Jimmy Kay from Canada's The Metal Voice recently spoke to Barry Graham Purkis, also known as Thunderstick, briefly the drummer for Iron Maiden in 1977 and Samson during Bruce Dickinson's tenure with the band.

Thunderstick spoke about the1977 Iron Maiden pre-Soundhouse rehearsal tapes which featured many of the songs on the first Iron Maiden album as well as two songs off Iron Maiden's Killer album.

On how how he joined Iron Maiden: “I answered an ad and auditioned much like many other drummers sitting in a corridor with non-stop drummers all the way down... NEXT... NEXT and I got the gig. They also advertised for a keyboard player at the same time and that's when this guy Tony Moore came on board and that was it. The lineup was myself, Steve Harris, a singer named Dennis Willcock, a guitarist named Terry Wapram, and Tony Moore on keyboards.

On the inner workings of Iron Maiden in 1977: “I thought at the time when I first joined it was a joint effort of both Steve Harris and Dennis Wilcock. Dennis being the singer, he was the man at the time responsible for the logos and stuff like that. The Iron Maiden type face that Iron Maiden still uses to this day was formulated back in those days, we are talking 1977. And Dennis, he had such a large input into the band at the time. I really did think that the two of them were co-running as it were. Steve Harris would make an effort to come up to my house in South East London and we would go through basic drum parts. I never done that before. I never actually sort of knocked it down to where you only have the bass and drums so you are building a rhythm section, then we would rehearse with the whole band back in the East end."

When asked about what classic songs were written in 1977, and if he ever got songwriting credits: “”Burning Ambition”, “Drifter”, “Sanctuary”, “Prowler”, “Another Life” (Killers album), “Transylvania”, “Strange World”, “Charlotte The Harlot”, “Wrathchild”, “Innocent Exile” (Killers) and the song “Iron Maiden”. You can say I was actually contributing, maybe I was the first drummer to come in that Steve would try to work alongside. And later on I was inputting regarding the songwriting but never got credit on anything ever. You are always going to hear something you contributed too, you are always going to hear and think to yourself, ‘yeah that was due to me’.”

Asked if the 1977 rehearsal tapes will ever be released: “Who knows, I have put these 30 second bursts on my Facebook and the kind of interest it generated is quite phenomenal, there are certain people saying that they look on it as the heavy metal holy grail to have something such as that, a 1977 recording of those songs. There is no way I can go out and release them cause I could imagine the full force of Iron Maiden’s legal team would come down on me because the songs there in contain Steve Harris compositions. However, I own the tape. I own my performance on that tape. However I don't own the copyright of the songs."