Iron Maiden

The year is 1980. But what does that matter? The London that serves as the backdrop to this debut album by Iron Maiden seems ageless: after all, when the dying light of day becomes an image of life itself irrevocably consuming itself, then night, falling, erases all shapes and with them the sense of oppression and confinement of the eternal city (and of a life with no way out), transforming it into a utopia that nonetheless remains temporary, forever bound to the perception of reality. This perspective is the real key to understanding this record; the strength, the exuberance, the irrational passion poured into it mean that its beauty breaks all boundaries and becomes the direct mark of these musicians' greatness, with no mediation, no stock tricks, no preciousness and no wasted time: a true masterpiece that speaks for itself and says an enormous amount.

To explain what this LP still means and communicates today, nearly three decades after its release, we need to start from what seems a superficial detail. The cover still ranks among the most repulsive and fascinating of all time: the "Death-in-Life" figure (that's what it is, not yet Eddie as a cartoonish character) bursting from its ambush radiates the same light as slum street lamps and the full moon, and directly enrols, thanks to that typically English taste for macabre atmosphere, graveyard poetry and the Gothic novel among Harris & co.'s influences.

It's possible to find a common thread running through this record, provided we set aside the lyrics in this respect (they only seem truly meaningful when taken individually); being, in fact, the antithesis of a concept album, the music doesn't unfold along the same axis as the written text, shaping itself around it - rather it's the words that are fitted to the music to depict its movements: the result is a deeply restless, unsystematic whole, made up of a multitude of episodes and moods, which nonetheless finds its unity precisely in each track's distinctiveness from the others.

The genuine drive that characterizes these musicians certainly can't be compared to that of the Sex Pistols or the Damned: the instrumental skill with which they perform these songs suggests a seasoned outfit, possessing a technique well above the average hard-rock band of the previous decade, and brings to mind progressive rock, albeit without the coldness into which the latter had ended up degenerating by that point. Beyond the simplified, reductive view that regards the so-called "New Wave Of British Metal" as a mediation between prog's solemnity and punk's rawness (following the exhaustion - or transfiguration - of both British movements), the Iron Maidens place themselves at the head of British rock's rebirth with an exuberance and originality that, while shared by many contemporary metal bands, in their case elevate them above the tide of otherwise excellent one-off acts, in a sense lifting them out of history and allowing them to survive beyond the end of the scene. Precisely for this reason, even though the band's career needs no introduction (from their debut through to the progressive concept of "Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son", via the power-metal of "Piece Of Mind", their influence on rock practice and imagery has been enormous), it felt right to revisit each gem of this pioneering debut, which paradoxically risks being overshadowed by the later glories of the (then) five Londoners.

"Prowler" opens the album and immediately establishes the pursuer/pursued dynamic that would be central to Iron Maiden and to 80s metal as a whole, not without a certain complicity between the two, a sort of role-play at once predatory and passionate; the same dynamic that plays out between the two guitars - the rhythm guitar, square-cut and rooted in hard rock, and the lead guitar, driven by elegant virtuosity - underpinned by Di Anno's charging vocals celebrating their duels. A track that still leaves listeners stunned today by the sheer naturalness of its attack. Amid so much novelty, a more classically-rooted episode holds its own: "Running Free", an anthem to the recklessness of youth as well as a summation of over a decade of street rock, all the more fascinating as a symbol of a world and era already crumbling, the 1970s: the band seems fully aware of this and forges a track that's only vaguely nostalgic, in fact superbly arranged, able to draw on the most well-worn devices (drums entering followed by the bass, a rising rhythm seasoned with an epic chorus and so on) to project a new, concrete musical vision: the masterpiece within the masterpiece is the central instrumental break, a kind of tribute to blues and rock 'n' roll, with an almost tribal drum pattern (Clive Burr's, among the first to make use of a double kick pedal) and a palm-muted riff.

It's worth noting that although this album marks metal's definitive break from its blues roots, finally becoming truly "heavy" and thus freeing itself from hard rock, Di Anno (note: not Steve Harris, the band's composer and mastermind, but the screamer, the beast on stage) described the band in interviews of the time as belonging precisely to that latter genre: like Kevin Heybourne of Angel Witch and Mortimer of Holocaust (to name two other NWOBHM bands), he was a singer more rock than metal - something Bruce Dickinson would never be.

"Remember Tomorrow" opens in an elegiac, subdued key (in the vein of Vanilla Fudge's "Some Velvet Morning", whose structure it echoes and on whose foundation it re-proposes and effectively re-founds the acoustic/electric dialectic within "heavy" music), and immediately Di Anno's lament turns into a scream, reacting against the voluptuous, self-satisfied surrender to sorrow that the song represents musically, soaring from the cramped reality of London's back alleys up onto airy, nocturnal cliffs.

The first half of the album closes with Iron Maiden's first true epic (fittingly, later reinterpreted masterfully by Dickinson on "Live After Death": all subsequent albums would be studded with sagas, and this one stands as their perfect archetype): "Phantom Of The Opera", with its neoclassical flavour and the driving charge of its famous triplet riff, largely instrumental and, precisely for that reason, all the stronger for a particularly meaningful lyric: conducting the orchestra, in the guise of a new Erik (the protagonist of the novel that gives the track its name), is Steve Harris, the young outcast composing music in the slums, forever torn between death drives and redemption through love, instincts that intertwine throughout his artistic output.

It's within this need for escape from everyday reality that "Transylvania" takes shape: Steve Harris, poet and proletarian, in dreaming up distant lands and horror-tinged scenarios, and in recreating them through music - something he could never have achieved as well through poetry or painting - draws, with a spontaneity that borders on the unconscious, on British musical and folkloric tradition: the guitars seem to imitate bagpipes, in a tight dialectic between present and past. And this track isn't simply fertile ground for his bass to run riot over, but re-founds instrumental rock on entirely new terms, remaining to this day one of its most thrilling and representative examples: largely the preserve of progressive rock until then, the "instrumental piece" would go on to become an extremely frequent presence on metal records of every stripe. In just over four minutes, without granting the slightest space to the rhetoric and preciousness of eighties "guitar heroes" or the bloated progressive superproductions of the decade's tail end: this is an ensemble in a state of grace, whose live sound must have come across - unlike what often happens - as even more devastating and incisive, and whose studio performance reflects nothing but pure creative spontaneity.

With "Strange World" the band almost seems to revisit, with personality and passion, and in a musical and cultural context that in some ways is the polar opposite, the very concept of psychedelia; whereas "Remember Tomorrow" was essentially a slow-building crescendo, this track knows no sudden explosions, instead modulating the same atmosphere across multiple registers: some of the most spectral arpeggios ever committed to tape unfold in a circular structure, then the piece reaches its peak with a magnificent solo in twelve-eight time from Dave Murray, before settling back down and taking flight once more around the three-minute mark, spreading a concentrate of emotions that remain, in every respect, deeply rooted in reality: lysergic acid seems utterly obsolete for a dreamer as grounded and troubled as Harris.

"Charlotte The Harlot" marks an abrupt return to street-level epic, all crossroads vulgarity, lopsided rhythms and machine-gun bursts of drumming, interspersed with an elegiac central break that recalls the atmosphere of the previous track. The picaresque harlot at the heart of the story possesses an almost heroic immorality, and the young man who has fallen for her is torn between the enjoyment of carnal pleasure and the selflessness of "caring": recurring themes in rock culture and music, but developed here in a thoroughly personal way (as the slaughter savored in the following track will demonstrate, even though Charlotte's "ghost" will return on "The Number Of The Beast").

"Iron Maiden" is the final blow struck with whatever strength remains after just over thirty minutes of music, the blood dripping from the eponymous Iron Maiden of Nuremberg with which the band carves its indelible name into the walls of history and distills its own worldview. In just three minutes our heroes give form to a bloodthirsty fury (yet one so pure and crystalline) that has nothing to do with decibels or bpm reached, but pushes the mimetic and introspective capacities of rock music even further: Steve Harris's refined musico-literary games on one side, the perversion of the basest, rawest instincts on the other, create a disorienting effect, as if sanity and madness had been chasing each other in a whirl throughout the record, only to collide and merge at this very point. And so we return to where it all began.

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31/01/2008