Happy 15th Birthday to Iron Maiden’s Brave New World which was released on May 29th, 2000! In this BraveWords Rewind special feature, we blow the dust off the "Metal" Tim cover story that was featured in BW&BK; #41, which hit the streets in April 2000 and has long been sold out!

Iron Maiden - Hallowed Be Thy Name! 

    550 Madison Ave. is where it all sank in. East Coast headquarters of Columbia and Portrait Records, and a good indication of what's going on in the world of corporate music in the U.S. And guitar-driven rock is barely visible on the walls and in the eyes of those that are scurrying around yearning for their next chart topper, no care in the world if the band/flavour of the moment will be here next year. It is also press and marketing central for the present incarnation of Iron Maiden. Sounds like an odd place for a listening session and an even odder place for a band that has continuously "been here next year" since 1980.     

    Iron Maiden's reunion record with vocalist Bruce Dickinson and guitarist Adrian Smith rejoining bassist Steve Harris, guitarists Janick Gers, Dave Murray and drummer Nicko McBrain, is far from flavour of the moment. It's a yearning for Heavy Metal... their way. No compromise, just pure heavy delivery.     

    "Maiden is much more like a soccer team than a rock 'n' roll band," begins Bruce, putting his current situation into perspective. Dressed in beige khaki's and sporting a back-pack, he appears ready to jump from a plane into the jungle. The man is cool and casual, especially after a day of being grilled like a magnifying glass on hot pavement. Now it's time for the mealtime break with BW&BK;, just down the street at one of the Manhattan's many Japanese eateries.     

    In between bites of sushi and gulps of many sopporo, Bruce adds: "It's like a big revolving door - walk in, walk out. But on this new record I was in for the long haul, and strangely we suddenly appear to be the hippest thing on the planet all of a sudden."     

    And if we look back, one reason for Bruce leaving in the first place was his yearning to tackle a solo career. And with the door said to be wide open, he's free to roam, he will continue to roam, and Steve's cool with it. But more on that later.     

    Bruce crashes in: "You can tell I was obviously having a good time during rehearsals cause me and Jan were paralyzed every night after rehearsal. We'd come back in and go out and do that Belgian beer thing, it's like 8.5%, you know! And there ain't nothin' else to do, so we'd just go out to a blues club till four. It's dangerous you know, it's tough out there I'll tell ya."     

    "And in this world of ever-increasing shallowness," Bruce philosophizes, "in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king. It's true isn't it? So, suddenly for people to look at Maiden again - 'Oh my god - what a revelation - a nine minute song, oh good god - Arabian and Eastern rhythms - oh boy, that's never been done before.'     

    And with seven tracks scaling over six mountainous minutes, Brave New World is, not surprisingly, a Steve Harris record.     

    "Oh yeah," he agrees wholeheartedly. "Steve is having a major, kind of progressive moment on this album. The thrust of almost everything he's done has been that, and I confess, I was pretty apprehensive about some of it."     

And there wasn't an urge to grab the mike and beat Steve over the head with it?     

    "No, because I went with it out of respect. And I'd go, 'Well you know what? He went with 'Wicker Man' and he went with my stuff, you know, and he threw himself into it, so I'm just gonna go for it on his songs'. As we started doing 'Nomad' I thought, 'I don't know if this could work'. I was worried about 'Nomad' (a Murray/Harris track clocking in at over nine minutes) and it worked fucking brilliantly, so I happily ate my words."     

    "We never dared be that loose on a record before," he adds. "So I think it's a marvelous record. I have to say that I was wondering through it, 'I think this is the right thing to do.' But there's always a bit of, 'I hope it works, I hope people get it.' But at the end of the whole record, I got it."     

    And everyone else?     

    "We put the album tracks down and twelve days later Nick goes off on a plane to Florida playing golf. The next time we see him, he's heard the record for the first time and he just grabs a hold of me and starts kissing me. I'm like, 'Well I gather you like it?' He was just freaking out at how good it was, and because we had been so close to it, it was great to see that from somebody that had also been involved with the record and then heard it all finished. So I think it's a really outstanding record, and I think most of the people who have listened to it get that too, even though they've only listened to it very briefly and they haven't had a chance to pull it apart in any great depth. But the important thing is actually the initial reaction to it."     

    Brave New World is arguably Maiden's finest production hour. It's yards away from Harris' Barnyard boastings. It is a record that would make Martin Birch stand at attention. The album was recorded in Paris, France at Studio Guillaume Tell in a district called Suresnes (pronounced - Surain). Recording stretched from November '99 through February '00. Most parts were recorded live in November. Kevin Shirley produced and engineered the album and Steve Harris co produced.     Both Steve and Kevin mixed Brave New World. Most of the writing had been done earlier in 1999 and during the Ed Hunter Tour. The band then rehearsed the tracks live in Belgium before they got to the studio. The initial reaction when word spread that Kevin was to take on the duties was perhaps a little worrying. Alas, we didn't want the lads to be too polished. What did Kevin bring to the table?     

    "First off, I agree with you, I think it is the best sounding Maiden record. And it has nothing to do with technology at all. It has to do totally with the fact that Kevin insisted on recording the band live on the basis of what he heard at the Hammerstein Ballroom. It sounded fantastic. He's like, 'Why do you want to do anything else, why do you want to talk about recording any other way?', and we were like 'Well we didn't think it was technically possible to do live stuff and make it as controlled as we want it in the studio'. He said 'Of course it is'. So, that's what he did and we looked for a studio that was going to be able to deliver all of what we needed. A place where we could get a huge drum sound and also have the guitarists all playing together live, have me putting my vocals down live, and we could all look each other in the eye as we were doing it."     

    "We found this place in Paris that just worked brilliantly and we rehearsed the tracks as if we were doing a gig and then went in there and recorded the whole thing live, and it took about twelve days to record all the stuff, about a track a day. We did four, five, six passes on each song and then spent the next six weeks basically sitting on our ass waiting for Kevin to work his way through all the six passes on the drums, and then on the bass, and then on the guitars, and then on the vocals."     

    "I came back in after six weeks or so and went, 'Ok great, it's time for pain and suffering, time to do the lead vocals'. Kevin said, 'No you're done, you've done it all.' I said, 'What do you mean I've done it all? I can't have done it all, I'm all psyched up and ready to go, I want pain and suffering'. And he said 'Ok, well listen to this' and he played me 'Wicker Man'. They'd done a compilation of the vocal off the live stuff and I listened and I was like 'that sounds great', and I had thought, I haven't sung for like six weeks, am I going to go in there and make a fool of myself and try and beat this when I was absolutely at my peak having done this tour? I'm gonna go in and try and beat this? Nah quit while your ahead."     

    And Bruce says that "Steve was really chuffed" with Shirley, surprising as the fearless founder/leader has never left the reigns too far from reach.     

    "Oh, I remember Kevin was mixing 'Wicker Man' and Steve just sat there not saying a word and I looked at him and said, 'It sounds fucking great', and Steve went 'Yeah, yeah, shhhh', he goes 'I'm still listening, he hasn't done anything wrong yet'. 'What do you mean he hasn't done anything bloody wrong? Tell me it sounds great', and he said 'I'll tell you when it's finished'."     

Bruce immediately states that "This is a really good way to screw up this record, is to bring up all that crap."     

    Without stirring up too much shit, Bruce enforces that all egos have been placed aside and that Iron Maiden's "primary concern is to make sure that we do a great tour and that it's a great record. Steve and I are amused and bemused by the constant rumors that we hate each other or we're trying to kill each other and can't exist in the same room together etc., etc., etc. Get this, the French said that Janick and Adrian obviously hate each other because they don't look at each other on stage and then they said that me and Steve didn't touch each other enough. I don't want to fuck him!"     

It's been over ten years since Maiden did the Monsters Of Rock thing in Europe, and looking at their itinerary, the band look to be headlining most of the European festivals this summer.     

"In the '80s, the Monsters Of Rock thing was a series of celebratory metal festivals, kind of like Ozzfest but, you know, nobody gave a shit if it was like Lollapallooza at all. Metal festivals for fans. We're calling it Metal 2000 because everybody was getting bent out of shape. They're like 'Monsters Of Rock? There aren't too many Monsters Of Rock left.' So we said, well lets just call it Metal 2000. That's pretty clear isn't it, nobody can bitch about that. It's a pretty blue collar kind of a name, it's not subtle, it doesn't have overtones of super models or any bullshit like that. It's just straight down the line and pretty primitive. Metal 2000 leaves you in no doubt what it's all about. I don't know where Korn fit into all that but never mind."     

    Bruce is alluding to Korn's MTV appearance where they refused to appear on screen with the legend. So how does Bruce deal with such youthful drivel.     

    "Oh, they're not worth bothering with. If they were a fish I'd throw them back."     

    In August, Bruce sez that their North American tour starts in Quebec, Montreal, and Toronto, then it moves down into the States.     

    "The attitude when we go out on stage and everything else is like a sports team," he interjects. "We go out and kick the hell out of the opposition, except the opposition isn't there. We're not trying beat up our audience, but there is some invisible barrier that we want to bust through live."     

    "The first run through America is going to be fairly rapid, like two and a half to three weeks and it's going to do the three shows in Canada quick, Boston, Philly, New York, Chicago, Detroit, then Cleveland or something at the end and then quick down the West Coast and then off to Australia. Then we come back after South America and do another five weeks, which I hope would include some more Canadian shows assuming things go well in Canada. We want to get out to Vancouver. It would be nice to do something out in Western Canada, but you never know out there what's going to happen. We have no idea whether you're going to pull three men and a cowboy or just the cows."     

    "We were going to finish up in Long Beach Arena," he says gleefully. "'Scream for me Long Beach,' it's gotta be done, hasn't it? (laughs). I do it every night anyway as it is. I never had a catch phrase before."     

    And Maiden has failed to shy away from the questionable Blaze-era, this fan absolutely stunned at how close they fit Bruce's style on last years' Ed Hunter tour. With Bruce's vocal stamp of approval, The X-Factor and Virtual XI could actually find their way back into my collection if they were rerecorded with Dickinson singing.     

    "No, we're not going to do that. It was basically easy to slide into those shoes. They are Maiden songs, just like any other Maiden songs really and that's why it works."     

    And Bruce confirms that Maiden are "seriously thinking about Rob Halford" as one of the openers, the former Metal God recently shaking hands with Sanctuary Management. And Halford's much-hyped metal comeback is another eagerly anticipated force ready to be unveiled later this year. Have you heard it?     

    "Not all of it. I've heard some of the back tracks. Obviously I did a track with Rob on it, and I've heard some of the demos and I've heard one of the songs called 'Silent Scream' which is just fucking awesome. The whole album is like classic Screaming For Vengeance-era Priest. Brilliant. His singing is amazing, so I think it'd be a really positive move for him. It will be pretty good for the audience too. I think they'd love it, in the absence of Priest from the marketplace."