Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

As debuts go, Bruce Dickinson’s first album with Iron Maiden, The Number Of The Beast was and still is, a huge success, a towering behemoth full of stand-out Metal songs that even after 30 years can make the hair on the back of the neck not just stand up but revel in what the band put together. To follow that up would take something monumental, something that would have to crawl out of the pit of darkness and shine a light on the group that Iron Maiden were to come.

The fourth album Iron Maiden released in 1983, Piece of Mind, didn’t quite hit the same heights, an almost impossible task, a labour that even Hercules would have dithered over for months and ultimately turned down flat saying it was too risky and his reputation would suffer, however Iron Maiden would attempt it and as near as was humanly possibly nearly succeeded. Certainly Bruce Dickinson’s vocals if anything had improved as their literary references and their widening knowledge started to show more fruition. The addition of Nicko McBrain on drums replacing the now dearly missed and dearly departed Clive Burr was to take the band onto another level and Steve Harris’ writing went up several notches with the in the course of the preceding year and musically the band had taken on more prominence and appeal epic sounding battle cry of The Trooper, Bruce’s first forays into writing for the band after leaving Samson were well received and the combination of the two longest members of the British Metal kings, Harris and Dave Murray would see the collaboration on perhaps the most underrated song but brilliantly performed Still Life.

Before the album was opened and the music listened to though the striking image of Iron Maiden’s mascot Eddie in a straight jacket and being placed in a padded cell, was poured over. Once again the album artwork presented by Derek Riggs captured the soul of the album. The frightening transposition from a being that was bigger than the devil which adorned the group’s previous album was now reduced to being a creature in chains; one in so much mental pain was perhaps even more startling, more provocative to the listener and fan of album art than the fear attached to the thought that there was some being bigger than the Devil controlling the end of days of humanity. This is the fear of what goes on in the inner workings of the mind and when it all goes wrong, a nightmare for psychologists. In this the listener can dwell with Eddie and the band but with the knowledge they can escape should they wish to.

However terrifying the image on the front of the front, the snarling bestial creature held back by manacles that surround his neck, there is the hope of sympathy for a creature lost in his own head, so much so that the lobotomy has left him bereft and adrift. It is an image that perhaps stands out as one of the most iconic due to its single yellowish tinge and use of shadows and perhaps only bettered for its starling and gripping nature by the live album that followed the following year, the incredible Live After Death and wouldn’t be captured again till Fear of The dark was released many years later.

The album offered very much the same imagery inside and was only just short of matching the sheer majesty of the Number of the Beast as it didn’t have the unifying power of that album’s title track. That aside this was an album that reached deep into the pit of the listener, grasped something very dear to them and tinkered with it for a while before pulling it out completely, ripping it apart and letting the flotsam and jetsam take on its own free will. The opening of Where Eagles Dare brings the listener close and thoughts of the heroic war films spring to mind, for which the song was named after the Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood film. What comes next is the utter brilliance of Revelations and the mixing of English poetry and hymns with a full blown grasp of the biblical that would take on more prominence in the 1988 album Seventh Son of a Seventh Son. Even the timing of the song, 6 minutes and 51 seconds is an allusion to the part of the Bible of Revelations in which it resides. What G.K. Chesterton would have made of his hymnal being used by Iron Maiden is anybody’s guess but the words, “I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.” Fits each passage of the song and it also echoes throughout the album especially when taken into context of the album cover and the next few lines of the hymnal after the first verse. The illusion of insanity that the band and Derek Riggs present on the front of the album is there in the warning that, “That all that terror teaches, From Lies of the tongue and pen, from all the easy speeches that comfort cruel men…”  To each person the terror that takes root, whether doled out by Government, religion or by circumstance can be seen to nothing sometimes as the terror that is in the person’s own mind, these roots can get a grip a lot quicker and go a lot further.

The song also plays with the idea of the tarot card with the line, “The Secret of the Hanged Man- the smile on his lips…” The Hanged Man in such cards can be seen as a sign of sacrifice and the supposed glory of resurrection or of a new point of view. This image of a new point of view should be considered as Nicko McBrain suggests that after the band released The Number of the Beast, there were many in America and some at home in Britain that were all too ready to label the band as satanic, a ludicrous and absurd position in which to put Heavy Metal and one that would go on taking effect with the genre for many years after.

With references to the Bible, film, The Crimean War in the pulsating The Trooper, Greek mythology and the allusion to failed hubris in the Flight of Icarus, to which also leads the notion of genius and insanity that runs through the title of the album in the effect that of (The Icarus Complex, the psychological link between emotional high and depressive low of Bi-Polar disorder),  modern Science Fiction in To Tame A Land, based on Frank Herbert’s Dune series, there lies a song in between that doesn’t get the same type of recognition that are afforded the other songs on the album, namely Still Life.

If any song captures neatly the idea of the album title then Still Life with its ethereal feel, its atmospheric charge and sublime lyrics encapsulates perfectly the drive of collective madness. The fear of what someone sees in a pool of water, the images that rush at them whether in the form of the dead of the living takes root and leads to want to share this ambiguous knowledge with others. The songs best representation would be the film based on Stephen King’s novel The Tommyknockers. The idea that one person’s madness or mania, whether real or induced or perceived by outside influences frame the nature of nightmares, the subconscious trying to make the person understand perhaps what is at stake. The interesting line of, “I’ve no doubt that you think I’m off my head.” can make the listener go back once more to when they first got hold of the album and looked at the cover, the chains and manacles that hang around Eddie’s neck are waiting just as much for the listener as Bruce tells them, “It’s not just me they want you too”.  Perhaps in all of this the most important word is doubt, for it is only doubt, the hubris that stops humankind reaching to a place that is unattainable and dangerous to touch, whether that is the sun or the brain, some things are just too hot and unstable to tamper with.

Whilst not reaching the height of Number of the Beast, Piece of Mind is a classic of the British Heavy Metal genre, packed with great tunes that show the band’s ever increasing bounty and fountain of knowledge. A must have of the Maiden back catalogue.

Ian D. Hall