HEAVY
METAL: MAIDEN
VOYAGE
The
Sunday Times Magazine (London) November 5 1995
BRIAN
DEER
Blaze Bayley springs and snarls into a storm of
teenage boys. It is a fake kind of spring and a
contrived kind of snarl - the moves of the nerd with
the air guitar in front of the bedroom mirror. But
the boys are with him. They want him to win. And a
sea of their fists joins a chant
"Maiden...Maiden." He shakes his forearms
in mock rage at the sky.
It's
10pm and on stage at the Tel Aviv Cinerama, Israel,
the old war-horses of heavy metal, with 40m albums
sold, are confronting their fans for the first real
test of a decision that was tougher than steel. Two
years ago, a row over the creative chances and huge
spoils of top-line rock saw the band's legendary
vocalist, Bruce Dickinson, walk away "to pursue
a solo career".
Now
they have Blaze and tonight is his baptism: opening
his first world tour.
The
upbeat view is that the line-up has altered and yet
things remain the same. The band's managers, who with
founder and bass player Steve Harris own the
trademark "Iron Maiden", think that, as
with "Manchester United" or
"Chevrolet", you can change the bodies as
much as you like and the name will continue to sell.
After all, since its launch, 20 years ago next month,
a startling 19 Maiden musicians have experienced a
parting of the ways.
Tonight,
as the band ran out onto the stage to meet 3,000 boys
and maybe 50 girls, however, they were more than
freaked out by the risk. The music press says that
metal is dying and that the 1980s glory, when names
like Maiden and Def Leppard could knock even
Streisand out of the charts, was now just history. An
age gap is yawning, as these men in their 40s seek to
pump up fans who are typically only 17. And the
sexism, racism and homophobia of the genre is being
challenged by new attitudes. The agony of this
evening is that the verdict could yet be cruel.
Blaze
was nervous, to say the least, as he went through his
warm up motions. He had been plucked from obscurity
by Harris during lucky-break open auditions - and at
least 1,000 rivals had since gone bitching that they
were better than him. His old (mainly support) band,
Wolfsbane, had never been further than a trip to
Germany, where half its gigs fell flat. In a decade
of singing he had yet to receive one ego-boosting
royalty cheque. But as the band steamed into the
first song on the running order, their latest single,
Man on the Edge, he breathed hard and settled his
stomach for the hour-40-minute set. At 31, he was a
decade closer to the boys than the guys around him -
and in metal those years could count. When he gripped
his hands round the mike and pushed his elbows wide,
he could feel the force behind his voice rise from
somewhere near his knees. It swelled full inside his
black T-shirt before belting past his chords into
space:
- "A
briefcase, a lunch and a man on the edge.
- Each
step gets closer to losing his head.
- Is
someone in heaven? Are they looking down?
- 'Cause
nothing is fair as you look around."
From
the narrow pit between the band and the boys you
could see Blaze looking around. His brown eyes, cast
into hollows by racks of red and yellow lighting
above the stage, were flicking across the sea of
faces as if searching for some special friend. From
the pit, too, you could see his sweat break, as
Harris's bass galloped and the guitars blasted. You
could see strands of his hair matting with sweat as
they gathered around his sideburns. You could see
trails of sweat: spotting the stage, like OJ
Simpson's blood. The power now was turning him on:
the grinding beat, the loud pumping riffs. There was
something seductive about it. Like drinking whisky
until it washed his brain and his eyes turned cloudy
and dark.
He
felt it dig into him and, like with some drug that
has yet to be invented, he was out of any ordinary
existence. On stage, now, he felt the music bringing
out his beast. But it was a beast on a leash, like a
pack of mutant Dobermans. Everything grinding, under
control. With his legs apart and his forearms
straining. He could feel the power. His snarl was
real.
But
were the boys out there with him, for him, he
wondered? Was he making a real connection? Two days
earlier, Maiden had done a warm-up session at the
tiny Sing Sing club in Jerusalem and Blaze had lost
it, that point of contact, and the kids had voted
with their feet. As he had made himself vulnerable in
the new line-up's first public appearance, dozens
among the 200-strong crowd had rushed to the toilets
all at once.
Then
there was last night, outside The End bar in Haifa,
which offered an opposite omen. Half way through the
set, in front of maybe 300 kids under a warm
Palestinian sky, the practice session had suddenly
taken off and the teenage boy's climbing instinct had
been freed - sending scores of them scaling an olive
refinery to get a better view of the gig.
Urine
on porcelain, or metal on metal? What was it? How
would he know?
The
floor was bouncing, that was a sign, and it was
heaving like the sea. By 10.35, the stage-divers had
started up, too, leaping across the pit, touching as
many of the band as they could get away with and then
vaulting back into the crowd. A thousand fists were
up, stabbing the air above sweating heads - with
first and little fingers pointed high as a sign of
their fraternity. Blaze dabbed at the sweat in his
eyes with a wristband and then spoke at the end of
song eight: "You are fucking brilliant tonight.
Cheers," he shouts into the mike, his face
darting back and forth, with an eerie, crazed stare.
And
from the right, near the front, a shout comes back. A
boy replies: "So are you."
*****
Blaze
felt the power and was now prowling like an animal,
but he knew that elsewhere he was weak. This wasn't his
band rocking out, it was Steve's band - that
Bruce had fronted for most of the lives of
the sea of boys watching him now. A metal magazine
had wickedly pictured Harris holding Blaze by the
throat. And during a photo-session last night a kid
had said bluntly "You're good, but Bruce is
better." It felt like playing a borrowed guitar,
or sleeping with a dead man's lover.
For
all the tightness of the band on stage, it wasn't
particularly clear elsewhere that the rest of them
even liked him. Since they had all met up at Gatwick
airport for the British Airways flight to Tel Aviv,
Blaze had most often found himself sitting alone, or
talking with the road crew, while the others joked
around as a group. He had brought a Hi-8 camcorder on
the trip, to make a video diary, and the tape mostly
showed its distance from the action; observing, but
rarely observed.
Of
course, the guys had been together for years, while
he was the new arrival - yet this should have given
him a novelty value, something to count as a plus.
But whenever he held forth, in his English West
Midlands dialect, it seemed to provoke a retreat by
the others, or at least a glazing of their eyes.
Whether he was talking about why dogs should be
licensed, or the weaknesses of measuring in
millimetres, from the way his fellow musicians
behaved, you would think that they thought he was a
bore.
If he
was not in Tel Aviv tonight he would most likely be
on a Birmingham couch with his girlfriend Bev,
watching game shows or documentaries. But instead he
paced this stage in a make-or-break bid get through.
How often had he listened to live Maiden albums and
envied Dickinson's easy conversations with enormous,
cheering crowds? Now, as he stared into the damp,
youthful faces in front of him, he knew that to win
them over he had to make contact, soul to soul.
"Here's
another new one," he shouts into the mike.
"Maiden...Maiden,"
chant the boys.
Offstage,
he was an inveterate talker: philosophising, without
need of encouragement, about stuff like
"parallel worlds". There was no such thing
as truth, only our subjective perceptions, he would
ramble to anybody who wanted to know. "You live
in a different dimension to the one I live in,"
he would explain. "I can't see things the way
you can see them, but I can see you and I can see
those things. You are in a different dimension to
me."
Of
course, if he wasn't fronting this band, nobody would
swap a Motorhead album for the lonely tale behind
that thought. But if you pushed him further, he would
go on to talk about a time when he was a boy himself
- and eventually he would get around to a story about
his parents' ugly divorce. Bayley had been three or
four at the time and until he was 16 lived with his
mother. Then he had encountered other problems, with
his stepfather, and went back to stay with his dad.
In
general, his was a common story - a childhood
immersed in quarrels. He had been economically secure
- his father was a director of small manufacturing
business - but a peaceful family home life had always
been merely a hope. As his parents fell into hate
with each other, he could never reconcile the
contradictions of the different accounts from them
both. And out of the conflict between the people he
loved, he tried to negotiate a cease fire between
them by accepting that both sides were true.
"You
are in a different dimension to me," was his
favourite saying. "It's a great way to get
around the fact that we don't match up with each
other."
It
had been Bayley's father who had set him on the
journey that had brought Blaze to this theatre
tonight. After leaving school at 17, he had held a
string of crummy jobs, pulling out your three-piece
suite in a furniture warehouse, working as a hotel
porter, when his father told him to "have a
go" at his dream - so that at least he would know
if he failed. "It's always the people who don't
have a go at things," his father had counselled,
"who end up twisted."
He
had been working nights at a hotel when he decided to
change his name to "Blaze" and front his
own band in pubs. The night is the time when
teenagers are supposed to be going out and stopping
out, but mostly he had been alone and used the time
to think. "I'm just drifting around and I'm not
going anywhere," he had thought. And he had
thought: "Why am I not going anywhere. Maybe it
is because I'm too scared to try what I dream
about."
Tonight
was that dream - to do a world tour - and
yet, even here, there was every chance that he would
fail on an epic scale. After song eight, the band ran
headlong through three tracks from their new album,
The X-Factor - which was not at the time released.
Through the sweat in his eyes and the hair plastered
to his cheeks, Blaze could see that the boys were
confused. They didn't know the latest material. The
set was sagging. Was it time to judge?
But
then, as if crossing a rickety bridge, the band
reached Fear of the Dark. This, the title track of
their ninth album, was a masterpiece, written by
Harris, and was something that everyone knew. It
rocked like the best of them - but it was a gentle,
almost acoustic, sequence that came now to turn the
tide. The lights went down, matches were struck and a
stillness came over the theatre. And then out of that
rare metal moment of quiet, the boys began to sing:
- "I
am a man who walks alone
- And
when I'm walking a dark road
- At
night or strolling through the park.
- When
the light begins to change
- I
sometimes feel a little strange:
- A
little anxious when it's dark."
He
was Blaze, not Bruce, but the boys were with him: he
was going to get through after all. As guitarists
Dave Murray and Janick Gers thrashed into action at
the end of the lyric, he felt a new surge of breath
that filled his lungs and began a shape-shift to save
his life. A demented possession took hold of his body
as his arms began lashing to the rhythm. And his
fists started pounding an enormous drum, invisible,
between him and the crowd.
He
stared into the forest of stabbing fists, but the
person he wanted in the rising light was not there
and now never would be. If it had been his father who
had set him on the journey, it was his mother who had
lent the strength to stick it. Four years ago,
however, while Blaze was away on a tour with
Wolfsbane, she had been rushed to hospital with an
asthma attack and they couldn't save her life. She
was never to see his finest hour. He now had to
breathe for them both.
The
evening before, he had talked about this woman, to a
reporter who wanted to know. They had walked down to
the sea front outside the Hilton hotel and sat on a
rocky pier that was wet with spray in the wind. As
the sun had touched the Mediterranean horizon and a
crisp crescent moon had appeared at 90 degrees left,
Blaze had recalled her as his best friend and said
how he wished that she was there.
He
had asked the reporter about favourite movies and
mentioned his: Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. Then he got
quizzed in a weird way about who he would be in the
Wizard of Oz.
Blaze
licked at the salt on his hands and discounted the
lion, who was looking for courage, and the scarecrow,
who was looking for brains. He quibbled about the tin
man ("I think I could love if I wanted
to"), before finally making up his mind. He was
Dorothy, he said. He was the central figure. He was
looking for a way to find home.
*****
There
is no Dorothy on the stage tonight, nor are there
likely to be any in the crowd. If metal is anything,
metal is male - and males in a state of rage. Here
and there among the rolling ocean of black T-shirts,
an occasional pair of girls wave their hands, but
dancing, jumping and punching the air, is a tribe of
ecstatic boys.
From
the pit you could see them staring at Blaze,
wide-eyed and with teenage grins. If he was the
beast, then they were beauty, with enough energy
surging that, were any to be found, they would have
instinctively taken to the trees. In the pit it was
raining, a rain of sweat, in a primeval, monsoon
heat. Straining against steel rails at the front, the
kids were as wet as if they had recently surfaced
from the water by the hotel shore.
At
11.15, the 13th song, The Clairvoyant, brought Harris
to the front. In the tradition of bass players, his
expression was concentrated, even wooden, but as he
stepped forward, his effect on the kids was like a
magnet brought close to iron. A thicket of arms
sprouted from the crowd, anxious to make contact: to
touch. Gingerly, he approached further as boys, half
over the rails, brushed at his legs and shoes.
Then
one reached a finger to the back of the hand that was
picking the bass guitar strings. Harris stepped away,
but the touch passed back - to where everyone was
touching each other. Now the boys were hurling things
onto the stage, Maiden banners, flags and towels, for
members of the band to touch. The ritual's rules said
that, along with drummer Nicko McBrain's sticks,
these items would soon be thrown back. But now Blaze
prowled around monitors and mike stands, handling
them each in turn.
He
was a shaman, a holy figure, and from the back of the
stage he produced a bottle of water and doused the
front of the steaming crowd with broad sweeps of his
wrist-banded arm.
- "Feel
the sweat break on my brow.
- Is
it me? Or is it shadows that are
- Dancing
on the walls.
- Is
this a dream? Or is it now?
- Is
this a vision? Or normality I see
- Before
my eyes?"
His
voice lacked the character and range of Bruce
Dickinson's, but something else was breaking through.
As the guitars screamed, the beat pounded and the
floor bounced around him, Blaze's mutant Doberman's
came off the leash and a werewolf took his place.
This was no Clark Kent to Superman: it was the
Incredible Hulk, whose clothes split as his muscles
exploded; a gob-smacking transformation. Any trace of
the nerd was a forgotten thought as a wild,
primitive, but still human, form clawed and blinked
through a jungle of noise.
And
yet what you see from Blaze tonight is not violence,
nor even aggression. This is regression, to some
earlier phase, when we lived on fruits and nuts.
There is power and tension, but no trace of evil. He
would pick your fleas, but never hurt you. For all
the rubbish about metal as hostile, Satanist, or
causing suicides, while the boy from Birmingham paces
and rages, you sense from the pit that in the heated
turmoil he is heading to some private peace.
The boys were humans as a younger species, not some
menacing football mob. While their contemporaries
steal more cars than all other age groups combined,
these kids make visits to each other's homes to talk
over favourite tracks. While the rave scene today is
strung-out on ecstasy, these kids are drugged by
their own adrenaline and build to endorphin highs.
You couldn't find a better music crowd in the world -
frisky kittens to the vocalist's dog.
Through
the sweat and hair Blaze could see that he had won
them - and stuck out his bottom lip. With an encore
break, the lights went out and the band ran off the
stage. Then the boys started stamping, demanding
more, knowing that more was to come: the Number of
the Beast (that's "666), the title track of the
third and top-selling album; Hallowed Be Thy Name,
from the same commercial triumph; and finally, The
Trooper, from Piece of Mind, which was album number
four.
He
had never felt like this in his life before: in the
last hour something had cleared. All the months of
apprehension had disappeared: washed away in a river
of sweat. Would they like him? Would he get fired?
Would he even remember the words? These questions now
meant nothing to Blaze: his maiden voyage would be a
success.
It
was as if a lens had turned into focus, as the
parallel dimensions of band and boys for that time
merged into one. He knew nothing of their realities:
from where they had come, or to what they would soon
go back. But until 11.40, when Iron Maiden fled from
the rear of the building and the house lights came up
inside, he led this frenzied tribe of youth into a
world free of discord or grief.
* Iron
Maiden, The X-Factor tour, UK dates: Wolverhampton
(Civic Hall), Saturday 4th November; Glasgow (Civic
Hall), Sunday 5th; Manchester (Apollo), Monday 6th;
Leeds (Town & Country), Wednesday 8th; Newport
(Centre), Thursday 9th; London (Brixton Academy),
Friday 10th.
