The power of an icon

Paul Di'Anno has left us. Tragic news, but not entirely unexpected, given the well-known health conditions that had afflicted poor Paul for several years. Those lucky enough to catch his last tour - which also stopped in Italy at the Live Club in Trezzo sull'Adda on 13 September 2023 - won't be able to forget that feeling of standing in front of a survivor, a man who was still there only by some miracle. He knew it so well that at one point he cried with genuine sincerity, looking up at the sky and shouting "Have you seen mom? I did it", as if to suggest that this wasn't simply a farewell, but a warning of his imminent arrival.

A legend who struggled to move in a wheelchair, yet with the eyes of a boy who embodied a legend of metal music in the very years when it was being born and defining its own traits. Fundamentally a victim of himself, of the fragility that led him to fall into the endless traps a sensitive kid like Paul could fall into. And Paul came to know every single one of those traps first-hand, one after another.

The first two Iron Maiden albums, for some the most authentic ones: the sound of street-level metal drawing heavily from punk, the cursed metal of urban hooligans, capable even of insulting the then all-powerful Thatcher by imagining her murder, or picturing her dressed as a fascist ready to club a young Eddie - with a capacity for transgression that's hard to imagine today.

This primitive purity, this instinctive and irrational violence of the first two Iron Maiden albums would probably have been unthinkable without Paul Di’Anno, who embodied — throughout his whole life — the figure of the street tough, the alter ego of the characters populating the band's early songs: the drunks and the prostitutes, the outcasts of a fossilized society that made any form of redemption impossible.

For Di’Anno, the only ways to exorcise the violence he felt victimized by were the same available to Ozzy Osbourne: on one hand, cheating the system by becoming a rockstar; on the other, recreating the brutality of early-1980s British society through music, the only possible tool for redemption and emancipation.

Two iconic albums, “Iron Maiden” (1980) and “Killers” (1981), which will forever remain a unique chapter in the discography of Harris's band. Then, in 1981, Paul Di’Anno's problems with alcohol and his inability to withstand the stress of touring became unsustainable, forcing Steve Harris to look for a replacement. The arrival of the tireless professional Bruce Dickinson allowed Iron Maiden to achieve international success, but it also put Paul's punk spirit into storage, opening the door to epic, historical scenarios and the mythologizing of war — territory Paul had always been completely alien to.

1981 is therefore the year that marked Di’Anno's life, his sliding door moment. What Iron Maiden would have become had Di’Anno never left is impossible to say, and pointless to speculate about, since history isn't written with ifs. What's certain is that the two paths diverged: the band's path led it to become the most famous metal phenomenon of all time, alongside Metallica, while Di’Anno's path remained far more low-key, through various outfits — Di’Anno, Gogmagog, Battlezone, Killers — none of which ever came close to the greatness of the band he'd come from.

Di’Anno lived off the mythical aura of having been the frontman on the first two Maiden albums, turning his life into a cursed biography, marked by self-destructive behavior that he paid for in full without regrets, managing right up to the end to keep hauling his body around almost like the relic of a saint (a new European tour was planned for 2025).

Paul Di’Anno's life ends here; his agonizingly slow decline has finally come to an end. I like to imagine him now, running free the way he hadn't been able to for far too many years, just as he sang back in 1980 in “Running Free”.

Ho passato la notte in una prigione di Los

Angeles, ascoltando l`urlo delle sirene.

Loro non hanno capito nulla di me,

sto correndo selvaggiamente,

sto correndo libero

Sto correndo libero si,

Sto correndo libero

Sto correndo libero si,

Sto correndo libero

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