Any band with a long history of theatrical shows reaches a time when it faces a choice to either strip everything down and get back to the music, man, or to somehow push the boat out even further. Iron Maiden’s Legacy of the Beast tour takes the latter course: it’s their most visually extravagant show ever. Their mascot, Eddie, appears first as a 12-foot trooper, swordfighting with singer Bruce Dickinson, and then as a stage-dwarfing demon. There are pyrotechnics, a giant noose and a vast model of Icarus. Most eye-popping of all is the 90% lifesize model of a second world war Spitfire, which “flies” over the stage and almost takes out drummer Nicko McBrain with its tailfin.
There is a point to all this. The usually crowd-bantering Dickinson announces that he’ll only speak to the audience once during the show, as he wants the “music and the images to tell the story”. Then he explains that they’ve just come back from Poland, where he discovered that the plane on which theirs is based – Spitfire Mk Vb AA853 from 302 Squadron – was flown by a Polish pilot. “Which is a weird coincidence. We forget that young people a third of my age were going off to fight against nazism, and the Spitfire is the symbol of that.” Then he introduces The Clansman, a song about the 13th-century Scottish knight William Wallace, who “stood up to the English king”, announcing: “There are people who are trying to fuck with our liberty and freedom.”
As 10,000 people chant “Freedom! Freedom!” it seems Legacy of the Beast is a sort of conceptual state-of-the-world address, principally anti-war and anti-fascist, delivered via a heavy metal opera, divided into four sections: war, religion, hell, damnation – all the cheery stuff. The threat of dark forces isn’t the most original notion in a genre where demons and devils come along like buses, but makes for a powerful, brilliantly staged, two-hour rock show in which each song is a banger, from opener Aces High to the closing Run to the Hills.
Maiden aren’t known for greatest hits sets, but the veteran rockers invest songs which haven’t been played for years – Flight of Icarus, for example, not since 1986 – with rejuvenated energy. Although this is principally a demonstration of blistering hard rock, they push at its boundaries, with monastic chanting, moments of Mogwai-like quiet beauty and sections where the band’s three guitarists interlock like a classical orchestra. Janick Gers swings his instrument around his head and plays it with his toe; Dave Murray theatrically raises an eyebrow to the camera. Central to it all is Dickinson, a 59-year-old cancer survivor who is leather-clad, sweat-drenched, again defiantly longhaired and never stops running all night.
By the time they get to The Number of the Beast – for which the band play inside a mocked-up Hades – the house is beyond erupting. It’s never made clear who those dark forces threatening us are (Trump? The far right? Barbers?) or whether “unelected bureaucracy” opponent Dickinson’s Polish experience has made him reconsider his previous support for Brexit. But in terms of live, theatrical heavy metal, this show is a classic of the genre.
- At SSE Arena, Belfast, on 2 August. Then touring.
