Iron Maiden: Britain's Biggest Heavy Metal Export
In fact all of Iron Maiden seem to live in Shangri-La. The group was born in the 1970s but is now finding bigger audiences than ever before for the driving guitars, thunderous drums and fantastical lyrics about Coleridge and Cathars and the number of the Beast. Their solo show in São Paulo is their largest yet - it attracts about half the crowd of an entire Glastonbury Festival.“Five years ago,†says Steve Harris, guitarist and creative heart of the band, “we said we'd start easing back a bit. Just because we thought that by this age we'd be needing to. But we don't need to, or want to - and the demand is there, so we can't really. Our success is bigger than it was in the Eighties! So what can you do? You keep on going.â€Â
Iron Maiden are a uniquely British band - around the world their show opens with Churchill's “We will fight them on the beaches†speech and ends with Monty Python's Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.
They are such a wildly successful British export it's a wonder that Peter Mandelson hasn't invited them aboard any yachts. But then, that's the irony about Britain's biggest band - people in Britain don't think of them as big. Media attention seems skewed towards old bands making comebacks when Iron Maiden have never actually stopped, though the line-up has varied a bit and Dickinson went solo for some years. Cool kids in Shoreditch wearing Iron Maiden T-shirts may well be doing so ironically but, in times of crisis, metal sells well.
When AC/DC's new album went to No 1 at the end of last year it was surely a sign of hard times. The band's other peaks were the economically grim years of 1980 and 1990. Just this week, PRS for Music, which collects royalties for songwriters, revealed that British stars' foreign earnings had hit record levels, with the Police earning the most, followed by Iron Maiden, then Coldplay and the Spice Girls and Elton John. Def Leppard, another hard rock band, were also in the Top Ten.
Iron Maiden have just won a Brit Award for Best Live Act, from an awards body that has tended to ignore them, and last year sold out the 55,000-capacity Twickenham Stadium, their first UK stadium show. Not that the band care particularly. Their rock-solid manager, Rod Smallwood (who has the cash to keep year-round staff at his holiday home in Barbados), declares: “The band don't give a s***. We've got our own little world and the Brit Awards don't really come into it. But that award was voted for by the public and Coldplay fans aren't very proactive, are they?†Apparently an army of Maiden fans around the world orchestrated a mass vote.
And what about those ironic T-shirt wearers? “It's weird,†says Steve Harris, “when David Beckham wore a bloody Maiden shirt - he's probably not even a fan, he just wore it as a fashion thing or something. Or maybe he is a fan ... I don't know.
“But we've never been cool. Emphatically, we never want to be cool or fashionable. We despise fashion. What is fashion? It's a transient thing, here today, gone tomorrow. We have seen bands come and go, all of whom have been touted heavily. We have got a style - it just doesn't happen to be very fashionable. Who cares?â€Â
So what is the enduring appeal of heavy metal? It's noisy and relentless but, Iron Maiden insist, its message is positive. They sound almost Californian as they insist how inspiring their message is. The band formed in 1975, in Leytonstone, East London, and their hits over the decades include Run to the Hills, Can I Play With Madness, Aces High, Bring Your Daughter ... to the Slaughter, The Evil That Men Do and The Number of the Beast.
Research exists claiming to show that heavy metal and classical music fans have the highest IQs among all listeners. One fan, Felipe Martynetz, a 24-year-old from Curitiba in Brazil, has a letter to give to the band, in which he has written that “the philosophical background in Maiden's song lyrics made me discover philosophy as something that had always been near to me, but whose presence I'd never suspected. Then I read Huxley's Brave New World, Golding's Lord of the Flies, and Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.â€Â
What dawns on you, while watching Iron Maiden's live show, with its bombast and pyramids and 20ft robots, is how curiously lacking in aggression it is. Passion, yes, but it's not a fight. (A roadie tells me that he's been working for Maiden for 30 years and has never seen a punch-up.) Dickinson agrees. “Oh no, it's not fighting. It's not a big f***-you at all. That's a pointless waste of energy. There is the potential on the one hand for rage and chaos, or passion and exultation on the other - and that's my choice: to try to levitate all these people who have come along. And I don't do it - they do it themselves - but you have to sort of provide the framework.â€Â
He says that he began performing in small clubs, and learnt from one of his childhood heroes, Ian Gillan, the Deep Purple singer, how to bring your audience in. “I said to him one night, ‘What's your secret?' And he said, ‘Always look 'em in the eyes.' I thought, OK, I'll try it - but how far can I actually see? And I discovered it was entirely possible to look right the way to the back of a show and see somebody. I thought, well, if you grab that person, then everybody around them suddenly goes ‘Wow'and you energise that whole area suddenly. I started working that - in the end you can do it in stadiums.â€Â
A new film, Flight 666, shows these Maiden devotees in all their international hues - but all wearing variations on that same black T-shirt. The film, which has also just won an award - Best Music Documentary at the South By Southwest music festival in Texas, was made by two Canadian film-makers, Scot McFadyen and Sam Dunn, lifelong metal fans who were allowed access to the band as they toured the world on their private jet. Yes, Iron Maiden have their own plane, and Dickinson, who works as a commercial pilot in his time off, is the captain. He grabbed headlines last year for piloting one of two aircraft that rescued stranded holidaymakers after their package tour company went bust.
Ed Force One, a customised Boeing 757 (decorated with their zombie mascot, Eddie, clinging to the tail fin), transports all the band, their families, crew and equipment directly to where they want to play. It means fans in “Second World†countries never visited by Western rock bands now can be. Marvel at the Costa Rican in the film who never dreamt that he would see stars up close “because I live in the ass of the world!†The band tell me that Oasis have made inquiries about using it. But when you say the words “private jet� “Oh yeah, it's a red rag to a bull,†agrees Dickinson, “but there is so much woolly thinking about everything to do with the environment. It's like energy-saving lightbulbs - all very well and good, but there are lots of health risks associated with them and in addition they're a bit of a nightmare to get rid of and they cost a huge amount to manufacture in the first place with all sorts of weird chemicals in them - so, yeah, it's sort of the answer, but it's not 100 per cent the answer.†And so Dickinson's theories about the environment continue.
He debunks “myths†about electric cars and biofuels; he argues that shipping is far more polluting than flying, that algae technology is the way forward (“and it scrubs CO2 out of the atmosphereâ€Â) but that we will also have to get used to nuclear power, like the French. He has invested in a cargo airship that will lift 1,000 tonnes across the Atlantic and likes the idea of the band eventually doing an eco-friendly tour in one.
Dickinson could talk like this for hours. In fact, he does - until the chat drifts on to how his mother was 16 and his dad 17 when he was born in the upstairs bedroom of his coalminer grandfather's council house in Nottingham. And how he was 35 when his mum told him that she had tried to abort him, with some kind of month-after pill. “And I was, like,†he chuckles with bafflement, “‘Am I supposed to have some kind of crisis about this? Because this is harder for you than it is for me'.†He shrugs.
He went to Oundle when his parents started doing well in building and property. He felt an outsider there and says that he didn't make friends easily, which is a surprise because he comes across as such an affable chap now. The band come from modest backgrounds. Dickinson calls heavy metal “the working man's operaâ€Â.
Dickinson may be manic in his passions but his demeanour is unflappable, with the steady voice of the BBC radio presenter that he also is. When captaining the aircraft his reassuring tones comes from the cockpit announcing “light drizzle†and apologising for “a few small lumps and bumps back thereâ€Â. But later he tells me about flying in to São Paulo, sighing. “Oh God, it's a palaver. Sometimes they get a bit enthusiastic in Brazil and you have to say, ‘Hang on, this is quite a serious business we're engaged in up here!' But the call sign is always 666, so they know it's us. The guy yesterday goes, ‘Is that Ed Force One?' ‘Yes it is.' ‘Is he on board?' I said - guessing he meant me - ‘He is flying the aeroplane'. ‘Say something for me Broooce! Scream for me!'â€Â
Are the band a threat to morals? Nicko McBrain, the drummer with the long peroxide locks, the chatty Essex charmer of the band, now lives in Florida, where he goes to church regularly. “We used to play Southern states like South Carolina and there would be protesters outside the gig with banners, saying our lyrics were satanic. But you've got to read the words. In fact my reverend back in Florida, I gave him The Best of the Beast book - it's got all the lyrics, pictures, tour dates and everything. And he read it and he came out and said, ‘There's some serious stuff going on in this.' People question my faith and I say, ‘Well, the greatest trick the Devil ever played was making people think he didn't exist'.â€Â
Perhaps the greatest trick Iron Maiden ever pulled was convincing the English that they no longer exist - their lack of fame at home works out quite well. “Frankly, I like it that way,†Dickinson says. “I've lived in Chiswick for 20 years and I pay the council tax and the congestion charge and when I'm away I get texts from my sad old 50-year-old mate who runs the Feltham Recycling Centre saying they're missing me down the pub, ha ha. I go home, get my bike out, mooch around the shops and enjoy living in - how shall I put it? - a cool country. Because then we go out on tour and we can set fire to everything.â€Â
Flight 666 will be showing in cinemas nationwide on April 21. Tickets can be bought online at www.ironmaiden.com