Iron Maiden

The Number Of The Beast WARNER MUSIC

Forty years on, a classic reissued with a key difference and an added vintage live set.

With the band’s former singer Paul Di’Anno having eaten, drank and drugged his way to dismissal after the Killers tour the previous year, and with their last single having not even charted, it was rebirth or bust for Iron Maiden when they went into the studio in ’82 to make their third album.

The Number Of The Beast proved to be a glorious example of the former, and proof of it can be heard in the opening bars of this triple vinyl reissue: Invaders, a typically high-octane, exhilarating tale of the enemy coming over the horizon, establishing Maiden’s stock-in-trade – a galloping metallic anthem full of fearful talk of war, carnage, derring-do and Horrible Historiesstyle mayhem.

But it wouldn’t have worked half as well without their new singer. Compare the charismatic delivery of Invaders to the version (then titled Invasion) on the B-side of Women In Uniform 18 months previously. Something about new arrival Bruce Dickinson’s vibratowired, just-short-of-hysterical voice adds an extra sense of urgency to Maiden’s sound.

And so it proves time and again across the rest of the album. The songwriting has made a great leap forward, with the sound still full of vim but more punch and less punk bluster, and lyrics moving fully into the storytelling realm, as the likes of Run To The Hills and Hallowed Be Thy Name offer narratives way more fully realised and compelling than, say, ‘Iron Maiden’s gonna get ya’. Run To The Hills is also Steve Harris’s first seriously successful attempt at an epic composition influenced by the prog bands he’d loved as a teenager.

The album is not perfect, of course. Even if

22 Acacia Avenue makes a more sympathetic address to the anti-heroine of Charlotte The Harlot than the original, it’s still pretty cringe-inducing in the era of #metoo. Meanwhile, on this reissue Steve Harris has opted to replace Gangland with

Total Eclipse, righting a wrong he’s long expressed regret over. But when this is supposed to be a celebration of the original, it seems like an unnecessary airbrushing of history. These are trifling complaints, though, and the inclusion here of the Beast Over Hammersmith live set, on which we hear many Maiden fans hearing these songs performed for the first time, two days before the album’s 1982 release, adds to its celebratory feel.