IRON MAIDEN

                                

Iron Maiden adalah band Heavy Metal Inggris dari Leyton di East London, yang dibentuk pada tahun 1975. Band ini disutradarai oleh pendiri, pemain bass dan penulis lagu Steve Harris. Mereka telah merilis sebuah kolektif total tiga puluh album: empat belas album studio, tujuh live album, empat EP dan empat kompilasi.

Pelopor dari New Wave of British Heavy Metal, mereka mencapai kesuksesan pada awal 1980-an. Setelah beberapa perubahan susunan, kemudian merilis serangkaian album platinum dan emas. Ini termasuk platinum-selling US Landmark The Number of the Beast pada tahun 1982, Piece of Mind pada tahun 1983, Powerslave pada tahun 1984, album live yang terkenal Live After Death tahun 1985, Somewhere In Time pada tahun 1986, dan Seventh Son of a Seventh Son di 1988. A Matter of Life and Death dirilis pada 2006 dan mencapai puncaknya pada nomor sembilan di Billboard 200 dan nomor 4 di UK.

Pada Oktober 2009, band ini telah bermain lebih dari 2000 live show selama karir mereka.

Anggota:

Steve Harris – Bass, Keyboards (1975–Sekarang)
Dave Murray – Gitar (1976–Sekarang)
Adrian Smith – Gitar (1980–1990, 1999–Sekarang)
Bruce Dickinson – Vokal (1981–1993, 1999–Sekarang)
Nicko McBrain – Drum, Percussion (1982–Sekarang)
Janick Gers – Gitar (1990–Sekarang)

Mantan Anggota :

Doug Sampson – Drum, Percussion (1977–1979)
Dennis Stratton – Gitar (1979–1980)
Paul Di'Anno – Vokal (1978–1981)
Clive Burr – Drum, Percussion (1980–1982)
Blaze Bayley – Vokal (1994–1998)
Dennis Wilcock - Vokal (1976–1977)
Paul Day - Vokal (1975–1976)

Diskografi :

Iron Maiden (1980)
Killers (1981)
The Number of the Beast (1982)
Piece of Mind (1983)
Powerslave (1984)
Somewhere in Time (1986)
Seventh Son of a Seventh Son (1988)
No Prayer for the Dying (1990)
Fear of the Dark (1992)
The X Factor (1995)
Virtual XI (1998)
Brave New World (2000)
Dance of Death (2003)
A Matter of Life and Death (2006)
TBA (2010)
FINAL FRONTIER 2011

FEAR OF THE DARK

''in loving memory of ''dian'' its my best brother ''

Iron Maiden - Live In Sydney (24-02-11)[bootleg]

[Cd1]

01.Satellite 15 ... The final frontier
02.El dorado
03.Two minutes to midnight
04.The talisman
05.Bruce greets the crowd
06.Coming home
07.Dance of death
08.The trooper
09.The wicker man
10.Bruce chats some more and has a message for Shane Warne
11.Blood brothers

[Cd2]

01.When the wild wind blows
02.The evil that men do
03.Fear of the dark
04.Iron maiden
05.Number of the beast
06.Hallowed be thy name
07.Running free

The Trooper- Iron Maiden

BRUCE DICKINSON

BRUCE DICKINSON as known by Nicko McBrain
I think my first encounter with Bruce was when he was rehearsing with Samson in Kilburn, which must have been 1979. I remember I was playing pool and Bruce came out of the studio and he was very animated and very loud and I thought, ‘Who is this geezer?!’ His personality was way in front of the man himself. But as I got to know Bruce, I realised that he is a very intense guy. In the early days when I joined Maiden, he was very extrovert, yet he was introverted at the same time. When he gets a great idea, he won’t let it go and he gets so animated, but other times he would be so intent on what he was thinking about, he would be in another world. His mind amazes me. He’s a genius. He’s also an absolute lunatic - but most geniuses are! And inside there’s a heart of gold.

In the early days, there was a bit of ego. He was the frontman of the band, and you can’t be the stubborn brawny frontman of a band like Maiden and be timid and weak. Outwardly, very few things would phase him, but I know inwardly he’s a very sensitive man. We would have incredible times together, but he would also be a bit of a loner and go off and do his own bits and pieces.

He got into his fencing, which I completely admired about him, because he’s superfit now, but he doesn’t work out half as much as he used to. He was such a good fencer, he was actually asked to join the Olympic fencing team in the mid-to-late Eighties, but he couldn’t because he had to go on the road with the band.
Writing books was the next thing. He was unbearable when he was writing those Iffy Boatrace books, because you’d be doing something on the bus and he’d have just finished writing a new chapter and he’d want to read the whole fricking story to you! But he was so excited, you can’t blow someone out the sky for that.
I was very angry with him when he left the band, because of the way it happened and because I didn’t want him to leave. But when we all got back in the room to take that beautiful picture of the reunion, it was as though we’d all been on holiday for a couple of months, instead of four-plus years and in Adrian’s case, ten almost. The most amazing thing about making music together is that you really bond with your music and also personally, in your inner soul. There’s an amazing vibe that’s always maintained and even though we had four great years with Blaze, when Bruce and Adrian came back into the band, there was this incredible affiliation again.

A change I saw in Bruce from that time, apart from his enthusiasm for the band back like he had when I first joined it, is the genuineness of the emotion that I feel from him. He’s changed in that he seems more rounded and more content, although he’s doing so much more than before he left the band. He’s doing his radio show, he’s doing his flying and he’s got a part-time gig in a band as a singer! He is an absolute joy to be around. We’ve had so many great times on the ‘Give Me Ed’ tour, as we will do on the ‘Dance Of Death’ tour.

I think his finest moment on ‘Dance Of Death’ has got to be on ‘Journeyman’, because it shows a lighter side to Bruce’s voice. There are a lot more subtle emotions than you get with some other tunes and there’s so much more control. The emotion he puts into that track is phenomenal.

The Band

STEVE HARRIS as known by Janick Gers

STEVE HARRIS as known by Janick Gers
I was introduced to Steve and Bruce when Gillan were playing Hammersmith Odeon back in the Eighties. I quite liked the lad at the time, and I met him subsequently at a few Maiden gigs after that. He always seemed quite intense and serious and aware of what was going on.

As a person, Steve is one of the few people you meet that you can trust totally. He wouldn’t sell you down the river, he wouldn’t badmouth you behind your back; he’s a very straight fella. You can confide in him and it won’t get passed around, and he doesn’t bullshit. He has the ability to stand back and look at both sides of a situation, but if he’s convinced that he’s right, he will argue with every fibre of his body and he’ll never change his mind, which I think is a great strength. He has very strong mental tolerance.

In situations where other bands might have caved in, the one thing that has kept Iron Maiden doing what it does best is Steve, because he has this belief that what he’s doing is right. When you’re in a young band and your record company come to you, saying, 'You need to soften up your sound, we need a single', Steve’s the kind of guy you need to turn round to them and say, 'Fuck off!'

Steve has a very fertile imagination and a very simple way of writing lyrics. It’s not highbrow stuff – it’s deeper than that. He writes it as he sees it and you really get the feeling the words are from inside him. Every time I play the song ‘Blood Brothers’, it makes me shiver, because he hit the nail on the head. He lost his dad when he was on tour and when things like that happen to you, sometimes you go to deep places - everyone experiences that - but to be able to write it down is another thing. When you read his lyrics, there’s an honesty in there that comes out and he opens himself up more than he does when you’re talking to the guy.

He’s a great football player and he had the choice to play football professionally or play music when he was a kid, but I think he made the right decision. I don’t think he could cope with the discipline of the footballer’s life at the time when you’re a teenager and you’re starting to meet people and get into music. He’s his own man. But having said that, he doesn’t drink much and he takes care of his body – that’s very important to him. Being a sportsman, his attitude is that if your body is healthy, your mind is too, and I think that helps with the band, because you don’t get locked into that stupid rock'n’roll 'let’s go party every night' lifestyle.

He is an idiosyncratic bass player. He picked up the bass and taught himself in such a way that nobody can really copy it. People say it’s like a lead guitar, but it’s not. It gives the band a basis and it moves around quite a lot, but it’s the tone that he has. He has a way of hearing things and a tone that isn’t normally associated with a bass, it’s more like a rhythm guitar. Him and Nicko provide the pulse of Iron Maiden, the body of the band. You copy it at your peril, because the sound of Maiden is built around the way Steve plays bass and the only band that it would work in is Maiden.

Steve has been very involved in the new album. He has this tunnel vision where he can really hone in on things and he has this tremendous focus when he’s recording albums - or doing anything with Iron Maiden really. He wants to get it right and he’s prepared to put the time in. Not many people have that kind of determination and focus.

He is a very, very strong personality. Without his drive and ambition, it wouldn’t be Iron Maiden, no doubt about it. He’s its heart and its power.

The Band

Dave Murray - Iron Maiden

Gibson

You'd never know it from the way he throws himself around on stage, or from the way he makes his Gibson SG scream and bend to his will, but Dave Murray is actually the quietest, most unassuming rock star you could ever hope to meet. Indeed, the mile-wide smile apart, off stage, he is almost unrecognisable from the blonde-haired rock god we get to see on stage with Iron Maiden.

"Oh, well, you can't walk down the street throwing shapes like you do on stage," he says with one those dazzling and frequent smiles. "I mean, you'd just look silly!"

But it goes deeper than that. Along with the warmth and generosity and the general down-to-earth-ness, not to mention the musical talent, Dave Murray possesses a quality so rare in rock star circles as to be almost non-existent: humbleness.

"It's my upbringing," he shrugs, not wanting to make a big thing of it. "When you start out with nothing, you don't expect much from life. For all this to happen to me - well, it's like a dream, really," he says, pausing to gaze, as if for the first time, at the gold records that adorn every wall in the office where we sit.

David Michael Murray was born, of mixed Scots and Irish descent, in Edmunton, London, on December 23, 1956. Like Steve Harris, who had been born the same year just a few miles up the road, as a boy Dave was a fanatical football player and fan, as well as a keen cricketer. But his family was poor - his father was disabled and his mother worked part- time as a cleaner - and the family never settled anywhere long enough for Dave to establish himself in any of the schools' teams he could have played for. By his reckoning, he had been to a dozen different schools by the time he left for good at the age of 15.

"It was tough but it was only looking back on it years later that I realised just how tough," he says now. "But then, maybe I wouldn't appreciate what I've got now so much, if it hadn't been for then."

These days, when he's not touring and recording with Maiden, Dave lives on the exotic Hawaiian island of Maui with his Californian-born wife, Tamar, and their beautiful eight-year-old daughter, Tasha. But, he says, "Not a day goes by that I don't think, 'When is this going to end?' It's like it's all too good to be true."

The first thing he did when he made some money was buy his folks a house. His father has since passed away but his mother still lives there to this day. The only surviving member of the band - along with Steve Harris - who first signed to EMI Records back in 1979, Dave's hard upbringing also helped him ride the highs and lows of his career in Maiden without ever losing his head. As he says, "I grew a protective shell around me and just got on with things. And I think that held me in good stead later with Maiden, especially in the early days."

Dave first got interested in rock music when he was 15. He'd heard 'Voodoo Chile (Part 2)' by Jimi Hendrix on the radio and "everything changed - just like that." He had been a skinhead up until then. "But I just ditched the Doc Martens and I got myself an old Afghan coat and became a hippy - man!" he chortles.

He also got himself a guitar and started practising every night in his bedroom. "I didn't read music, I just used to sit and play along to records." His first band - a school trio called Stone Free - was actually with future fellow Maiden guitarist, Adrian Smith, who lived a few streets away. "Dave was a little bit further down the road than I was, in terms of playing," remembers Adrian. "I was a bit jealous, actually."

From there, Dave had played with a number of different bands before meeting Steve Harris and joining Iron Maiden for the first time in 1976. As long-time Maiden scholars will know, he was actually sacked just a few months later - after a spat with then vocalist Dennis Wilcock - and that, for a while, Dave rejoined Adrian in Urchin, who recorded one single, 'Black Leather Jacket', before Dave upped sticks again and returned to a now thankfully Wilcock-free Maiden.

"I never wanted Davey to leave in the first place," says Steve today. "I always thought he was the best guitarist I'd ever worked with. He was one of those guys who really could play the guitar with his teeth, you know?"

Musically, Dave's contributions to Maiden over the years have mainly been of the 'scintillating guitar solo' variety - witness any of his sublime work from early Blackmore-esque outbursts like the solo on 'Phantom of The Opera' (from 1980's 'Iron Maiden') to more recent peaks of performance like the eye-watering solo on 'Lightning Strikes Twice' (from last year's 'Virtual XI').

That said, despite a strike rate that works out to about one song per album - a trait he puts down to his own "laidback" nature more than anything - Davey is a talented songwriter, too. From the witty and wonderfully ludicrous 'Charlotte The Harlot' (from 'Iron Maiden'), to more thought-provoking stuff like the stiflingly atmospheric 'The Prophecy' (from 1988's 'Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son'), more than any other member of Maiden, apart from Steve himself, Dave Murray is the living embodiment of the heart and soul of Iron Maiden.

"I'm just lucky," he says typically modestly. "Lucky that I found such a great band to play in, and lucky to have such great fans that are into what we're doing."

But then, that's Dave Murray - modest, humble, down-to-earth and about as great a rock guitarist as you're going to get.

Gibson Guitars are for sale here