Iron Maiden
“It’s kind of bittersweet and extremely loving, and at the same time very emotional,” said Bruce Dickinson. But which of the metal giants’ songs is he talking about?
“[Blood Brothers] is kind of bittersweet and extremely loving, and at the same time very emotional.”
Bruce Dickinson
9 BLOOD BROTHERS
Iron Maiden From: Brave New World, 2000
Anumber of important questions were raised when Iron Maiden regrouped with Bruce Dickinson and Adrian Smith in 1999. Why did the band suddenly need three guitarists (having kept on Janick Gers, who had replaced Smith when he left almost 10 years earlier)? Would singer Dickinson and bass player Steve Harris – never the friendliest of colleagues even the first time around – be capable of establishing a more stable workplace relationship? Who would produce their records? Most crucially of all, were Maiden capable of re-scaling the commercial and creative peaks attained throughout the 1980s and early 90s? Did they still have the hunger? With Brave New World, and especially the track Blood Brothers, with its sprawling, epic quality, and the choral refrain ‘We’re blood brothers!’, which you could sing along to with ease, the answer seemed to be: ‘Yes.’
The ever-confrontational Dickinson responded to that last question by throwing down the gauntlet to Metallica, taunting them with the declaration: “We’re better than they are, better musicians. Put it this way: they can try to walk on stage after an Iron Maiden show if they want. That’s not a challenge they would want to take up.”
Following such a display of bravado, Maiden had to walk the walk. The decision to cut ties with the past and bring in an outside producer, one of the hottest of the moment – Kevin Shirley had worked with Aerosmith, The Black Crowes and Dream Theater – strengthened the group’s hand, enabling them to make what Dickinson said was “a real state-of-the-art record and not just a [runof-the-mill] comeback album.”
Harris and Dickinson have both often voiced a love of progressive rock, and Brave New World was Maiden’s first album since the conceptual Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son, re;eased more than a decade earlier, to really throw those influences into the mix, on tracks such as Ghost Of The Navigator and Dream Of Mirrors. It’s a template that the band have revisited ever since. Arguably the record’s most important selection was among its most concise. Blood Brothers was written by Harris in honour of his late dad. The pair had shared a very close relationship, hence the song’s poignant lyric: ‘Just for a second a glimpse of my father I see/And in a movement he beckons to me/And in a moment the memories are all that remain/And all the wounds are reopening again.’ It set up the pair as blood siblings forever more.
In an early indication that relations between the pair were set to warm, Dickinson said Blood Brothers was “a little masterpiece”, adding: “It’s kind of bittersweet and extremely loving, and at the same time very emotional. It [presents] a lot of mixed emotions, and musically speaking there’s a few Celtic nods.”