Children of the Damned, heed my warning: Iron Maiden offers terrifying proof of why it’s a bad idea to mess with the Dark One. No, bassist and chief songwriter Steve Harris didn’t find himself scuttling around the studio ceiling during Iron Maiden’s recording of 1982’s landmark The Number of the Beast, nor did lead singer Bruce Dickinson get raped by a succubus with the body of Scarlett Johansson and the face of Gene Simmons. And no one in the band was fatally impaled by a flying mic stand while they were laying down “Hallowed Be Thy Name.”
It was worse! Lights reportedly turned themselves on and off in the studio! Equipment, which fails all the time, inexplicably failed! And what was producer Martin Birch’s punishment for meddling in the dark arts? He was involved in a traffic accident involving a mini-bus sardined with real live nuns. Papal penguin punishers! Who probably had to be restrained from ruler-whipping him to death! And the cost of repairs? £666! And he didn’t have collision insurance!
That’s some scary shit, and totally true, but it was worth it—The Number of the Beast is revered as a classic in the heavy metal genre, and no doubt there are lots of fifty-somethings out there who owe their very survival to it because how else would they have gotten through their awful teen years? Their parents sucked, school sucked, the pot was shitty, they were never going to get laid (it was a mathematical impossibility), but at least they had “Hallowed Be Thy Name”!
And it’s still saving lives today. The joke was on Satan! The album is a lifeline, and not a one-way ticket to suicide and the Pit, no matter how many little Christian idiots saw fit to burn it or beat it to death with hammers (they were afraid the fumes would drive them insane!).
The album was the first with vocalist Bruce Dickinson, whose impressive pipes evidently allowed Harris to up his game and do some more challenging songwriting. And this is metal of no small sophistication—not prog-metal by any means, but immaculately put together with all kinds of shifts of gears and stealth pop touches and best of all, guitars galore. The dual lead guitar interplay between Dave “Legato King” Murray and childhood friend Adrian Smith is one of the marvels of metal, and you don’t have to be a big metal fan (I’m not) to dig the way their guitar lines twist around one another like snakes playing Twister.
If The Number of the Beast has a shortcoming, it’s that Iron Maiden don’t completely follow through on the Satanic shtick. If you’re going to go ghoul, go full ghoul is what I always say, but Iron Maiden spend the bulk of the album taking detours like “22 Acacia Avenue,” “Gangland,” and “The Prisoner.” And more! Fortunately these songs are good songs, but come on! How is evil going to triumph when Iron Maiden is writing songs about Patrick McGoohan? Stick to the knitting, blokes!
“22 Acacia Avenue” (which owes a large debt to the Easybeats “Friday on My Mind”) is a rather dumbed-down take on “The House of the Rising Sun,” with Dickinson going from recommending a certain lady of the night to his chums to begging the same missy to get out of the game before it’s too late. It includes such classic lines as “She’ll teach you more than you can know” (think about that for a moment) to the classic off-rhyme “All the men that are constantly drooling/It’s no life for you, stop all that screwing.” And then there’s my personal fave, “Don’t you know the risk of getting disease?” But the guitars are mean, Clive Burr is a force of nature on drums, and Dickinson hangs on to notes like his tonsils are prehensile. And the slowdown towards the end gives the guitars the chance to show their stuff, as does the instrumental takeout.
“Gangland” is high-velocity, B-movie mobster stuff, but what a ride—nobody has time to stop for breath, from the sped-up drums (borrowed from the Sweet’s “Ballroom Blitz”) that open the song to the guitars on crank that take it out. Great song, but it’s evil quotient is nil—this speed racer should be about Satan’s muscle car, or how he could win the Olympic Gold Medal for the 100-yard dash with one wing tied behind his back.
“The Prisoner” was inspired by the short-lived late sixties British TV show of the same name, and the bit at the beginning was from the program’s title sequence. (Do Satanists watch the telly? It’s an interesting question, but don’t ask Iron Maiden—they’re about as satanic as a Mickey Mouse Pez dispenser.) If I had no scruples I’d say “The Prisoner” takes no prisoners, and seeing as I have no scruples I just said it. After some insane laugher Burr goes John Bonham on the drums and the guitars pound out power chord after power chord until the song makes a mad dash for the electric fence, sounding more pop than any self-respecting metal song should but getting away with it because who’s going to try to stop a song going at that velocity to complain? As for Dickerson, he’s a Golden God. And the dueling guitars that (almost) take the song out are as cool as Zia McCabe. And I love the way the song sizzles out in a hiss of cymbals.
It’s no big secret amongst occult circles that Old Scratch was not pleased (“miffed” was supposedly the word he used) by the inclusion of the above songs on The Number of the Beast. Satan is said to have threatened to sic a succubus with the body of Carol Alt and the face of Phyllis Diller on Birch, the prospect of which led the petrified producer to plow into the aforementioned penguinmobile in the first place. In the end, Satan was pacified by Birch’s having to pay that unholy repair bill, which was almost certainly padded.
“Invaders” is a second-hand “Immigrant Song,” all Vikings swinging axes and raping and pillaging and eating food from other people’s plates, taken at an unrelenting tempo that will make you think the Norsemen came ashore in cigarette boats. Dickinson’s on the losing side but he doesn’t scream like a little girl or flee or anything, although I guess he does: “You’d better scatter and run/The battle’s lost and not won,” he sings, which is a redundant thing to say but cut him a break, he’s got barbarians on your ass. Powered by a great chugging up-tempo riff, “Invaders” also includes enough guitar mayhem to satisfy even your most bloodthirsty Eric the Red type. And Dickinson’s pipes are powerful enough to propel a Viking Cruise liner.
“Run to the Hills” (that’s British for “run for the hills”) is “Invaders” all over again, only this time it’s the Native Americans who are being Manifest Destinied off the American continent. What “Run to the Hills” has going for it is the coolest chorus you’ll ever hear, to say nothing of an American history lesson, the tightest rhythm section in British metal, and a galloping pace that is the perfect musical accompaniment to running for your life. And some guitars that would have changed the outcome of the Battle of Little Big Horn.
Things don’t get properly demonic until “Children of the Damned,” a real imp pleaser that opens on an acoustic note that Satan himself told Rolling Stone magazine “Sets you up for that big chorus, which hits you like a plague of flies. Which is balderdash, actually. The Book of Revelation has it all wrong. Basically the End Times are going to be one big Red Hot Chili Peppers concert.” After a couple of verses you get these big power chords followed by a real guitar rave-up, which is followed in turn by an apocalypse of cymbals and a knick-knack-shattering shriek by Dickinson, whose vocal cords are obviously possessed even if he isn’t.
“The Number of the Beast” opens with some hokum dialogue then in come the guitars and Dickinson in a pseudo-whisper that climbs to a blood-curdling scream of epic coolitude. Then you get more of the same and Dickinson utters the number of the beast and sharp objects begin to fly around your room and your Iron Maiden poster bursts into flames as the guitars go at it and if you’re smart you’ll hide beneath the bed. But that won’t save you! Under the bed is always the first place evil looks!
“Hallowed Be Thy Name” opens on a dolorous note with some for-whom-the-bell-tolls tolling (it tolls for Dickinson, who’s being taken to the gallows pole) which is followed by lots of fancy guitar work and Dickinson’s bark. This is his darkest hour, his parting speech to the world, and when he’s finally had his say the guitars take over and basically go berserk and ride over Burr’s pounding drums for the duration of the song. It’s a tour de force, and when Dickinson comes in at the end it’s like he saying, “Goodbye everybody, Satan loves you!” Well not really. It’s more like he’s saying “Is that a take?”
I’ll always wish Iron Maiden had stuck with the evil shtick, but in their defense (and Mick Jagger makes this clear in “Sympathy for the Devil”) wherever there’s war or sin or injustice Satan’s there chortling or eating a blintz or whatever, so I guess I shouldn’t be complaining about songs like “The Prisoner” or “22 Acacia Avenue.” On second thought I think I’ll continue to complain about “22 Acacia Avenue.” It’s the album’s Nightmare on Elm Street, and I don’t mean that in a good way.
If nobody went mad or died during the making of The Number of the Beast it’s because Satan really does love heavy metal. He likes to hang out in the parking lots of metal shows and if there’s a metal band t-shirt he doesn’t own you can be sure that metal band sucks. If you want to find yourself in a studio where some really scary shit is happening and Satan is causing mayhem, I suggest you check out Metallica. Satan thinks they’re shit and so do I.
As Satan recently told an interviewer for Heavy Metal magazine, “The Number of the Beast is my all-time favorite metal album. But I’ll tell you what I don’t get. This whole devil’s horns hand thing. I don’t have horns. Who has horns? How is a person with horns supposed to walk into a Starbucks and get a grande vanilla latte with oat milk? I look like Benedict Cumberbatch. In fact I am Benedict Cumberbatch. The Beast Rules!”
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A-
