Iron Maiden
Former band members Paul Di’Anno and Dennis Stratton look back at the early days of Iron Maiden and the self-titled debut album that changed the face of heavy metal.
Former band members Paul Di’Anno and Dennis Stratton look back at the early days of the band and the self-titled debut album that changed the face of heavy metal.
As we know them today, Iron Maiden are six supremely successful rock stars who, armed with an expansive catalogue of music, travel the world on a jet often piloted by their lead singer, and challenge a rival American band called Metallica for the title of the biggest heavy music act in the world. Forty-one years ago it was very different. In January 1980, when bassist Steve Harris and the rest of Maiden arrived at
London’s Kingsway Studios to hammer down tracks in the form of a debut album, he was 23 years old. As the band entered the 80s, their discography amounted to a solitary
EP, the self-financed Soundhouse Tapes, with one of its tracks,
Wrathchild, about to appear on the various-artists compilation album Metal For Muthas.
Two previous attempts to formulate a Maiden album had failed to get off the runway, but Paul
Di’Anno, their vocalist of the era, recalls that the mood was not one of anxiety.
“Nah, there was too much excitement to feel any pressure,” he exclaims today, looking back on the experience. “We knew that what we had was unique compared to every other band around, and we had spent the previous couple of years playing every shithole in the UK, also some decent venues as well. The only person who might have had any doubts was me.
Though I was a cocky frontman, I was all mouth and no trousers, and when I got into the studio I realised I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing.”
That’s quite an admission. Although the previous few months had seen the band introduce a pair of new members – guitarist
Dennis Stratton and drummer Clive Burr – Di’Anno pretty much stood alone; he was stoic in his refusal to do anything he didn’t agree with, vocal in his belligerence against the status quo, a pressure cooker waiting to blow.
There was another problem. Because Maiden were forced to make their debut album within a specific window of opportunity, before the Metal For
Muthas tour began in February, the producer they sought, Martin Birch, was busy with Black Sabbath and their post-Ozzy record Heaven And Hell.
Nobody can quite remember how Maiden instead ended up with Wil Malone, who’d also worked with Sabbath but as a conductor and arranger.
“There was too much excitement to feel any pressure. We knew that what we had was unique.” Vocalist Paul Di’Anno
Through gritted teeth, Steve Harris would later recall: “We used to laugh about [Malone] sitting there with his feet up on the desk, smoking a big cigar and reading Country Life, because he didn’t do fuck-all else. We’d try to get some feedback off this guy and he’d just go: ‘Oh, I think you could do better.’ So in the end we just ignored him.”
Consequently, their debut album, Iron Maiden, was pretty much made by the band – who were freshmen in such an environment – in conjunction with engineer Martin Levan.
These days, given Maiden’s standing in the world, it’s difficult to imagine them tolerating the kind of disrespect they got from Malone.
“I don’t remember the guy sitting with feet up on the desk,” Di’Anno says, laughing. “Had I seen that, I’d have clouted him around the ear ’ole. What I do know is that all the songs on that first album are fucking great. It’s such a shame that the production is complete dogshit.”
Maybe he exaggerates, but while the album does a decent enough job of capturing the raw energy of the band in their youthful prime, from the multitempo rifferama of Phantom Of The Opera to the hard-edged commerciality of Running Free, the clarity, colour and professionalism of later recordings is sorely missed.
There could be no criticism of the material, though, almost all of which was written by Steve
Harris. Guitarist Dave Murray chipped in with Charlotte The Harlot, the story of a prostitute who charged a fiver for starters ‘and ten for the main course’, and Di’Anno’s name appeared alongside that of the Harris in the writer credits for two tracks: Running Free and Remember Tomorrow. According to legend, Di’Anno’s lyrics for the former song drew on his days as a skinhead in London’s East End.
“That’s all a load of bollocks,” he retorts now. “A skinhead? Don’t make me laugh. But it’s a rebellion song, isn’t it? It’s ‘fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me’. I was going to do what I wanted, running free. It’s funny that the words mention an LA jail – little did I know that in the future I would end up in one of those [Di’Anno was arrested by the LAPD in 1991].”
Although Harris has always made a big deal of despising punk rock, it’s difficult to overlook the spiky-topped aggression that lay beneath so many of the album’s songs, enhanced by the don’tgive-a-fuck roar of Di’Anno, who very much appreciated the rival genre.
“If there was a punk element to Iron Maiden at that point it probably came from me – especially on stage,” he says. “There’s no denying it, those songs are bloody fast, though they also have some proggy time changes in them. That’s what made us so unique.
“I love the excitement of punk because it allowed everyone to have a go, not just those up in their ivory towers,”Di’Anno continues now. “Half-anhour-long guitar solos didn’t really do it for me. Something’s got to be real, no matter how bad or good it might be.”
Dennis Stratton, on the other hand, adored guitar solos and the mellifluous possibilities they could bring to the music. One evening when the rest of the band had left the studio and gone home, he and studio assistant Martin Levan added layers of guitar embellishment and harmony voices to Phantom Of The Opera, à la Bohemian Rhapsody.
“We didn’t expect Rod [Smallwood, Maiden’s manager] to hear what we’d done, it was only a mess-about,” Stratton recalls. “But somehow he did, and we were told: ‘You can take those off for a start. It sounds like bloody Queen.’ I realised that there was only one guv’nor in the band, and stepped back from trying to submit songs.”
Out on the road promoting Iron Maiden was where the real issues with Di’Anno began to emerge. “Paul was having a bit of an identity crisis,” Stratton remembers. “One minute he was singing like Sting from The Police, the next he was wearing a pork pie hat [a symbol of the ska movement] on stage.”
“I used to enjoy winding up Steve [Harris] and the audience with that whole thing,” says Di’Anno, laughing at the memory. “I was one of the rare singers in heavy metal that didn’t have long hair. I dressed how I felt. Had I wanted to wear a kaftan and sandals, then I’d have done so – but I never did.”
Although Maiden had put in the road miles during the build-up towards the release of Iron Maiden, nobody foresaw that the debut would slam into the British album chart at No.4. “EMI had predicted it might go top ten,” Stratton recalls. “So when it sold the way it did, that was a huge lift. And getting to do Top Of The Pops made it even better still.”
Although Top Of The Pops ran out of steam, finally hitting the buffers in 2006, during its heyday the BBC’s prime-time weekly chart show attracted millions of viewers and a spot on was worth its weight in gold. But metal and rock acts rarely appeared on the show. However, when Maiden were invited to perform Running Free on it in February 1980, they refused to mime, as the show demanded, and insisted on playing live in the studio. Which they did, in front of a studio audience of puzzled-looking pop fans unable to dance to it. In some ways the incident represents the start of Maiden’s fiercely stubborn yet intensely focused path to the top.
As the heavy touring began, the chasm between the singer and the rest of the band only widened. During a prize support tour, Di’Anno antagonised headliners Judas Priest by threatening to blow them off the stage. Stratton remembers him trying to cancel a date on the Metal For Muthas tour due to a sore throat. Unwilling to let down their fans,
“When I got into the studio I realised I didn’t know what the f**k I was doing.” Paul Di’Anno
Maiden performed their set with Steve Harris singing lead vocals.
“Paul stood at the side of the stage staring at us with a face like thunder,” Stratton remembers. “He never tried that trick again.”
Maiden’s next album, the following year’s Killers, made in conjunction with Martin Birch, the producer they would continue to work with until his retirement a decade later, corrected the sonic issues that had dogged the band’s debut.
It also saw Stratton replaced by Adrian Smith. Maiden were not happy with the fact that while a fan of metal, Stratton, who was several years their senior, also enjoyed more melodic music such as US soft-rockers the Eagles. Put plainly, it worried them that he sometimes preferred the bonhomie of travelling with the road crew to being on a tour bus with his bandmates.
“When Rod sat me down to tell me I was out of Maiden, it wasn’t a decision he could really explain, except to say that as he saw it I didn’t feel like a member of the band,” Stratton explains now. “Back then Rod was a young, relatively inexperienced manager, but he knew he had something that was going to be massive, so he wrapped the band up in cotton wool to make sure nothing could go wrong.”
With Smith, who had been their original first choice, at last able to commit to joining, Iron Maiden set their sights on becoming the biggest metal band in the world. But first they needed a singer they could depend upon in every given scenario. In September 1981, Di’Anno was fired. In his place came the long-haired, leather-clad, equally ambitious former Samson singer Bruce Dickinson, who was ready, willing and able to take Maiden to the next level and beyond.
“I don’t blame them for getting rid of me,” Di’Anno says. “The band was Steve’s baby, but I wish I’d been able to contribute more. After a while that got me down. In the end I couldn’t give a hundred per cent to Maiden any more, and it wasn’t fair to the band, the fans or myself.”
Four decades on, neither Paul Di’Anno nor Dennis Stratton harbour a grudge. Both went on to carve out careers of their own, and they remain fiercely proud of their contributions to the Iron Maiden legacy.
“Sure, they’ve made some small mistakes along the way, but Steve never changed his vision,” Stratton observes. “Allowing Adrian and Bruce to become more involved [with the writing] has made them more consistent. Steve is a magnificent band leader and a brilliant songwriter.”
“The two albums I made with the band were pivotal [to the genre],” Di’Anno offers. “Later on in my life when I met Metallica, Pantera and Sepultura and they told me that those albums were what got them into music, it made me incredibly proud.”
“I realised that there was only one guv’nor in the band, and stepped back from trying to submit songs.” Dennis Stratton