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Magic mushrooms, hit single pressure and second album syndrome – in 2024 Marillion looked back on the challenges of creating 1991’s Holidays In Eden, their sixth album and second with vocalist Steve Hogarth.

The tipping point for Marillion came with ‘Mexican Night’. It was late summer in 1990, and the band had spent several increasingly frustrating weeks holed up in Stanbridge Farm Studios, a residential facility outside the English seaside resort of Brighton, attempting to write their second album with new singer Steve ‘H’ Hogarth.

The breezy mood surrounding the band had evaporated as weeks dragged on. Their unhurried, jam-based approach to songwriting clashed with Hogarth’s more traditional modus operandi. Tensions were rising, and the atmosphere was getting fractious.
 “No one hit anyone else, but we did have a few words,” says bassist Pete Trewavas. “Steve was getting pissed off: ‘What’s the point of me being here?’ I suppose he was also trying to stake his claim on where he would fit in the band.”

Then came Mexican Night. The plan was for the band and their lyricist, John Helmer, to get together in Stanbridge, deck themselves out in ‘bandido’-style fancy dress and stuff themselves with Mexican food in an attempt to alleviate the tedium and ease the pressure. It wasn’t the first themed night they’d had, and none of them had worked. The omens weren’t good for this one either: there had been a row earlier in the day.

“There was a bit of an ugly atmosphere and none of us wanted to be there, but there was no getting out of it,” says keyboard player Mark Kelly. “Then someone discovered there were magic mushrooms growing in the field outside, which we naturally took. We had a great time. It was a good bonding experience. Everybody felt much better about things 
after that.”

The slog wasn’t over for Marillion, though; they still had an album to write. But that psilocybin-fuelled dinner felt like the point where they turned a corner. The album that emerged from that frequently tortuous period, Holidays In Eden, remains an outlier in their back catalogue. It was the sound of a band who’d reluctantly acceded to their record label EMI’s desire to make a ‘pop’ record in order to boost their career. It failed in that respect – yet it acted as a crucial stepping stone between what Marillion were and what they would become.

“What I love about Holidays In Eden is that it sounded like a proper, polished album to me,” says Hogarth. “I’d waited all my life to be involved in something proper and polished.” Having replaced original singer Fish in 1989 after the latter’s acrimonious departure, his entrance into Marillion had been smoother than he’d anticipated. “The Seasons End tour had been successful; the response from fans was incredible and we were getting on well,” he remembers. “I was expecting some kickback, but I didn’t really experience it.”

There was just one issue, though. EMI, were concerned about what Kelly calls “a downward trajectory sales-wise.” The label made it very clear they wanted Marillion’s new album to feature three hit singles.

“They were thinking, ‘Well, what are we doing with this band? And more to the point, what’s this band doing for us?’” says Trewavas. “If we didn’t have another big hit soon, the writing would be on the wall.”

“We were prepared to give it a go,” adds Kelly. “The biggest problem was that we weren’t very good at writing hit singles.”

That may have been the biggest problem, but they were about to encounter another unforeseen one. Some of the music that ended up on Seasons End had pre-dated Hogarth’s arrival; but now they were effectively starting from scratch. “It was the difficult second album all over again,” says Kelly.

The band entered Stanbridge in mid-1990 with a blank page. It was a reflection of their mood that they were paying someone just to be on hand if they needed booze or cigarettes from the nearest shop. “We went in there in a good frame of mind,” says Hogarth. “It was our intention to be there for two or three weeks. We went in there in June and came out in December.”

Initially, the band knew what they wanted – or at least what they didn’t want. “There were certain things that Steve H didn’t want to revisit from Marillion’s past, and certain things we didn’t want to revisit either,” says Trewavas. “We wanted it to be a clean slate, and for the band to move on.”

Still, there were some reservations about just how far they wanted to go. “I think certain members were becoming increasingly scared that this new guy was going to start pulling them in the direction of pop music,” says Hogarth.

Marillion’s songwriting process was relaxed at best. When they weren’t playing pool or drinking, Kelly, Trewavas, guitarist Steve Rothery and drummer Ian Mosley got together to jam then find ways of fitting together the bits they liked. The pragmatic Hogarth preferred to construct songs: verse, chorus, middle eight.

“It became apparent where each party was coming from and it was completely different,” says Kelly. “You’ve got H going, ‘Let’s work hard, let’s put the hours in.’ At the other end, you’ve got Steve Rothery going, ‘I don’t really feel it today; I’ll wait for inspiration to strike.’ You can’t knock either method, because both work – just not necessarily at the same time.”

“Everybody had a sort of an agenda that I wasn’t party to,” says Hogarth. “It wasn’t really about songwriting, it was about doing their thing and getting their musical reward. I couldn’t just grab their ideas and go, ‘Look, I can finish this song, I just need the middle eight and it’s done.’”

That didn’t lessen his growing restlessness. “I think he found it more frustrating working with us than we did working with him,” says Kelly. “We were sitting around, drinking and playing pool, and he was just pulling his hair out: ‘What the fuck have I joined here? I just want to get on and make an album!’”

Mexican Night went some way to dispelling the agitation within the band, though Hogarth and his colleagues remained at a creative impasse. Eventually, it was suggested that the singer take a break from the studio to focus on writing lyrics while the others attempted to come up with some solid songs. “I was sent home!” says Hogarth. “Looking back on it, I totally get it, but I was slightly hurt by it at the time. I felt excluded.”

The temporary separation helped to a degree. The singer returned a fortnight
later with a set of revised lyrics, as well the foundation for The Party, the album’s vividly moody third track. His bandmates hadn’t been idle, repurposing unused music they’d come up with during their very last session with Fish for eventual album closer 100 Nights. Conversely, the band had been working on the song Holidays In Eden when Hogarth left. When he returned, they still hadn’t finished it. The creative breakthrough they needed remained elusive.

“There wasn’t a breakthrough at all,” says Hogarth. “There was just a feeling of, ‘Well, we’d better just stay here until something happens.’ It was a kind of process of attrition.”

The band’s A&R man, Nick Gatfield, was watching costs escalate with nothing to show for it. The onetime sax player with Dexys Midnight Runners announced he’d come to Stanbridge to check out progress. “He said, ‘Maybe I can see if I can help anywhere,’” recalls Trewavas. “We were, like, ‘What does that mean – does that mean you’re interfering with what we’re doing? We didn’t really like that.’”

Despite their reservations, Gatfield did have some constructive input. He pinpointed a track they’d been working on, the breezy love song No One Can, as a potential single – one of the three hits EMI had asked for. “It had a nice guitar and keyboard figure, some nice sounding chords, and Steve put a great melody over it,” says Trewavas. “And the label was thinking, ‘Oh, this sounds very of the times, this could be pop music.’ Of course, that’s the last thing we wanted.”

In the end, Marillion themselves realised they needed to call a halt to the interminable songwriting process and actually start recording songs. “I think it was Ian who said, ‘We’re not paying for any more of this nonsense,’” recalls Trewavas.

With their lengthy stay at Stanbridge finally over, the band decamped to The Moles Club, a venue-come-studio in Bath, where they demoed the music they’d been working on.
A trio of fanclub gigs at Moles in December 1990, under the name The Low-Fat Yoghurts, even saw them giving an airing to a handful of new songs, including No One Can, Waiting To Happen and a version of Splintering Heart with an intro that was gnarlier and more guitar-heavy than the one that would eventually open the album.

Plans to record the album with Chris Kimsey – who’d produced their twin commercial highpoints Misplaced Childhood and Clutching At Straws – were thwarted by the Rolling Stones, who insisted Kimsey work on their live album, Flashpoint. Instead, when Marillion entered Hook End Manor in Oxfordshire in early 1991, it was with Christopher Neil, whose credits included Sheena Easton, Shakin’ Stevens and, more recently, Celine Dion. But it was the presence of Mike + The Mechanics on Neil’s CV that convinced EMI, if not Marillion, that he was the man for the job.

“I think the label thought, ‘Which prog rockers have had pop hits? Oh, Mike Rutherford. If we can do a Mike + The Mechanics with Marillion, we’ll have hits and get on the radio and make a lot of money,’” says Hogarth.

Neil himself played a blinder when convincing the band that he was the man for the job. The producer told them his son was a big fan of theirs. “He said, ‘If I fuck you up, he’ll never forgive me,’” says Hogarth. “I’m not sure if it was true or not, but that was the line that got him the gig, really.”

“Chris Neil reassured us that he wasn’t going to turn us into a pop band,” says Kelly. “And then proceeded to attempt to do it. I don’t blame him. That was his brief from the record label.”

Neil was a personable character, and the band got on well with him, even if his production sensibilities were only marginally less at odds with Marillion’s than Hogarth’s approach to songwriting had been. Neil was a studio pragmatist: his priority was to get a solid backing for the songs above all else. That wasn’t how the band were used to operating.

“I liked to experiment with sounds and textures on my keyboards, to give myself different options,” says Kelly. “But he had no time for it. I’d play something and he’d say, ‘No, that’s fine.’ And I’m thinking, ‘Actually, not for me it isn’t.’”

They still only had one of the three singles EMI demanded, but Neil had a ready-made solution. He suggested they record a version of Dry Land, the title track from the one and only album from Hogarth’s pre-Marillion band How We Live. “I’m not sure how he came across it, but he came pre-armed with the idea that we should cover it,” says Hogarth, who describes Dry Land as “a song about sexual tension rather than unrequited love – that feeling that perhaps something could happen with this person, but neither of you are going to say it.”

The new version retained the original’s structure and airy melody, though Marillion added their own character to it. However Rothery, in particular, wasn’t comfortable with covering another band’s song. “Steve doesn’t like playing other people’s parts, and that song was based around a particular guitar pattern, a set of chords played in a specific way,” says Kelly. “But he put his stamp on it, especially the solo.”

It was Neil, too, who came up with the idea for the third potential hit. Rothery had played an echoey, U2-esque figure during one of the sessions at Stanbridge, over which Hogarth sang lyrics from an unreleased How We Live track titled Simon’s Car, inspired by suave 60s TV presenter Simon Dee and featuring period-piece references to Sandie Shaw, David Hockney and The Avengers’ Emma Peel, among others. “It ended up on tape somewhere, and Chris heard it and loved it,” says Hogarth.

The singer dialled back the explicit 60s iconography, turning the song into a hymn to an idealised woman: ‘She’s like the girl in the picture that he couldn’t afford.’ Crucially, though, he kept the original opening lines and initial vocal melody: ‘Cover my eyes/The light falls on her face.’

Neil had another suggestion. The band should take another song fragment – essentially Hogarth intoning a swooping ‘Hey’ – and merge it with the first part. The band titled the finished song Cover My Eyes (Pain And Heaven), even if the final version found Hogarth stretching the three-word subtitle over nine notes. In the eyes of the producer, they had their three ‘hits’ – although certain members remain sceptical as to their merits. “We were stuck for time,” says Mark Kelly. “We needed a single.”

Cover My Eyes (Pain And Heaven) was the first single from Holidays In Eden on May 28, 1991, three weeks ahead of the album itself. Longtime fans were mildly perplexed by its unfamiliar, poppier sound, and the song peaked at No.34 in the UK charts – disappointing, but far from catastrophic.

The next single, No One Can, was a safer bet. This soft-centred ballad had true crossover potential. It entered the charts at No.36, but began picking up radio airplay. EMI capitalised on this positive state of affairs by promptly diverting its promotional budget to Vanilla Ice’s latest single, Satisfaction. “And it flopped without trace!” says Mark Kelly of the US rapper’s track.

Realising their error, the label re-redirected their budget to No One Can, but it was too late. Radio stations had moved on to something else. “I was hurt that No One Can wasn’t a huge hit,” says Steve Hogarth. “It still sounds like one to me.”

Holidays In Eden itself was received with a degree of suspicion by longtime fans on its release in June 1991. They were unhappy with the pop leanings of No One Can, third single Dry Land and Waiting To Happen, and the apparent lack of anything resembling the band’s knotty, proggy old sound. But the naysayers overlooked the likes of dramatic opening track Splintering Heart, and the closing mini-suite consisting of This Town, The Rakes Progress and 100 Nights, both of which pointed towards the complex, atmospheric songs the band would produce in subsequent years. And it wasn’t like Marillion had never written a ‘pop’ song before anyway.

“Kayleigh wasn’t dissimilar to other things that were around in the charts at that time,” says Trewavas. “But because it was wrapped in this bigger concept, people forget that it was a nice little pop song.”

Although it peaked at No.7 in the UK chart, Holidays In Eden failed to arrest the downward commercial trajectory of Marillion’s recent albums. Live, the band’s pulling power wasn’t what it was either – a show at London’s Wembley Arena was curtained off halfway due to underwhelming ticket sales. “It didn’t meet the label’s expectations,” Kelly admits. “But we did our bit – we delivered the album the record company wanted. If nothing else, it convinced us that, actually, we’re not a pop band. Trying to write hit singles isn’t for us.”

That would be borne out by Marillion’s next album, Brave, a record that was as intricate and opaque as its predecessor was glossy and straightforward. It was, says Trewavas, a direct reaction to their experiences. “One of the criticisms of Holidays In Eden isn’t that it’s too commercial, it’s that some of the songs lack a bit of depth. It doesn’t have the little bits of detail that some of our other albums have. That’s why, with Brave, we decided to rebalance that and have as much stuff in there as humanly possible.”

Brave would fare even worse commercially than Holidays In Eden, though it successfully corrected the band’s drift pop-wards, at least in the eyes of their diehard fans. Now, Marillion look back on their sixth album with a detached fondness. Kelly still loves Splintering Heart and 100 Nights. “This Town and Cover My Eyes not so much,” he says.

Hogarth says he likes the album, though it’s “tainted” by the arduous process of making: “Putting the head of a horse on the body of a camel,” as he puts it. “To some extent, EMI fucked it up,” claims the singer. “But looking back, I’m glad they did.

“Because if we’d had a huge hit with No One Can, that would have pigeonholed us in a place where we wouldn’t have been very comfortable at all, it would probably have eventually split the band up. And that would have meant that an awful lot of good music we wrote after that would never have been written – which would have been a shame.”

Every morning before entering Mogwai’s Castle Of Doom studio in Glasgow to work on most recent Jesus And Mary Chain album, Jim Reid would head out on two-hour walk around the city. A meandering amble is one of the singer’s favourite things to do when his band are on tour, aimlessly wandering around a new town, taking in the sights, getting lost. It was the same but different in Glasgow, a location Reid knows inside out having grown up eight miles away in East Kilbride, where Jim and his brother William formed the Jesus And Mary Chain in 1983.

On some occasions Reid would look around and not know where he was. Other times, if he’d fallen off the wagon, he’d settle into a local boozer for a liquid breakfast. When he was sober, he’d find himself spending time at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery, a place he hadn’t been to since the ’80s. All around him was memories, the shards of four decades of one of rock ’n’ roll’s most potent and visceral forces.

Reid isn’t sure if being back on home turf had an effect on the latest record by The Jesus And Mary Chain but mulling it over down the phone from his home in Devon, he concedes that maybe it did. For starters, it’s called Glasgow Eyes.

“My immediate reaction would be that it could’ve been recorded anywhere but maybe that walk makes the difference,” he says. “Maybe it makes you feel a little bit more in a Glasgow frame of mind. It probably does seep in in ways that I don’t realise.”

Similarly, Reid says, him and William tried not to think about the fact the band’s 40th anniversary was approaching as they made their eighth album but that also must have worked its way in. Those four decades have taken in turmoil, chaos and vicious rows between the brothers but The Jesus And Mary Chain are still standing. There is a sense of celebration at the heart of Glasgow Eyes, not the sort of celebration that would ever raise a smile – this is The Jesus And Mary Chain, after all – but more a feeling of ebullient defiance that they’re still doing it.

“I’m proud of the fact we’ve been here for 40 years but, making a record, it should have nothing to do with it,” reckons Reid. “To us, it’s just another Mary Chain record but that in itself is something to celebrate.”

As Reid well knows, there was a time when the idea of “just another Mary Chain record” was a very unlikely scenario.

The band had emerged in the ’80s with a sound that melded Phil Spector-ish 60s pop with squalling feedback and chainsaw guitars, a tug-of-war between soothing melodicism and barbed sonics that was perfectly captured on their game-changing 1985 debut Psychocandy. It was a pioneering form of rock music that would become a springboard for shoegazing and experimental noise-pop, inspiring a wave of bands to mix hooks with ear-shredding effects. Their sound was built on tension until the tension got too much – by the time of 1998’s sixth album Munki, the Reid brothers couldn’t bear to be in the studio together and recorded their parts separately. They split up later that year: more on that later.

They patched things up and reunited in 2007, though, with a seventh studio album, Damage And Joy, following in 2017. Glasgow Eyes, which homes in on their love of Suicide and Can and brings out the more electronic and synth-y side of their sound, shows they have lost none of their devotion to the cause. Reid says they are still doing it for the right reasons.

“We’re still making records because we think we’re the best band in the world,” he declares. “Now, loads of people may disagree with that but that’s the way we are going into this thing – we’re better than anybody else, we believe that whole-heartedly and I think it comes across in the music. Whether you agree with that statement or not, I think you can hear that we at least believe it.”

The Reid brothers possessed that self-belief from the very beginning. The reason they started the band in the first place, Reid recalls, was because they thought music in the 80s was so bad they were compelled to fix it.

“The 80s was particularly hateful,” he states. “We used to always have the conversation where it would be like, ‘Fuck , we’re so unlucky that this is our decade, we could’ve got the ’60s or the fucking ’70s but what do we get, the fucking ’80s!’ We were so disgusted with it that we thought, ‘Let’s change it, the 80s doesn’t have to be all bad, let’s go and make a little corner of it pretty good’. To us, the music coming out of the radio was diseased and we wanted to inject penicillin into that radio and cure the disease.”

When he looks back at their career, Reid thinks The Jesus And Mary Chain did make a difference but fell short of their world-conquering aims.

“We actually did think we were going to completely change the music scene,” he says. “We had massive ambition and we thought we were going to completely destroy all of what needed tearing down. In the end, we did cause a bit of a shake-up but we were hopelessly naïve about the scale of the problem.”

Whilst the new album is powered with a sense of forward-thinking urgency, there is some looking back. Propulsive lead single Jamcod revisits one of the most harrowing nights in the band’s history – when the two brothers ended up in a fight so bad after a 1998 show at Los Angeles venue the House Of Blues that it brought an end to the first incarnation of the group.

“That night has been raked over so many times and everyone always wants to know about it,” states Reid, “but I’ve talked about it so much that I just thought I should write it down, try and get it across in a way that simple language doesn’t, how it actually felt at that time. It was a terribly traumatic experience, it wasn’t just one night, it was over a period of two or three nights, a prolonged explosion and the boom was at the House Of Blues, that’s when the actual gunpowder went off. It was horrible but memorable all at the same time.”

After the band split up, Reid says he thought of nothing other than that fateful night for months to come.

“I tried to make sense of it and make sense of what happened,” he recounts. “I don’t know if I really have done but maybe I started to at least realise that the band didn’t need to break up then. I also started to realise that at the time I thought it was all his fault but when I reviewed a lot of the arguments and occurrences, I started to realise that I was a complete arse as well, so I think we each gave as good as we got… or as bad as we got.”

Not only has Reid never seen another band who argued with such feistiness as he and his brother did, he’s never witnessed another set of humans go at it so ferociously.

“Seriously, we used to argue and we could clear a room,” he laughs. “There would be a room of two dozen people who would all have to leave because it was so uncomfortable the way that we used to scream at each other. People would be like, ‘Oh god, I don’t know if I should be witnessing this’. That was the way it was.”

These days, he says, both he and his brother have learned that there’s a line that shouldn’t be crossed.

“We argue now and we scream at each other but we know that the things that you say that are unsayable should stay unsaid, and they didn’t stay unsaid back then. We said horrible things to each other and it left festering wounds for years afterwards. The wounds have healed so why open up new ones?”

Instead, they have a legacy to celebrate. As well as the new record, there will also be an autobiography released this year. You only have to look at the breadth of artists who’ve covered their songs to see how influential they are – Pixies, Sandi Shaw, Fontaines D.C., Richard Hawley and, um, David Hasselhoff have all had a crack at reworking tracks from their catalogue.

“Hasselhoff was quite funny, I thought that was amusing,” Reid says. “We had a bit of chuckle. It’s good when people do covers, it shows we’re getting through to people.”

They might not have changed the world quite in the way that they set out to but they remain an exhilarating band still pushing things forward. They wanted to remedy music’s ills but it’s no quick fix. The Jesus And Mary Chain’s intoxicating shake-up continues.

Glasgow Eyes by The Jesus And Mary Chain is out now on Fuzz Club. The band are currently on tour in the UK, and will launch their European tour on April 2 in Copenhagen, Denmark.

The first time Bruce Dickinson sang on stage with Iron Maiden, he kept his eyes shut for the first half of the set. “I don’t think I opened them until we did Killers,” he says today.

The band endured an arduous three-day bus journey before that show, on October 26, 1981, at Palasport in Bologna. “When we got to Italy, it was a bit dodgy – people being threatened with hand grenades and all that,” understates the singer. “None of which bothered me in the slightest, because the main event was my big moment with Maiden.”

So why the closed eyes?

“Because I had to get my own world straight before I could go into the outside world.”

Dickinson joins Classic Rock, via modern technology, from a living room devoid of gold discs or images of Maiden’s immortal mascot Eddie; just exposed woodwork and a tasteful paint job that might be magnolia. With his gunmetal grey ponytail and habit of heading off at tangents, Dickinson has the air of an upbeat, but easily distracted, hippieish university lecturer.

Iron Maiden have two high-profile events taking place this summer. Last month saw the release of a new documentary, Iron Maiden: Burning Ambition, which tells their story through archive footage, animation, and interviews with fans and celebrity supporters, including Hollywood royalty Javier Bardem.

In July the band headline ‘Eddfest’ at Knebworth Park as part of their Run For Your Lives 50th-anniversary tour. There, themed bars, fairground rides and the Infinite Dreams Museum Experience promise to transform the grounds of the Hertfordshire stately home into ‘Maiden World’.

The idea of Iron Maiden existing in what Dickinson later describes as “its own bubble” is a prevalent theme in the documentary. Dickinson, bassist Steve Harris, drummer Nicko McBrain and guitarists Dave Murray, Adrian Smith and Janick Gers (as well as Dickinson’s predecessor, the now late Paul Di’Anno, and his former temporary successor Blaze Bayley) are all interviewed, but appear in the film only as their younger selves. “Because we’re not as good-looking as Eddie,” Harris deadpans.

Instead, an animated Eddie (a constant presence on every Maiden single, album sleeve and piece of merchandise since the dawn of time) illustrates some episodes, while the modern-day Maiden narrate off-camera, like a crew of seasoned ancient mariners.

Steve Harris came up with the idea for Iron Maiden in 1975, and burned through singers, guitarists and drummers until hiring vocalist Paul Di’Anno in ’78. Following one disagreement too many, Di’Anno quit after Maiden’s second album, 1981’s Killers. Enter Dickinson, from fronting jobbing hard rockers Samson.

“Never has anyone been better equipped for world domination in his mid-twenties than Bruce Dickinson,” suggests one of the film’s talking heads, Classic Rock and Metal Hammer writer Dom Lawson.

Would you agree with that?

“Yeah, no… maybe,” replies Dickinson. “It’s very nice of someone to big me up, but I didn’t quite view it in those terms. I do think me and Steve was a really good match up, though. The film’s title is Burning Ambition, and that’s what Steve’s all about too.”

With Dickinson on board, Iron Maiden built on the success of the first two albums and turned themselves into what he calls “a global band”.

Harris entrusted band manager and “bombastic Yorkshireman” Rod Smallwood to help him realise his vision (“To build a creative fence around the band,” as Smallwood says in Burning Ambition). But there would be conflict. Not least with his new lead singer.

The dynamic between East End-born ex-Waltham Forest Borough Council road sweeper Harris and former Oundle public school boy-turned-rock star, champion fencer and airline pilot Dickinson is a constant presence in the Maiden story.

“Steve is the introverted, quiet, thoughtful young man from the East End working class,” explains Burning Ambition’s director Malcolm Venville. “And then you’ve got this public schoolboy, who is very expansive, very educated and – how can I say it? – volcanic. There’s a lot of mutual respect, but I think over the years there’s been a crazy energy between them.”

Dickinson gleefully recalls Harris jockeying with him for a centre-stage spot at Newcastle’s City Hall, and the pair almost coming to blows later. “We needed to butt heads, though,” he says, “because Steve needed to realise I wasn’t a pushover.” Harris also needed Dickinson’s voice to help realise his musical ambition (that word again).

“I’m never going to slag Paul Di’Anno,” Dickinson insists. “His voice was very charismatic and intrinsic to those first two albums. But Steve wasn’t just into heavy metal. He was into prog rock too. When he was looking for a singer, he wanted someone who could encompass a bigger range – not just notes, but storytelling, dramatising… all that stuff.”

The drama went up a notch for 1982’s The Number Of The Beast. Dickinson – like a heavy metal town crier in a studded leather jerkin – became the voice of persecuted Native Americans in Run To The Hills, and a prisoner facing the gallows in Hallowed Be Thy Name, and Iron Maiden scored their first UK No.1 LP.

“We’d changed the singer and everyone went: ‘Oh god!’ But then we put down the marker with the magic third album… And then we changed the drummer,” he adds, laughing.

The widely experienced Nicko McBrain replaced Clive Burr for 1983’s Piece Of Mind, and occupied the drum stool for the next four decades.

“I loved Clive, but the range of things we were able to do with Nicko was pretty much limitless,” admits Dickinson. Or, as Javier Bardem puts it, “Nicko was a gift from the gods of metal.”

Some of the documentary’s footage is poignant; both Di’Anno and Burr are no longer with us, and McBrain announced his retirement from touring in 2024. However, Piece Of Mind marked the beginning of Iron Maiden’s first imperial phase.

“Look at the difference from Number Of The Beast to Piece Of Mind to [1984’s] Powerslave, which was just banger after banger,” suggests Dickinson, who thinks this is the era when he learned how to write an Iron Maiden song. “If I were to choose two songs of mine from that time it would be Revelations and Powerslave. But there are others too – Flash Of The Blade, Slice Of Liquorice…”

Pardon?

“Flight Of Icarus,” he says, grinning. “We have lots of stupid names for our songs. We take the piss gently but frequently.”

Is it ever written down as ‘Slice Of Liquorice’ on the set-list?

“God no,” he shudders. “Because one night I might actually say it – ‘Hello Cleveland! Slice Of Liquorice!’”

Adrian Smith made his Iron Maiden debut on Friday, November 21, 1980, in the Sports Barn at Brunel University in Uxbridge. I know it was a Friday, because this writer (then an impressionable schoolboy in a Rush T-shirt) was in the audience.

“I remember it vividly,” Smith says today. “Because Steve said to me before the show: ‘I’m going for a walk in the audience. Come with me.’ He was happy to go out and talk to people. And – I’ll never forget – someone looked at me and said: ‘You better be good.’”

While Dickinson, in the nicest way possible, loves the sound of his own voice, Smith is more reserved. Talking to Classic Rock via Zoom from Milan, where he’s performing with his own group Smith/Kotzen, he yanks down his baseball cap and fumbles with his beard while talking.

Smith was childhood friends with guitarist Dave Murray, and his band, Urchin, and Iron Maiden sometimes shared a bill, including a gig playing in front of drunk American servicemen at the USAF base in Upper Heyford, Oxfordshire.

“Maiden played a few Van Halen songs that night, including Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love,” Smith remembers. “They were more aggressive and heavier than Urchin. But they had to use our PA, so I had to ask Steve for five quid after the gig.”

One week Smith was travelling to a pub gig with his wah-wah pedal in a Tesco carrier bag; the next he’d replaced fellow East Ender Dennis Stratton in Iron Maiden, and his world was about to change forever.

In reality, though, Smith was a frontman who gave it up to become part of a band.

“I’m a bit of a contradiction,” he says. “People think I’m shy, but really I’m a bit of a ham. In Urchin I’d been the lead vocalist, the songwriter, and I’d taken on a lot of responsibility. But when I joined Maiden I quickly found my place.

“Paul, Steve and Rod were all strong characters. Dave Murray was incredibly important musically but just happy up there playing guitar. Sometimes you have to curb your natural instincts to make it work as a collective. A band is a compromise.”

Maiden’s newest arrivals, Smith and Dickinson gravitated towards each other. “The other guys had regular girlfriends, who they all used to call ‘the missus’. After rehearsals they’d say: ‘I’ve got to see the missus.’ I couldn’t understand that, because it’s not like they were married,” Smith says, smiling. “I was footloose at the time and I think Bruce was, so we’d go for a beer and a game of pool, and then we started writing together.

“Eventually, we were on the road so much I gave up my flat. So when we played London I’d stay at my parents’ place in Clapton. Bruce would come round, we’d do a bit of writing, and my mum would bring us tea and sandwiches.”

From this cosy domestic set-up a writing partnership developed, which eventually lead to songs such as Flight Of Icarus, Two Minutes To Midnight, Moonchild…

At Brunel University, Eddie was still a disembodied head, spewing dry ice from behind the drum riser. A month later, Eddie was on stage at London’s Rainbow Theatre, brandishing a hand-held spotlight. Every generation of Maiden’s mascot is represented in Burning Ambition. “You’ve got ‘Beginning Eddie’, ‘Middle Eddie’, ‘Powerslave Eddie’…” Malcolm Venville explains.

“Eddie was Rod Smallwood in the early days,” recalls Smith. “When we went to the States the first time [summer 1981], Rod would drive us to a radio station and say: ‘Right, you and you – meaning me and Clive – you’re doing this interview.’ He’d put the Eddie mask on in the car, drag us into the building so we were cowering behind him, and then go roaring around the office, chasing the secretaries.”

Did Eddie give the band something to hide behind?

“To an extent, yes. Years later, when my son was about eleven or twelve, him and his mates were looking round the house, picked up the Maiden albums and all went: ‘Wow, look at this!’ They got drawn in by Eddie and the artwork.

Burning Ambition also revisits footage from Iron Maiden’s first Polish tour, in 1984. The country was then still part of the Communist Bloc, and the authorities treated Western heavy metal bands with suspicion.

The group look stunned as cheering fans surround their bus, banging on the windows and waving banners. “They could not believe we’d come there to play for them, because so many bands didn’t,” explains Smith. “It was the same when we first went to South America. The more deprived people are of comforts, the more music becomes important.”

After one of the Polish shows, Dickinson and the then Kerrang! writer Howard ‘HoJo’ Johnson broke curfew and went with a couple of fans to what the singer calls “a Soviet-style apartment complex in the middle of nowhere”.

“We were in the back of a Trabant and our hosts told us to stay quiet and look Polish if we got stopped by the cops,” Dickinson recalls. “It was all very Spy Who Came In From The Cold.

“‘HoJo’ and I sat up drinking with them, and they played us compilation cassettes they’d made of Western rock music. All they wanted to do was play that music, to let us know they were civilised people and they loved what we did. It was humbling.”

Burning Ambition’s true stars are the non-famous interviewees. Like the retired NYPD cop who used Maiden to blot out the horrors of 9/11, and the journalist who says that 1992’s Fear Of The Dark soundtracked her experience growing up during the Lebanese civil war.

“It’s about the resilience of people,” Dickinson suggests. “The resilience and hope that music gives people.”

Being in Iron Maiden from the mid-80s onwards also required resilience. “By then we didn’t have much chance to draw breath,” admits the singer. “Because it was tour, stop tour, start writing, start recording. Boom! Off you go again.”

In the documentary, 1984-85’s aptly named World Slavery tour (189 shows in 331 days) is illustrated by an animated Eddie struggling to scale a pyramid. This was Maiden in their stadium pomp, with on-stage sarcophagi and a giant mummified Eddie.

“We were in Brazil doing Rock In Rio, then back to America and six-foot snowdrifts,” Dickinson recounts. “We had seven nights booked at [New York’s] Radio City. But I got bacterial bronchitis and had to cancel two.”

Dickinson wasn’t the only one affected. Nicko McBrain’s hands became so severely blistered that he contracted blood poisoning. “All the veins in his arms turned red and they had him in hospital on an intravenous drip.”

“There was a lot of drinking and, yes, late nights too,” admits Smith. “When you start a band, you need money for petrol, food and guitar strings. Drugs are way down that list. Then you make more money, and what starts as a bit of fun starts to take the energy out of you.”

The absurdity of this period peaked when Dickinson was detained at Montreal airport for having a studded wristband in his hand luggage.

“A fan had given it to me, but it was a fashion wristband, with flattened decorative studs,” he protests. The Mounties were called, and claimed Dickinson was in possession of an offensive weapon. He was fingerprinted but eventually released without charge.

Yet the wristband returned to haunt him when he was flagged up as a person of interest at Baltimore airport. But a security official took pity and erased the incriminating entry on the computer: “She told me she’d had to do the same for one of The Beatles when he was caught with a quarter of a joint in 1968 or whenever.”

“The concerts and the people were great,” Smith says in the film. “Everything else was horrible.”

The only person that didn’t seem to be affected was Steve Harris.

In Burning Ambition, Iron Maiden’s bassist lists some of the names he’s been called over the years – “Sergeant Major, Ayatollah, Headmaster” – in a voice that no matter how many times he travels the world hasn’t lost one iota of its Waltham Forest accent.

Harris talks to Classic Rock from his home in Cable Beach in the Bahamas. It’s 10:15am his time, but he’s not catching any rays. “Nah, not at all,” he says, surprised by the suggestion. “I’m doing some DIY on the house.”

In Steve Harris’s world, if a job’s worth doing – be it writing 90 per cent of Iron Maiden’s music or undertaking home improvements – then it’s worth doing yourself.

Even when playing with older musicians during Maiden’s formative years, 20-year-old Harris was always in charge. So much so that one of his lasting memories of the band’s first gig, on May 1, 1976 at St Nicholas’s Church Hall in Poplar, East London, is the brief moment he lost control. “I was so nervous I cocked up the bass intro on one of the songs, and the rest of the band thought I was tuning up,” he sighs.

Playing gigs is still everything. Burning Ambition includes footage from 2025’s homecoming show at the London Stadium; Harris bounding on stage like a greyhound out of the traps the same way he’s done almost since Iron Maiden began.

“In the early days when we had frontmen that didn’t move so much, I had to cover the stage more. It was my job,” he stresses. “After Bruce arrived, I didn’t need to be in the middle of the stage – despite what he says,” he adds, laughing. “But I always wanted to keep moving. These days it takes more effort to get across the stage, without slipping over in my own sweat. I’ve always done a lot of sports, though. I still do a lot of running and I just played tennis this morning.”

Harris thinks Maiden took their biggest leap between the first and second records (“I know people love the first one, but Killers was a more professional-sounding album’), and that the greatest lesson he learned, from supporting the likes of Kiss and Judas Priest in the early days, was “to be nice to people”.

“No, I’m not naming names. But there was a lot of things going around, with headline bands worrying you were going to go down better than them. I’ve always felt you should give up if you’re worried about support bands. Any band supporting us, their job is to go out there, push us hard and try and take our audience.”

After Maiden played Rock In Rio, Brian May cornered Harris before Queen’s headline appearance. “Brian said we’d frightened the life out of them. I thought: ‘Good, we’ve done our job.’ Of course it didn’t make any difference to Queen, they still went down amazing. But it’s good to ruffle feathers.”

While the others were going mad on the World Slavery tour, how did he manage to keep his head? “I figured I had to be more sensible. Someone had to keep it all together and get on with it, whether I wanted to or not.” He pauses. “You know, it was boring at times. Sometimes I wanted to get a few beers down me. But there’s a time and place for it, and I always felt I was walking a bit of a tightrope.”

In early 1986, Iron Maiden hired an out-of-season hotel in Jersey in the Channel Islands to prepare songs for a sixth album, what would become Somewhere In Time.

“There was no one there, it was freezing cold, Bruce was off fencing, and, frankly, I was depressed,” recalls Adrian Smith, who channelled the experience into his songwriting. “If you look at the lyrics for [the album’s first single] Wasted Years, they’re written by someone who’s feeling alienated.”

Encouraged by Smith and Dickinson, Maiden broadened their palette with acoustic guitars and synthesisers on Somewhere In Time and 1988’s Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son.

But for 1990’s No Prayer For The Dying Harris insisted on going back to basics musically, and instead of using high-end facilities such as Compass Point studios in the Bahamas he wanted the band to use his Essex home studio.

“It seemed like going backwards, bashing it out in Steve’s barn,” says Smith, who quit during the early sessions. Dickinson followed Smith out the door three years later. Maiden soldiered on for two albums with new guitarist Janick Gers and ex-Wolfsbane vocalist Blaze Bayley.

Burning Ambition doesn’t gloss over this period, and one fan recalls watching the group playing to just 500 people at Philadelphia’s Electric Factory.

Harris, who was also going through a divorce at the time, seemed to take a perverse pride in such adversity. “I liked it,” he says.

In the film, however, Nicko McBrain complains bitterly about Dickinson revealing his plans to quit while they were halfway through a tour. “I had to look at his sorry arse every night,” the drummer grumbles. “We could have all handled it a bit differently,”

Dickinson agrees today. “The problem was the first person I told was Rod Smallwood, and he tried to control it. That creates a conspiracy. I don’t do shit like that any more. Nowadays I’ll come right out and say it to someone’s face. And I don’t mind what Nicko says about me in the film. We’re like a family. People say things and do things and people get over it.”

What did he learn during his six years out of Iron Maiden?

“Oh, I learned how two-faced fifty per cent of the world was,” he says, grinning. “And, after I’d gotten over that I learned an awful lot about creativity and singing that, frankly, I would never have learned if I’d stayed in Maiden.”

Both musicians returned to the band, now with three guitarists, in time for 2000’s Brave New World, with Smith, Murray and Gers nicknamed the Three Amigos.

“I was much stronger as a person,” says Smith. “If there’d been three Ritchie Blackmores or three Yngwie Malmsteens it would have been like an atomic explosion. But we’re all band guys, so it works.”

“I think Steve was suspicious at first and thought I just wanted to trouser some money,” Dickinson acknowledges. “But my attitude was: ‘The band are underdogs right now, so let’s start again and nip everybody in the nuts.’”

Unlike some of their peers, Iron Maiden never embraced hair metal, grunge and the rest to try to stave off obsolescence, and No.1 albums such as The Final Frontier and The Book Of Souls re-established them as a global band and brand. Yet watching Dickinson singing about the Charge Of The Light Brigade while clad as a 19th-century ‘redcoat’, or Harris, wearing his West Ham FC shirt, foot on a monitor, mouthing the lyrics, it’s difficult to imagine a more quintessentially English group.

“I’ve just made a documentary about Churchill [2024’s Churchill At War mini-series],” says Malcolm Venville. “And there is an Englishness to Iron Maiden.”

Today, Harris compares the forthcoming Eddfest at Knebworth, with its Friday-night preshow party, to a “medieval fair”. Maiden also handpicked Saturday night’s opening acts, who include vintage blues rockers Stray, The Almighty, The Hu, Airbourne and The Darkness. “I know The Darkness are a different type of band,” he stresses. “But I think they’re really entertaining.”

Either way, Harris knows it’ll be better than the time he went to see the Rolling Stones headline Knebworth in 1976.

“Oh it was ridiculous,” he says. “As soon as you put your foot out, you had to step over somebody, people were getting really ratty. I watched [opening acts] Lynyrd Skynyrd and Todd Rundgren and thought: ‘Nah, I’ve had enough, I’m out of here.’ Do you know, I’ve still never seen the Stones, which is a shame.”

Dickinson claims they’ve been speaking about an event like this for years. “Eddfest could even become a festival that didn’t have Iron Maiden in it, just bands in the same spirit,” he marvels.

Bruce Dickinson claims that Iron Maiden has always been “run in a very eccentric way, and that’s never changed”.

Would he describe it as a benign dictatorship, then?

“No, it’s not even that,” he replies. “Maiden is a very big bubble that seems to be getting bigger. But it’s never going to be a Metallica-sized bubble, because we didn’t do the Black Album and the ballads.

“But the difference is, we have a creative little world in Maiden. There’s the musical world and a weird little social world. Our families are interlinked – quite literally. So we look at the outside world as weird.

“The BRITs, the Grammys, the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, all of it is utterly irrelevant to us. What’s Number One at the moment? I couldn’t tell you. It’s meaningless. All I care about is what Iron Maiden are doing next week.”

Dickinson stops and laughs. “Of course, one of the reasons I left the band is because I was in that bubble. I had to escape to find out if there was anything I could do in the outside world. When I came back, I realised it was actually possible.”

Dickinson has another solo album in the works (“And it’ll blow your mind”), Smith has his ongoing collaboration with fellow guitarist Ritchie Kotzen (they recently released a second album), Harris has his side project British Lion.

Will there be another Iron Maiden album?

“I keep saying to Steve: ‘Do you want to do another album?’ And he’s like: ‘Well, no, not really,’” claims Dickinson.

“I’d be up for doing one,” Harris insists. “So you can’t rule it out, but we haven’t planned one as yet. The rest of them wanted to take next year off, and I didn’t, to be honest. But it is what it is.”

Harris is fixing up his house before a visit from his friends, including “all my football herberts”, for his 70th birthday.

“Steve’s as old as the speed limit,” quips 67-year-old Dickinson.

“Oh I don’t want to talk about that,” Harris groans. “It’s just a number. I’m always busy doing something, because I’ve known people who retire or even semi-retire and a few months later they pop their clogs. I was talking to a guy the other day who said his boss was ninetyone and still busy. I thought: ‘Well there’s hope for me yet.’”

Dickinson is not long back from a much-delayed honeymoon in Vietnam with his wife Leana. “And it provoked at least one new song,” he announces. “There’s always that little musical radar going.”

Unlike Harris, though, Dickinson claims that he’s also happy to spend time at home doing nothing. Daytime telly?

“Yeah, absolutely,” he says with laugh. “And if I can’t watch daytime telly, I’ll record daytime telly. How sad is that? With all the adverts it has for funeral arrangements and what to do if you have thrombosis.”

“Of course, there will be an end at some point,” one fan says in Burning Ambition. Not right now, though. Iron Maiden’s big bubble isn’t ready to burst yet.

Iron Maiden celebrate their 50th anniversary headlining their two-day Eddfest at Knebworth Park, Hertfordshire on July 11. Tickets are still available.

Iron Maiden have issued a statement to fans after they were forced to play a shortened set in Paris due to a power outage in the city on June 22.

The British heavy metal legends put on a phone-free gig at La Défense Arena in the French capital on Monday night and were recording footage for an upcoming concert film, but had their set interrupted for approximately an hour while waiting for power to be restored.

To comply with an 11:30pm venue curfew, Steve Harris’ band were forced to drop three songs from their setlist, losing proposed encore songs, Aces High, Fear Of The Dark and Wasted Years.

The band issued a statement about the show yesterday, June 23.

It reads:

“Last night Maiden returned to La Défense Arena in Paris. Having played two sold out nights there last year in the 37,000 capacity indoor stadium, home of Racing 92 rugby club, this return a year later was specifically to film the show for posterity and future release, and an indoor stadium and exuberant French fans were ideal for this. However, about fifty minutes into the set towards the end of ‘2 Minutes to Midnight’, a total power cut brought everything to a stop.

As stated by Le Figaro, the French national newspaper, today – “Officials are investigating whether the outage was linked to the extreme heat. However, French electricity distributor Enedis said the problem did not appear to originate from the public power grid and was more likely related to the arena’s own electrical installation. The exact cause remains under investigation”.

We will find out in the next few days exactly what happened with the power and why.

The band were able to resume on stage about an hour after the cut occurred continuing the set with ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. The concert was scheduled to finish by 11pm with a curfew at that time which the local police chief would only extend to 11.35pm after the cut off because, we were told, all local transport in the area stopped by 12.15 and they could not have over 30,000 fans on the streets unable to get home. This gave just enough time for the band to complete the set finishing with ‘Iron Maiden’ but unable to play any of the encores.

Bruce comments, “Despite everything the audience and atmosphere last night were fantastic and, like every other challenge Iron Maiden have faced over the years, we’ll find a way to deal with and overcome the missing songs in the encore when it comes to the final film.

“We know that many of you travelled long distances, waited patiently throughout the interruption, and were looking forward to experiencing the complete Run For Your Lives show. We share your disappointment. No one is more frustrated than the band and crew, who were eager to deliver the full performance you deserved.

“What we will remember most from last night is the incredible spirit inside the arena. Your patience, understanding and unwavering support through an extremely challenging situation meant the world to us. The energy in the room was remarkable and is exactly what we have to come to expect from Paris, and a reminder of why we always love playing here.

“Thank you, Paris.”

Manager Rod Smallwood adds, “The fans were magnificent and a huge thanks to them from the band for their patience and support. It just illustrates again what great fans we have. The temperature in Paris was as high as 44°C that day and the hall AC went off with the cut so of course, with so many people in there, it soon got hot while they were waiting for us to be able to resume playing. Naturally when we continued with the lights and pyro and excitement it got seriously hot for fans and band. Despite that the energy of the reaction was incredible!””

The Run For Your Lives tour, which first made its way across Europe in the summer of 2025, will continue at Copenhagen’s Copenhell festival tonight (June 24).

This leg will wrap up with a performance at Knebworth House on July 11, when the band headline the second day of their own two-day festival, Eddfest. The Hu, The Darkness, Airbourne, The Almighty, the solo band of ex-Maiden singer Blaze Bayley and more are also on the lineup.

After the European leg ends, the band will bring the Run For Your Lives production to the Americas starting in August. Further shows in Asia and Australia are also planned. The tour will conclude with performances at K-Arena in Yokohama, Japan on November 24 and 25, after which Maiden will not take to the stage until 2028, at the earliest.

Before they became the sleek, stadium-conquering pop juggernaut of the eighties, Genesis were a delightfully strange beast. Long before I Can’t Dance proved that at least two members of the band couldn’t, indeed, dance, the prog pioneers were weaving dense, theatrical tapestries of pastoral English mythology, biblical allegory, and surrealist high art.

This was an era best represented by the classic five-piece lineup: keyboardist Tony Banks, bassist/guitarist Mike Rutherford, guitarist Steve Hackett, drummer Phil Collins and frontman Peter Gabriel, a man who transformed rock music into avant-garde theatre. Gabriel variously sported a reverse mohican, a fox’s head, a batwing gown, and the bulbous costume of the Slipperman, which looked more like a terrifying, highly-contagious skin condition than anything picked off the racks at the popular Kensington branch of Biba.

Genesis moved swiftly from the boarding school cloisters of Charterhouse to the sprawling, conceptual madness of their early albums, each a masterclass in creative eccentricity and musical virtuosity. They didn’t merely write songs; they constructed entire sonic universes across albums like Foxtrot and Selling England By The Pound. It was a time of uncompromising artistic risk, except that it never felt like risk at all. It was a time when whimsical folk melodies could instantly give way to apocalyptic, multi-part epics, and nobody would think it was weird. Why? Because it was their time.

So, how well do you know the band’s progressive golden age? Do you know your Supper’s Ready from your Musical Box? It’s time to channel your inner cosmic lawnmower and test your knowledge. And please let us know how you got on in the comments – but no googling. We’ll know.