High adventure at the vanguard of human experience – my collected thoughts on the Iron Maiden album – The Final Frontier
Musical synergy experienced while on a flight to East Africa; The Life of Alexander the Great re-enacted while naked and wet; a lyrical arms race between the kings of heavy metal and Al Stewart...
In February, 2004, I was on a late-night flight from London to Asmara. There was a midnight stopover at Jeddah where practically everybody got off the plane. By the time we were airborne again, a hush, underlaid by the engine drone, had descended upon the dimly-lit, near-empty cabin, as the remaining passengers dozed or sat in silence with their thoughts.
I trawled the in-flight radio stations, that played hour-long shows on endless rotation, in search of something I considered worthy of my attention. Eventually I alighted upon Rainmaker by Iron Maiden. Barrelling through the darkness at hundreds of miles an hour, above the Red Sea, towards the parched coastline of East Africa, the song's relentless forward momentum (the way the band seemed to lean into it) along with its lyrical references to deserts, and cracks in the ground sealed by the rain, felt like an appropriate curtain raiser to the three months that I planned to spend in the country (sensing that things were rapidly going south, I bailed after two).
When I was growing up, Iron Maiden were at the visible end of the burgeoning British heavy metal scene. Unlike their peers, whose popularity came and went, the band had real commercial staying power. During the 1980s they were an intermittent and incongruous presence in the singles chart, releasing energetic but melodic songs – Run to the Hills, Aces High, Wasted Years (which I regard as their best single), Can I Play with Madness, and so on. To gain a full appreciation of the band and their music required a temporary suspension of one's notions of reality, though I suppose that is true of engaging with any musical act, to varying degrees. You needed to buy into their vision of a world engulfed by perpetual war, subject to the ebb and flow of occult forces. Deja Vu, along with its better-known cousin – the live staple Fear of the Dark – are, at heart, incredibly silly songs that make sinister mountains out of unassuming molehills, yet they are both performed with such conviction that you cannot help but be drawn in. When Bruce Dickinson is yelling “Feels like I've been here before! Feel like I've been her before!” like a man screaming his last words into a hurricane, the only sensible response is an unqualified “Hell, yeah!”
Iron Maiden songs are big on narrative – a return to the oral tradition of storytelling that at times verges on the pictorial, as if the lyrics have been storyboarded. Historical events are revisited (the destruction of the R101 airship in Empire of the Clouds), notable battles re-fought (Passchendaele), classic works of fiction recontextualised (Rime of the Ancient Mariner), and historical figures celebrated. I am unashamed to admit I have performed the entirety of Alexander the Great, including the evocative instrumental passages, in the shower, to a chameleon who watched patiently through the billowing clouds of humidity, and who I think knew that he was witnessing something special.
You could argue (and in fact I will) that Iron Maiden share common lyrical ground with the singer-songwriter Al Stewart, who is also partial to a lengthy historical epic, albeit rendered in the genre of progressive folk. Incredibly for a metal band who have delved into the advantages and perils of clairvoyance, and who are not shy of charging headlong towards the nearest cliché, Iron Maiden, have never explicitly penned a song about Nostradamus; a feat that was accomplished by Stewart early in his career. I recommend the live recording of Nostradamus where the song is divided into two parts by World Goes to Riyadh, in the same way that The Doors used Jim Morrison's poem Horse Latitudes to break up Moonlight Drive when they performed live.
The late Seth Putman, who is best known as the lead singer of the ultra-offensive grindcore act, Anal Cunt, fostered a short-lived side-project that he named Impaled Northern Moonforest. The sole reason for its existence appears to have been to give himself an outlet for mocking acoustic black metal bands. Putnam claimed that ...Moonforest's release schedule was dictated by the whims of an all-powerful necrowizard, though none of the material was overworked and much of it has a written and recorded on the spot feel about it. The band's longest song – Nocturnal Cauldrons Aflame Amidst The Northern Hellwitch's Perpetual Blasphemy – clocks in at one minutes and twenty-seven seconds, while their shortest – Entranced By The Northern Impaled Necrowizard's Blasphemous Incantation Amidst The Agonizing Abomination Of The Lusting Necrocorpse runs to an economical twenty seconds.
Similarly, the substantial body of work that has been released by Iron Maiden since 1980 has been presided over by Eddie, the band's mascot – an amoral ghoul whose appearance changes to suit the artwork of either the most recent album, or the theme of one of the band's lengthy and wide-ranging tours, upon which they have founded their weighty global reputation. Eddie has gone through more costume changes than Elton John, has endured more face lifts than Joan Rivers, and is more iconic than the pair combined. It is hard to imagine what Iron Maiden would be without him.
Growing up, I certainly knew who Eddie was, despite no-one in my immediate circle of friends being into metal. My exposure to the music and gruesome imagery of Iron Maiden occurred mostly through my interactions with my cousin, Jon, who lived in Pellsal and who I saw infrequently.
It wasn't until after I returned from Eritrea that I began purchasing Iron Maiden's albums as they came out, alongside some of the fan favourites in their back catalogue. While the importance of the album as a format has diminished in the digital age, the release of new material by Iron Maiden is regarded as an event by fans all over the world. The band, egged-on by this enthusiasm, and perhaps sensing that they are nearing the natural end of their career, have responded by putting out longer and longer records. The last two studio-recorded behemoths were released as double CDs, with 2015's The Book of Souls exceeding an hour and a half in length. Despite this, the number of tracks on a given album remains roughly the same as it ever was. It is the songs that have gotten significantly longer.
The ten tracks that comprise The Final Frontier collectively total seventy-six minutes. It is Iron Maiden's fifteenth studio album and was released in 2010. My CD copy is packaged inside a slender tin box with a clear portal window that conveys an astronaut's view of the cover art – a painting that depicts the aforementioned Eddie as a grotesque 1950s-style sci-fi alien looming over a pair of skeletons wearing damaged space suits with cracked goldfish bowl helmets. On closer inspection the skulls appear to be the same species as Eddie. As someone who is prepared to dwell upon album covers at length in an attempt to uncover any hidden meaning or message, my theory is that these skeletons are bio-engineered humans whose bodies could not withstand the rigours of their transformation.
The fan consensus that has formed around The Final Frontier places it within the mid-to-lower tier of the Iron Maiden canon, though that says more about the quality of the band's output than it does about the merits of the record. While I have reservations about some of the songs, and also the overall length, and while I wouldn't rank at it as their best album, the high points are epic and profound, while the lows are at worst middling.
The first two songs – the title track and El Dorado, open the album with an intense, uninterrupted fifteen-minute block of music. Anyone who is unfamiliar with the record could easily mistake the cacophonous entrance of El Dorado – a sustained power chord, cascading drums and electric guitar descending through the scales – as an unexpected rekindling of the song that preceded it. Both share a common lyrical quirk, loosely braiding two distinct strands of thought in a manner where you can still see the joins; a consequence perhaps of multiple band members having input on the same song.
Lyrically, the opener has a foot in two camps: There is a sci-fi narrative – the final thoughts of an astronaut drifting helplessly off course – that aligns most closely with the accompanying video – a CGI-heavy battle, first in space and then planet-side, between a human astronaut and the band mascot, Eddie, reincarnated here in H. R. Giger-inspired alien form.
Then you get to the lines:
“Done more in my life
Than some do in ten
I'd go back and do it
All over again”
Suddenly it feels like the song is coming from a more personal place. It could almost be a coda to Wasted Years written almost a quarter of a century before, with a lot of water having passed under the bridge since then. While the former was a reminder not to dwell too much on the past and to appreciate the here and now, its successor looks back on a life well-lived with no regrets.
The album version differs significantly from the single, adding Satellite 15 – an overture that nudges the track towards the nine-minute mark, gradually taking form from disparate elements – a heavily compressed, muffled guitar loop – the kind of beckoning Pavlovian siren call that one's teenage self might have heard emanating from the gunked-up speaker of a poorly-serviced arcade machine – spiked with cosmic ambiance, while a scattering of war drums and electric guitar feel out the ground. It builds to a holding pattern, dismantles itself to allow room for Bruce Dickinson's, lament, then regathers and re-escalates to the split second of silence before a single drum beat heralds the beginning of The Final Frontier.
By this point it may be clear to those who are unfamiliar with Iron Maiden, that, while their music is often complex, they are not a subtle band. Their lyrics paint a vision of this world, and those worlds that lie beyond, in the broadest possible strokes. This plays very much to their advantage when it comes to laying down the bold imagery that populates their more theatrical numbers, but leaves their attempts at social and political commentary lacking nuance. El Dorado, which addresses the 2008 financial crisis, grasps wildly for an appropriate allegory and returns clutching the pantomime monologue of a cartoonishly evil financier (replete with evil laugh, following the first verse) fused with a narrative concerning the Spanish conquistadors' failed attempt to locate the mythical lost cities of gold. It is probably what you would get if you instructed an AI to rewrite Treasure Island with the pirate, Long John Silver, reimagined as an immoral Wall Street tycoon.
The line “I'm a clever bankers face, with just a letter out of place” is a stone’s throw from wit, but sadly falls short. A better take musical take on the crisis can be found in The Divine Comedy's The Complete Banker.
While lyrically the song doesn't get off the ground, when invested with music it is an absolute belter, exemplifying the band’s ability to play like they are leaning out into a headwind over the edge of a high cliff; settling into a galloping groove early on, seasoned with the rhythmic patter of side stick against the rim of the snare drum, and tiered like a South American ziggurat, with the pre-chorus taking things up a gear. Dickinson builds tension by withholding the actual chorus until the end of the second verse, three minutes in.
A duality of themes plays across the majority of the ten tracks on the album: The moments leading up to death, the great mystery of what might lie beyond, and the overlap between these two states. Isle of Avalon – for me one of highlights – is a gradual transition through the fabled burial place of King Arthur – an island occupied by the spirits of the dead who awaken and rise to mark the approach of the unnamed interloper. It is a song that is heavy on atmosphere, the sound of the wind buffeting against the music, at times almost drowning it out; again, that side stick patter buried deep in the mix; the tension at last ceding to a bellowed chorus bedecked with pagan imagery.
The other peak, very much the heart of the record, is the anthemic Coming Home – a love song to an aeroplane that is somewhat atypical of Iron Maiden, whose lyrics mostly turn the focus away from the lives of the group members, or obfuscate the meaning when the subject matter is personal. Among Dickinson's many interests is a lifelong interest in aviation that goes way beyond the academic. In his downtime from the band, he flew Boeing 757s for the charter airline Astraeus. He returned British soldiers home from Afghanistan. He once captained a 737 full of fans, from Cardiff to an Iron Maiden show in Paris. He has also, on occasion, flown Ed Force One (initially a Boeing 757; later upgraded to a 747) – the jet that the band use to ferry their equipment between shows.
This passion for manned flight surfaces periodically on Iron Maiden albums, admittedly mostly as accounts of aerial dogfights (Dickinson has flown with the Great War Display Team who re-enact air battles from World War One). Coming Home may be cut from the same cloth as Aces High, Tailgunner, or Death or Glory, but comes from a very different place. It is an account of what it is like to fly a jet, elevated in song to the realm of sky-bound mythological grandeur, where vapour trails align, where the aircraft is a thunderbird that casts a silver shadow over the earth, and where, from an altitude, the span of one's hand can cover countries. “No creed and no religion, just a hundred winged souls...”
Perhaps it is inevitable that a band with such a cosmopolitan international audience would be disdainful of those ideologies – both sacred or terrestrial – that manifest as artificial divisions or shackles that hold us in place. Starblind, finds Dickinson vocally tethered to the spot raging into cosmos, as he envisages an alternative afterlife undefined and unimpeded by any worldly dogma.
When it comes to the supernatural, Iron Maiden appear to favour those individuals who plough their own idiosyncratic furrow through the metaphysical realms. I find it extraordinary that a band who fixate on the occult were fifteen albums deep into their career before they wrote a song titled The Alchemist – a heads-down, up-tempo sprint through the key moments in the life of John Dee – the astronomer and advisor to Elizabeth I, who had a reputation as a magician. An x-ray of a painting by Henry Gillard Glindoni, that depicts Dee performing an experiment before the Elizabethan court, revealed a circle of skulls around his feet that had been painted out.
The song feels like a nod towards the band's energetic punk roots, its momentum reined-in by Dickinson's staggered delivery of the overlong lines that lead into the chorus. Around the time that it was conceived, Dee had undergone a rediscovery, appearing in a biopic of Queen Elizabeth 1st, and as the subject of an opera titled Dr Dee that was scored by the Blur frontman, Damon Albarn. Given his study of the arcane, it is tempting to attribute this renaissance to the after-effects of some magical ritual resurfacing over 400 years after it was performed.
In common with this review, The Final Frontier is overlong. Iron Maiden have either forgotten how to edit, or are unwilling to do so. Repeated listens have never elevated Mother of Mercy, in my mind, above makeweight album filler. The lyrics trudge familiar territory for the band – a soldier contemplating the horror that surrounds him, questioning the validity of the cause for which he is fighting, and the integrity and the motivations of his leaders. The words and music labour in lockstep through the quagmire of this existential no-man's land, and song only wakes up in the ranted outro of the chorus. It is not terrible by any means, but any time that a song makes you want to check your watch it is not a good sign.
The penultimate track – The Man Who Would Be King – also feels superfluous. It's not often that you can throw a pejorative like “vague” at Iron Maiden but here it feels justified. I assume the lyrics, which, despite the length of the song, don't really go anywhere, reference Peachy Carnehan – a character from the Rudyard Kipling story, also called The Man Who Would Be King – who establishes himself as a tribal ruler in Kafiristan before falling from grace, surviving crucifixion and being reduced to a state of wandering beggardom.
The closing track, When the Wild Wind Blows, is a nod in the direction of Raymond Briggs' poignant graphic novel When the Wind Blows that follows the misfortunes of an elderly British couple as they attempt to preserve a semblance of normality in the aftermath of a nuclear attack. The song is a fan favourite – many regard it as the best thing on the record. I have never liked it. The twist at the end is trite. It takes the air out of the album, ending it on a deflated note.
When I listen to The Final Frontier, I usually skip the final two tracks, shortening the overall length by almost 20 minutes, ending more-appropriately, in my opinion, with the doomed sailors in The Talisman, either dead or close to death, voyaging eternally westward. Aesthetically this brings the album thematically full circle, albeit in different eras, with the crews of two different ships venturing into the unknown.