resist, and even if the four I'd never heard turned out to be rubbish I'd still be able to look at the covers and follow the story of Eddie as he has a lobotomy, reincarnates as an ancient Egyptian God, becomes a futuristic cyborg, and so on and so forth.
The first three sounded even better than I remembered, Piece of Mind, Powerslave and Somewhere in Time all sounded good, and this one sounded fucking amazing beyond all expectation and accordingly glued itself to my turntable for the duration of the next few months.
I appreciate that we're all way too sophisticated for this sort of thing, and that the otherwise mighty Rollins regards Maiden as the most ridiculous band to ever stick their tongues out on a stage; and I know there's a thin line between Maiden and Spinal Tap, but fuck it.
This one was inspired by an Orson Scott Card novel, and accordingly invokes all of usual horror tropes picked up from Dennis Wheatley and Tomb of Dracula comic books, all delivered as Dickinson pulls an operatically scary face to the soundtrack of a million widdly-widdly guitar solos; but even the notion that so melodramatic and populist a take on the occult might be ridiculous is itself ridiculous, unless you somehow think David Tibet has a direct line to the real stuff; and if that's so, let me know when he's recorded anything half as powerful as Moonchild or even Can I Play with Madness.
I still don't understand how Iron Maiden succeed with the same formula as all those other leather studded wankers who made my school years so fucking depressing, apart from that they get it right and don't sound like a bunch of disgruntled farmhands showing off their 50cc motorbikes to each other in the town square on a windy Tuesday evening. They gurn and wail and scream and go right over the top somehow without trying too hard, and they only ever sound like Iron Maiden even on an album such as this with all of its convoluted song structures and funny time signatures; and whilst there are virtuoso moments, nothing ever distracts from the whole; so all of the pieces fit together in an almost symphonic sense. I'm not even sure Seventh Son of a Seventh Son is metal, or that it matters given that most metal is shite.
All I know is that this is an amazing record.
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