Iron Maiden are two songs from the end of a show to 14,000 people in Seattle, in a vast shed in the middle of a Native American reservation. The only signs of life for miles around the venue are rundown casinos and stalls selling dangerously large fireworks tended by men with a cavalier attitude towards smoking near combustible materials.
It's only at this late point in the set that Iron Maiden's seventh member finally graces the crowd with his presence. I bellow his name and he looks down at me, shaking loose a bandage from his arm. He waggles his hands as I try to get his attention and it's only then I notice the green worms that are creeping from his mouth. He's not in a good way. The noise around me is reaching fever pitch, as he swivels his head and sprays two jets of flaming sparks out of his eyes. On Iron Maiden's current record-breaking world tour, it's clear who the star of the show still is: Eddie The Head, heavy metal's most enduring mascot.
Before I had ever heard a note of Iron Maiden's music, I knew Eddie. Before I knew anything else about Iron Maiden - that they'd had two singers, that they single-handedly spread heavy metal worldwide with groundbreaking tours in the Eastern Bloc and South America - I knew of their image from T-shirts, posters and record store windows. Before I'd ever bought any of their records, I knew that they were a terrifying, none-more-hardcore proposition. At a time when most metal bands looked like passably attractive women, Maiden were the kind of hardline Satanists who'd come to destroy glam metal and pop music, pausing only to kick rivals like Saxon and Venom to death for good measure.
I'm standing by the mixing desk at the Vancouver Colisseum; Winston Churchill's "We shall fight them on the beaches" speech is echoing around the PA at eyeball-vibrating volume, signalling the start of Iron Maiden's second world war dogfighting epic, Aces High. "When I was a kid I was shit scared of this band," confesses their Canadian press officer as 12,000 locals go batshit behind us. Ignored by radio, the mainstream press and impervious to the vagaries of fashion, the band - under the guidance of vocalist Bruce Dickinson and bassist Steve Harris - have forged a strange identity; sinister, menacing outsiders and yet phenomenally popular to the tune of 70m albums worldwide. "I don't think people understand, unless they've been to the gigs," explains their career-long manager, fixer and rock-industry legend Rod Smallwood. "We go to South America, India, everywhere... it's like a religion."
The tour that I'm following Iron Maiden on across north-west America and Canada is, to all intents and purposes, a recreation of 1985's Live After Death, the ne plus ultra of live metal albums. The setlist is drawn from five of their 1980s albums, a purple patch that saw them evolve from a raggedly aggressive east London rock band to the world's leading stadium metal act. "I wasn't really worried about it looking like nostalgia," says Harris backstage. A genial King Charles in West Ham sweatbands, he has been the band's constant driving force, both ideologically and sonically. Before their first single Running Free in 1980, he spent four years drilling through band members, ruthlessly culling anyone whose ability or commitment was in doubt, while his two-fingered "galloping squaddie" bass playing became the Maiden trademark. "We're going to places we've never been before, for a lot of these people we're playing the stuff for the first time. And there are so many young people here." The tour has already stopped in on India and Dubai, while at both Seattle and Vancouver around 50 per cent of the crowd wasn't born when Powerslave came out in 1984.
Purely in statistical terms, this tour would be remarkable at any time. 1.5 million fans will see them play over six months: 42,000 in Sao Paolo, 48,000 in Mexico City, 50,000 in Bogota, two 14,000 shows in Australia sold out in 30 minutes, 125,000 tickets sold in Sweden and Finland in just over two hours. The band move 12 tons of equipment and 50 road crew from gig to gig in Ed Force One, their own Boeing 757 piloted by Bruce Dickinson. Meanwhile, somewhere in London, Pete Doherty is struggling to get a taxi across Zone 1 for a gig.
The stage is a vast Egyptian temple, complete with glowing-eyed zombie mummies, Anubis statues, a giant fire-breathing Beelzebub, a golden sphinx and face-melting pyrotechnics. But beyond the spectacle, there is something else that connects the band to people everywhere. "It's more than just the music," explains Dickinson. "It's our independence; from fads, fashions, reality TV. We're the audience's thing and to an extent they've created us. We don't exist without the fans." Harris later compares the sentiment to "a football crowd, except everyone's on the same side".
Harris and Dickinson are a world away from the stereotypical view of rockers of a certain age, who generally decline into a burned-out autumn of cocaine psychosis, shaky hands and bitterly trading on former glories. The bassist is quiet and focused, talking in detail about the surprise influence of Jethro Tull and how he incorporated the structures of English hymnal music and medieval tunes into Maiden songs. The singer is an idea-spewing polymath, veering wildly from Gnosticism and Egyptology to his recent experiences as a screenwriter (Chemical Wedding). He's also a truly remarkable frontman. Partly it's his voice - an air-raid siren with a bass note of theatricality, Terry-Thomas crossed with the four-minute warning - but it's also his ability to shrink vast arenas down to the size of intimate clubs. "It's really basic, old-fashioned showman stuff," he explains. "Eye contact and gestures work over a surprisingly large distance and no device can replicate that."
This sense of stagecraft gives their gigs an enjoyably theatrical aspect; while they take what they do incredibly seriously, the whiff of ham and greasepaint hangs strongly in the air. "I loved eccentricity and all things theatrical," says Dickinson. "I always had great difficulty taking anything seriously and then I saw Arthur Brown play at my school when I was 15." It's unclear why any headmaster would have booked the top-hat-immolating Brown, but watching Dickinson onstage in his feathered Anubis mask, hunched over in the robes of the Ancient Mariner and waving giant ragged flags, it's clear the vaudeville influence stuck. "While it's not theatre it is theatrical . In theatre you have a script and your personality is a small part of that. In rock'n'roll you are the script." Possibly the only comparison is with Queen in their heyday - a band who, like Maiden, managed to be enormously popular while spawning almost no imitators.
In light of this theatricality, Eddie's role seems a lot clearer. Developed as a mascot to front a publicity-shy band, he has since adorned every Iron Maiden sleeve, poster and T-shirt. At various points, he has murdered Margaret Thatcher, controlled the Devil, been sectioned, transcended physical matter, killed Icarus with a flame thrower, been the Sphinx, destroyed the pyramids, flown bombing raids and burst out of the trenches. A strange life, but then as Alan Partridge said, zombies are, by their very nature, inconsistent. And during the Iron Maiden gig, they're also the star of the show; Eddie constantly appears as a variety of giant backdrops, lumbers onstage in futuristic guise - complete with radioactive underpants - and finally emerges as the snake-spewing bandaged corpse to deafening cheers.
Four hours before showtime, wandering around the empty stadium, I stand in the pit and see Eddie standing, alone and forlorn among the flight cases and drum risers and it strikes me how perfect he is for Iron Maiden. Defiantly British, completely absurd, enormously popular and capable of apparently endless reinvention. According to voodoo law, zombies must carry on until their controller allows them to return to death. On the evidence of these shows, Iron Maiden won't be releasing Eddie any time soon. There's still too much work to be done.
· Somewhere Back In Time and Live After Death (DVD) are out now,
Iron Maiden play Twickenham Stadium on July 5
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