IRON MAIDEN

Revolver joins the NWOBHM legends on their very own Bruce Dickinson-piloted Boeing 757 and gets high on the band’s Somewhere Back in Time ’08 world tour.

By Patrick F. Albertson

Flight 666 from San Juan touches down on a Thursday afternoon in March, causing fellow travelers, security guards, police, baggage handlers—even the seagulls—to stop and gaze at a certain custom-painted, passenger-freight combi Boeing 757. Granted, this aircraft is difficult to miss, emblazoned as it is with a giant azure-and-gold “Iron Maiden” logo and massive Mummy Eddie on the tail. As the plane taxies across the tarmac of Liberty Newark International, the pilot’s voice crackles to life over the intercom, and for those on board, the familiar sound of Captain Bruce Dickinson’s voice welcomes them to New Jersey. That’s right, the type-A, operatic spark-plug, better known for his high octaves than his high flying, is a fully licensed international commercial pilot and the Captain of Ed Force One.

Over the last seven weeks, this beastly bird—which seems to impress the uninitiated almost as much as it does the most committed hesher—has caused scenes at 21 airports on five continents, from Mumbai to Mexico City. “Everybody’s a fan,” says longtime Maiden manager Rod Smallwood with a grin. “At the airport they all turn out—it just stops; everybody stops.” Ed Force One is, of course, no ordinary jet plane: It’s Iron Maiden’s Imperial Cruiser, hauling the crew, management, and 12 tons of cargo that make the band’s Somewhere Back in Time ’08 world tour possible.

23 YEARS LATER
The night after touchdown in New Jersey, the band gallops through an epic set list at the newly-christened Izod Arena, playing songs off Powerslave and Number of the Beast that they haven’t touched in 20 years. The show captures all the energy and showmanship of another gig, one that happened exactly 23 years ago to the night, when Iron Maiden began their infamous four-night stand at Long Beach Arena during the 1984–85 World Slavery Tour.

The entire production of Somewhere Back in Time ’08 harkens back to that molten-metal era. Sure, they’ve left the spandex at home this time—check out the recently released Live After Death DVD that was culled from those very Long Beach performances 23 years ago to confirm that this was a sound sartorial choice—but in addition to bringing back classic Maiden tunes they’ve also brought along the original Egyptian set designed by Alan Chester, replete with glowing-eyed sarcophagi, hieroglyphs, and yes, bodacious pyro. They’ve even added a visit from the laser-wielding, 20-foot Eddie from their Somewhere in Time tour to fill the void left by the original, giant mummy version, which regrettably couldn’t be squeezed into the hull of a 757. Revolver ducked out of the crowded backstage area and sat down with Bruce Dickinson in the band’s Spartan, cinder-block lounge before the show. Despite the evidence, Dickinson denied that this was a revival tour.

“It doesn’t feel like we’re bringing it back. It actually feels like we’re moving it on somewhere else. We had 30,000 people show up in Costa Rica, which is the biggest outdoor event that Costa Rica has ever had—and we’ve never been to Costa Rica. We don’t even have a record company in Costa Rica. We had 50,000 people show up in Bogotá, Colombia, with 5,000 gatecrashers, because the place was sold out months in advance. We’ve never been to Colombia.”

He mused on the band’s growing global popularity and continued, “Let’s face it, the great thing about being in a band is discovering things. It’s like Star Trek, but with music. And after a while, that process slows down and can grind to a halt if every tour is like Groundhog Day—just a bit bigger. You know, same hotel, stadium gets bigger. Career on the slide, stadium gets smaller—woah, stadiums getting bigger again. I mean, in effect it’s the same kind of world—hotel, gig, hotel, tour bus—and I hate that, because it’s a sleepwalking existence. I do this because I want to feel excited. I really want to feel the adrenaline and feel, Wow, this is a great show! Like, every show is going to be the one, and every show we’ve done on this tour—it’s been like that. It’s been the one. It’s like, What’s the next show? 50,000 people in Mexico City? Shit, can’t take a backseat there. Every single show has been the one. And that is enthralling.”

FLIGHT 666 TO TORONTO
It’s just after noon on Saturday, and in the back of Ed Force One the lager cans are piling up next to empty Jack Daniels minibottles that have found their way into various coffee cups. The crew, most of them Maiden tour veterans, are settling in for what will be the last flight before a transatlantic shot to England, and are looking forward to a well-earned break before the second leg of the Tour begins in May.

“Really, our crew is pretty much the same people tour after tour, which is great because we have that camaraderie,” says Steve Harris in his tight-mouthed East End accent. The reserved British bass god, who has been kind enough to reserve time on the short flight to Toronto to talk with Revolver, seems completely at ease surrounded by his band and support team. “It’s great, because normally you don’t see much of the crew. We see them for an hour before the show and that’s about it—passing ships in the night, really. When we’re traveling like this we get to see ’em and it’s good fun. They’re funny guys.”

Still, Harris had some reservations about the ambitious schedule. “Obviously, people think it’s going to be easy because it’s a private plane and all that. And there is a plus side to that, but the fact that we’ve been going through all these different time zones…I think we’ve found that to do this, we need to add another day off, because a travel day is not a day off. And everyone’s a bit knackered, I think.”

With this tour, Iron Maiden have changed the game. At a time when fewer bands launch such truly global endeavors, they have managed to play to sold-out cities and covered 50,000 miles in such a short time by essentially loading the whole tour onto one plane. Smallwood proudly states, “You can’t do a tour like this any other way. You can’t. It’s not even feasible. Can you imagine going through a major international airport, immigration, and customs with all these people? Any other way you’d go mad, you’d freak out at the airport.”

To pull off this metal-fueled jet-setting stunt, 60 seats were removed from the 757 to add more cargo space, and the cargo holds were completely fireproofed. The resulting interior resembles most other 757s, but with a shorter cabin, and the plane is the first-ever Boeing 757-200 combi, a conversion that cost $500,000.

Harris acknowledges the upside: “One of the beauties of having this plane is that we can go wherever we want. This is a bit of a trial really, but it’s gone so well we know we’ll do it again. It means we can go other places as well. We want to go to South Korea—Bangkok as well, places like that—all the places we haven’t been before.”

As we fly towards Canada, a country the band has played on 17 of their 19 tours going back to 1981, you have to ask the question people started asking 20 years ago: How long can they keep doing it?

“As long as we feel like we want to tour. We really don’t know. You just do the tour and see how it goes. You can’t carry on forever—we know that. And physically what we do is a lot more demanding than most bands, so I think that you gotta be realistic, but having said that, we’re enjoyin’ ourselves, and I think we’ve got at least another four or five years in us. We’ll definitely do another studio album and see how we go from there. As long as everyone’s enjoying it and everyone still wants to do it, then we’ll do it. The demand is there; if anything it’s more than ever. It’s crazy. I don’t know what’s happening, but the last five or six years, it’s just grown bigger than the ’80s really. In general at least 50 or 60 percent of the audience that we’ve played to so far have either, one, never seen us before, or two, weren’t even born when we did those albums. It’s pretty scary.”

THE GREAT WHITE NORTH
When Revolver arrives at the Air Canada Centre on Sunday afternoon, Maiden fans, seemingly impervious to the 30-degree temperature and clad only in T-shirts have already been lined up for hours.

In our earlier conversation, Dickinson offered some insight into the recent growth of the band’s global fan base: “Basically, since I rejoined the band in 1999, we’ve been steadily going around the world doing new albums, and each time we’ve done a new album, it’s gotten bigger. And it’s gotten bigger with young kids, not with old fogies. I mean, yeah, everybody’s welcome to come along for the party, particularly one like this, where guys who might have been around and seen it in the ’80s can come back and cry in their beers; but for young kids, they’ve been with us since 2000’s Brave New World, and they’ve discovered the old albums, but they’ve never heard us play any of the stuff. So that’s why today it’s so thrilling, and I think it’s one of the reasons why it’s just seized people’s imaginations globally. And it really has.”

But it isn’t just their new audience that sustains them globally. Iron Maiden has become a mantle that is passed from one generation to the next. Revolver told Bruce about a man we met at the New Jersey show while waiting for the band to arrive at the loading ramp in back of the arena. He had brought his 6-year-old grandson to his first show that night and was educating him in all things Maiden.

“We’ve always tried to conduct our affairs with a certain amount of self-respect,” Dickinson responds. “And that translates into respect for the fans, respect for the music, and respect for the legacy of the band. And that’s more important than the short term. Nowadays, if you look in the media, it’s all about the cult of celebrity and not anything about content. And Iron Maiden is all about content and nothing about celebrity. Nobody’s dating a Playboy model, no one has put out a porno sex tape, nobody’s been on reality TV shows, game shows, or anything crass like that. And nobody ever will, because it’s just not what we do.”