is the best album we’ve ever done,’ ” says Iron Maiden guitarist Janick Gers. “Because then you think, Well, what about the last one? At the end of the day, you just try your best with each and every one of ’em. So, really, they’re all great albums.”
(from left) Adrian Smith, Dave Murray and Janick Gers
guitarworld.com 63 But as has been well documented, once the recording was
com-pleted things within the Iron Maiden camp took a frightful turn, when doctors discovered a cancerous tumor on Dickinson’s tongue.
The news, Murray says, “was devastating.” Dickinson underwent chemotherapy and radiation to treat the growth, and the release of The Book of Souls, as well as plans for an upcoming world tour, were put on indefinite hold.
Today, the band members are happy to report that their singer is on the mend. “Bruce, he’s up and about again,” Smith says. “He’s buzzing around, traveling all over and back to doing what he does. He’s very positive and very physically strong, and so he was in a good position to kick [the cancer’s] ass. He wasn’t going to let it knock him down. And I
When did the band first get together to begin work on The Book of Souls?
DAVE MURRAY Well, we toured last sum-mer doing festivals all over Europe, and finished around August. We took a cou-ple months off, and then got together in the middle of October, I think it was. And we went straight into a studio. Usually we’d go into a rehearsal room for a couple weeks and start rehearsing songs up, so that when
we get to the studio we already have maybe a half dozen songs ready to go. This time we went in and everybody had ideas from CDs and tapes and whatever and we just started straight from scratch. Kevin Shir-ley was producing it and mixing it and he was on standby. And as soon as we had part of a song worked out, or had a general idea of how the song was going to be, we just started recording. So a lot of it was very
spontaneous, and done a lot quicker as far as the backing tracks.
JANICK GERS We went back to Guillaume Tell Studios in Paris, which is where we recorded [2000’s] Brave New World. And we had the band all facing each other, which is a great vibe. When you’re in the studio playing the songs together you can bounce things off each other. And we just had that connection. So we would put personally never doubted he would. He’s just not that sort of guy.”
With The Book of Souls in the can and Dickinson back out front, Iron Maiden is getting set to hit the road once again, on yet another extensive globetrotting live jaunt. To that end, it was recently announced that the band would be traveling to shows in style—
aboard a massive Boeing 747-400 Jumbo Jet piloted by Dickin-son himself, as they hit a proposed six continents and more than 30 countries on next year’s Book of Souls tour.
“We’re saving up all that battery power and getting it ready for next year,” says Gers. “And I look forward to getting out there in front of the fans and playing these new songs.”
“Oh, yeah, it’s gonna be great,” Smith adds. “I mean, what a job!”
KEVIN ESTRADA
something together, learn it and then have a go at it. It was great because it gave the songs a kind of live feel, I think.
ADRIAN SMITH Having said that, we had rough demos, musically, of all the songs.
Maybe not all the way through, but quite a bit of them. So we had something to work off of. But what we’d do is we’d go into the studio in the morning, and the writers would sit down together, whether it was me and Steve, or Steve and Jan, or whoever.
We’d go through the arrangement, and then get Bruce in to sing vocals and make sure everything’s in the right key. Then we’d
start going through it as a band. And at that point Kevin would press record. And you know, some of the stuff you hear might be us actually learning the song and rehearsing it. There’d be a bit of magic that happens on that very first take.
Some of these songs are so long and involved. How did you tackle them with-out having had much rehearsal?
GERS Obviously, with something like an 18-minute song, you’re learning pieces at a time, really. But what you might find is you’ll play a 10-minute song straight through, and two verses will have come out perfect, and one was maybe a bit fast. So
you might go in and try to pull it back a lit-tle bit and get it slightly better. Because we never play to a click song. But there were no restrictions, really. Sometimes you’re going at it a bit blind, but that kind of gives you an edge. If you’re overlearning the songs, sometimes you play the notes but you don’t quite get the vibe.
MURRAY And then some of the shorter songs—you know, the five-minute ones [laughs]—we’d learn the chords and things, and we’d have pieces of paper and we’d write down sequences, changes, melodies.
So we’d have that in front of us. But
basi-cally you were flying by the seat of your pants. You never quite knew what was com-ing next. We were all in the same room with headphones on, playing together. You’d be like, “Okay, there’s a change coming up here…” and you’d just kind of go for it.
Speaking of the 18-minute song, “Empire of the Clouds,” it’s pretty different from anything in Maiden’s catalog.
SMITH Bruce wrote everything on that. Not the guitar solos, obviously, but everything else. And he recorded it from start to fin-ish just on piano. It took him a couple days to do that because it’s quite complicated.
From there, we played along to it as a band
in sections. And Bruce and Kevin would be in the control room saying stuff like,
“This section’s a bit too bluesy. We want it more classical sounding.” They’d sort of direct us through it, and we’d try differ-ent approaches until we had the right one.
Then we put the orchestration on after that.
Adrian, your songs on the record are actually some of the shorter ones, like
“Speed of Light” and “Death or Glory.”
SMITH Yeah, because I think it can be a bit heavy going if everyone brings in 10-min-ute songs, you know? It’s just too much.
And I knew we would probably be doing some long songs, so I thought I’d just try to keep things moving with some shorter ones.
Otherwise you’d have had a triple album.
SMITH Yeah! [laughs] But I think what we ended up with is well balanced. You have the lon-ger songs, and then you have the punchier ones, which is ideal.
Longer, epic-type songs have always been a big part of Iron Maiden, but it seems that since Brave New World that “proggier” side of the band has become much more pronounced. Do you prefer doing the longer tracks or the shorter ones?
MURRAY I like it all, really. We played “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” [from Powerslave]
for several tours, and that’s, like, 15 minutes long. And it’s a piece where there’s a lot of time changes. The kind of focus and energy and commitment you need to play a 15-minute song from the beginning to the end, it’s intense. It’s like being in a classical music band. [laughs]
But it encourages you as a player and I think it improves you. But then doing something like “Can I Play with Madness” [from 1988’s Seventh Son of a Seventh Son], which is a really short one, we play that live and it goes down really well, too. So it’s all great.
How did the three of you work together on your guitar parts on the new album?
GERS It’s a pretty easy process. We might get together and say, “You play this bit and I’ll play that bit,” but more often than not we tend to just naturally all play things slightly different. We have differ-ent styles and we have differdiffer-ent sounds and it seems to gel together. For instance, in
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GONZALES PHOTO/CHRISTIAN HJORTH VIA GETTY IMAGES
Steve Harris