The iconic career of heavy metal royalty Iron Maiden is to be showcased in a new movie taking fans on a journey of the band’s blood, sweat and tears
With its multi-platinum highs and crashing lows, its Satanic controversies, life-threatening illnesses and literal blood, sweat and tears, the Iron Maiden story is rightly described by singer Bruce Dickinson as “the world ’s biggest rollercoaster”.
Now a new documentary film Iron Maiden: Burning Ambition traces the journey of the “Run to the Hills” metal icons – and their undead mascot Eddie – from the East End clubs to the top of the charts and the pinnacle of the British heavy metal scene. And, briefly, back down again.
Directed by Malcolm Venville to celebrate the band’s 50th anniversary, the film features all of the band members in voice-over, as well as appearances by high-profile fans including Gene Simmons of Kiss, Chuck D from Public Enemy, Metallica’s Lars Ulrich and Dune actor Javier Bardem, a Maidenhead from a young age. “Now I’m older I’m in the back,” he says, “but still I jump and I scream.”
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Though the documentary begins with the band’s original singer Paul Di’Anno quitting when his cocaine and alcohol issues began causing the band to cancel entire tours of Germany, this is no ordinary tale of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll.
When Dickinson was poached from fellow rockers Samson in 1981, he recalls being offered a line of cocaine by band manager Rod Smallwood during his interview and replying “No, I don’t do that kind of stuff.”
What Dickinson – quickly dubbed “the human air raid siren” by critics – did do was combine Maiden’s virtuosic metal with a stratospheric rock voice and stage-owning showmanship, to the point that bassist and band mastermind Steve Harris wanted him sacked for hogging the limelight too much.
Instead, Dickinson helmed the band to monumental success throughout the 1980s and beyond, selling almost 20 million albums and topping the UK charts with records such as The Number of the Beast and Seventh Son of a Seventh Son and 1990 single “Bring Your Daughter… to the Slaughter”, the only British heavy metal song ever to reach Number One.
“We just achieved terminal velocity and stayed there for five f***ing years,” Dickinson says. But their success also brought controversy. Thanks to songs such as “The Number of the Beast” and artwork depicting Eddie as the puppetmaster of the devil, media and religious groups accused Maiden of being Satanists.
The band denied such claims, but the infamy only made them more popular. As Bardem explains, “Suddenly, the devil is fun.”
Maiden played up to their devilish image, evolving Eddie – on their album sleeves and in animatronic form onstage – into zombie soldiers, mummies and alien androids and taking advantage of onstage accidents to ramp up the gore. When Dickinson suffered a head wound from a guitar onstage at the Rock in Rio festival in Brazil in 1985, he kept playing despite having blood pouring down his face. “A message [came through] from Rod,” he recalls. “Can you squeeze it and make it bleed a bit more, it looks amazing on the cameras.”
After years of touring in what he called “the golden cage”, though, Dickinson reached burn-out in 1993. “We had no time to sit back, we were still on the rollercoaster,” he says. “It kept getting bigger and bigger. I felt like packing it in…I was ready for the funny farm.”
Dickinson quit the band for six years, during which time Wolfsbane singer Blaze Bayley took his place and Iron Maiden shrank back into clubs and theatres, where disgruntled fans would spit at the new singer.
But with his solo career floundering, Dickinson returned in 1999. “Bruce came in and Steve said ‘why do you want to come back into this band?’” says Smallwood. “And Bruce says ‘I want to play big gigs again and I think we’ll be great’. And Steve was like ‘okay’ and we went to the pub. That was the meeting.”
Since then, Iron Maiden have returned to the top table of heavy metal over a quarter-century marred only by Dickinson’s brush with throat cancer in 2015. Thankfully, due to swift treatment, he made a full recovery. “You’ve got to destroy a bit of yourself to get rid of it,” he says, but Smallwood was amazed at his vocal comeback. “His voice was actually stronger than it was before,” he says. “It was a miracle.”
IRON MAIDEN: BURNING AMBITION, will be released in cinemas worldwide starting May 7
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