Iron Maiden review — a masterclass in relentless entertainment
“Scream for me, Glasgow! Here we go!” Should the bottom ever drop out of the rock star game, Bruce Dickinson could defer retirement by getting a job as the guy who hypes the punters on the waltzers. He remains, at 64, a terrifically powerful and theatrical singer, but his secondary role is to work the crowd with the same expert touch that his bandmates bring to bear on guitars and drums. He is hammy, he is cheesy, he’s the full omelette, but he will not rest until everyone in the room is clapping and roaring. This opening night of Iron Maiden’s UK run was a masterclass in relentless entertainment.
This new tour is built around two albums: Somewhere in Time from 1986 and 2021’s Senjutsu, dropping many of their poppiest songs and leaning into the bassist and lead songwriter Steve Harris’s prog-rock tendencies. In a set of epics Alexander the Great stood tall. This holy grail among fans was released almost 37 years ago but, until this summer, the band had never played the song live. In some ways it’s preposterous, with a lyric like a Wikipedia entry — “By the Aegean Sea/ In 334BC/ He utterly beat the armies of Persia” — but Dickinson hollered with such bellicose gusto that its eight and a half minutes passed in a flash.
The staging, which featured the band’s giant mascot Eddie as a samurai warrior swinging a sword, had splendid pantomime charm. But that’s just window dressing. Iron Maiden are all about virtuosity in pursuit of intensity. Every riff, every beat, every solo builds towards catharsis. When this works, which is most of the time, it’s thrilling. Fear of the Dark, the evening’s high point, was an expression of communal euphoria, the crowd singing along with Janick Gers’s beautiful opening guitar motif and never letting up. By this time the band had recovered from a bad lull caused by four new songs clustered early in the set. The Senjutsu material is worth hearing, and Maiden’s refusal to be a legacy act admirable, but the running order could be finessed.
That said, Hell on Earth, the best of the new work, deserved its place in the encore, paired with another futility-of-war song, The Trooper. The latter, an all-time metal classic, was so fast and exhilarating that it was almost possible not to notice that its content — “The mighty roar of the Russian guns” — is once again bleakly relevant.