Iron Maiden

History

Origins and the Long Road to a Deal

Iron Maiden formed in East London in 1975, built around bassist Steve Harris after he walked away from an earlier band that dismissed his songwriting as too complicated. Harris pulled the name from the iron maiden, a device popularly but inaccurately remembered as medieval, by way of a film adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’s The Man in the Iron Mask, and spent the better part of four years cycling through more than a dozen musicians while the lineup refused to settle. Singers arrived and vanished within months, guitarists were hired and fired inside weeks, and at one low point Harris scrapped the band entirely before rebuilding it from scratch.

The turning point landed at the close of 1978, when singer Paul Di’Anno joined after an audition. A rough four-track demo recorded over two days that New Year’s Eve weekend yielded three tracks — “Prowler,” “Invasion,” and “Iron Maiden” — later released as The Soundhouse Tapes (a fourth, “Strange World,” was left off over sound quality). “Prowler” topped the chart at London’s Bandwagon Heavy Metal Soundhouse and drew coverage in the music press, putting Iron Maiden in front of manager Rod Smallwood, whose push carried the band into a deal with EMI by the end of 1979.

Eddie began life as a low-budget stage prop, a papier-mâché mask meant to startle the crowd during the band’s title track. Artist Derek Riggs had independently painted a punk-styled illustration for another project. When Steve Harris spotted it in Riggs’s portfolio, he and manager Rod Smallwood asked Riggs to add more hair and transferred the mask’s name onto the drawing — creating the character who would anchor Iron Maiden’s album covers for the next decade and give the band a visual identity nearly as recognizable as its music. Long before the band ever cracked a chart, that mix of theatrical menace and working-class grit was already the whole pitch: a group from East London building something loud, morbid, and unmistakably its own out of pub gigs and secondhand gear.

The Di’Anno Years and the NWOBHM Breakthrough

The self-titled debut arrived in 1980 and cracked the UK Top 5, followed a year later by Killers. Both records landed as the New Wave of British Heavy Metal was reshaping British metal, sped up and sharpened by punk’s directness. Di’Anno’s voice carried that scene’s grit, rougher and more street-level than the operatic style that would soon replace it. Harris’s bass sat unusually forward in the mix even then, driving the songs at a gallop rather than trailing behind the guitars, and that instinct, treating the bass as a lead instrument rather than a rhythm section afterthought, became the foundation for everything that followed.

By 1981, the pace of touring and the band’s climbing ambitions had outrun Di’Anno’s ability to keep pace. Persistent drug use and a run of underpowered shows were widely reported as the cause when Harris dismissed him later that year, closing out Iron Maiden’s rawest era and clearing the way for a singer built for a much bigger stage. Di’Anno later also pointed to his growing dissatisfaction with the band’s musical direction, while acknowledging that he was no longer able to give Maiden his full commitment.

Dickinson’s Arrival and the Classic Era

Bruce Dickinson, previously of fellow NWOBHM act Samson, took over as frontman in 1981, and the band’s sound transformed almost overnight. His wide, theatrical range gave Harris’s increasingly ambitious songwriting somewhere to go, while producer Martin Birch, who stayed behind the board for the next decade, sharpened the band’s attack into something built for arenas rather than clubs. Where Di’Anno had barked, Dickinson soared, and the shift let Harris write longer, stranger, more structurally ambitious songs without losing the aggression that defined the band’s earliest records.

The Number of the Beast, released in 1982, became Iron Maiden’s first UK number-one album; press and retailer accounts commonly put worldwide sales near 20 million copies, though no single certifying body has audited a global total. Its title track and cover art also drew fire from religious groups in the United States, who staged protests and record-burnings over accusations of Satanism the band never took seriously.

The albums that followed leaned on literature and history as much as riffs. Harris wrote songs pulled from Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Alfred Lord Tennyson, while Smith and Dickinson turned to Greek mythology for “Flight of Icarus,” weaving historical and literary material through a catalogue that could easily have coasted on riffs alone.

The band pushed further into North America and beyond, with Powerslave (1984) becoming the vehicle for the World Slavery Tour, an extensive run that carried the band’s Egyptian-themed stage production to Poland, Hungary, and Yugoslavia, at a time when Western rock tours rarely reached the Eastern Bloc. The tour’s document, the double live album Live After Death (1985), captured the band at its performing peak. The decade closed out with Seventh Son of a Seventh Son (1988), the band’s second UK number-one and its first record to fold keyboards into the arrangements.

Turmoil and the Wilderness Years

The band’s momentum broke apart in the early 1990s. Guitarist Adrian Smith left in 1990 over creative differences during preproduction for No Prayer for the Dying, replaced by Janick Gers. Three years later, Dickinson walked away entirely, convinced that staying inside Iron Maiden meant repeating himself indefinitely and that a solo career would never be taken seriously while he remained the band’s singer.

Blaze Bayley, formerly of Wolfsbane, took over vocals from 1994 into early 1999 and fronted two studio albums, The X Factor and Virtual XI. Sales fell well short of the Dickinson-era peak, and mounting difficulty performing the classic-era catalogue on tour weighed on the band; the split came in early 1999, amid moves that soon brought Dickinson and Smith back into the fold. It was the lowest ebb of the band’s history, a stretch where a group that had spent the previous decade selling out arenas often found itself playing substantially smaller venues than at its mid-1980s peak, and it left Harris and the rest of the lineup facing the real possibility that Iron Maiden’s best years were behind it.

Reunion and Renewed Ambition

Dickinson and Smith rejoined in 1999, creating a three-guitar lineup alongside Gers and giving the band its most stable configuration in years. Brave New World (2000) moved recording away from Harris’s home studio to Paris’s Guillaume Tell Studios, working with producer Kevin Shirley for the first time, and the album met the kind of critical reception Iron Maiden hadn’t drawn in a decade; a headlining slot at Rock in Rio the following year pulled a crowd of roughly 250,000.

The band spent the 2000s and 2010s building an increasingly ambitious touring operation, headlined by the Somewhere Back in Time World Tour of 2008 and 2009, which ran on Ed Force One, a custom-wrapped jet piloted by Dickinson himself, a licensed commercial airline captain.

Studio output stayed steady across the same stretch, with the band’s early-2000s releases maintaining its momentum. The Final Frontier (2010, source of the band’s sole Grammy win for “El Dorado”), The Book of Souls (2015, home to “Empire of the Clouds,” the longest song in the catalogue), and Senjutsu (2021) each landed at or near the top of the UK albums chart and extended the band’s reach across dozens of countries.

Drummer Nicko McBrain stepped back from touring after a farewell performance in São Paulo, Brazil, on December 7, 2024, with Simon Dawson of Steve Harris’s side project British Lion taking over behind the kit for live dates in 2025.

Legacy

Several generations of heavy metal carry Iron Maiden’s mark. Metallica’s Lars Ulrich has repeatedly said Iron Maiden was probably his own group’s biggest influence, and Slipknot’s Corey Taylor traces his musical identity back to receiving Powerslave as a childhood gift. The band’s galloping bass sound, twin-guitar harmonies, and history-and-literature songwriting became a reference point that acts across thrash, power metal, and progressive metal have drawn from directly.

Steve Harris remains the only member to have played on every Iron Maiden album since the band’s 1975 formation, writing the bulk of its catalogue, shaping much of its visual direction, and anchoring the band with the same rhythmically aggressive bass style heard since Killers. Eddie grew from a backstage mask into the band’s most enduring visual signature, and the band’s stadium-scale touring model, built on animatronic stagecraft and a band-piloted jet, became a benchmark for stage production that other heavy metal acts would be measured against.

Iron Maiden was named a 2026 inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, more than five decades after forming in East London.