When I ask Iron Maiden bassist and founder Steve Harris about the fact that his band has lasted for more than half a century, he sounds confused, as if he’s put something down and forgotten where he left it. “It’s gone so fast. You go on tour for a few months and it seems to fly by, but so much happens. Our whole career is an extension of that – for 50 years.”
He’s reflecting on how he guided one of the most influential – and deeply unique – British bands in history. Propelled into the top tier of 80s metal with fast-paced, theatrical, multi-platinum albums like The Number of the Beast, Powerslave, and Seventh Son of a Seventh Son, Iron Maiden not only survived the mid-90s slump that hit many metal bands, but became even heavier and more ambitious.
Last year, they celebrated that 50th anniversary with the Run for Your Lives tour, which continues until this November and includes their biggest UK headline shows to date at their own two-day EddFest at Knebworth in July. Next month, there’s also the cinema release of Burning Ambition, a documentary spanning the decades that features rare archival footage mixed with interviews from people like Tom Morello, Chuck D, Lars Ulrich, and – less expectedly – Javier Bardem.
“Diehard Maiden fans will be saying: why isn’t it 10 hours long?” laughs energetic singer Bruce Dickinson when I meet him alone in a hotel in London’s Soho. “But hopefully it’s an entertaining ride.”
Formed in London in 1975 by Harris, Maiden went through many lineup changes before settling on Paul Di’Anno as vocalist in 1978, and fought their way to the forefront of the new wave of British heavy metal (NWOBHM) through constant gigging. A rough-and-ready movement known for eccentric theatrics and a DIY attitude, the NWOBHM played out in backstreet pubs to crowds in customized denim and leather, all during the height of punk. Because of the band’s speed and East End roots, critics sometimes compared punk and Maiden, but “I would’ve rather swept the roads than play that shit,” Harris says in Burning Ambition.
Dickinson was deeply involved in the NWOBHM with his band Samson, who recorded in the studio next to Maiden when they were making their 1981 album Killers. “The NWOBHM! It was like: OK, if you can spell it, you might as well say it,” Dickinson says. “But at ground zero, we were all: what are you talking about? This has been around for years.” He mentions the Marquee Club in Soho and Music Machine (now Koko) in Camden, north London, as “the pinnacle, where you wanted to be. Before then, you were doing a bit of carpet in the corner of a pub.”
“The one thing metal did adopt [from punk] was the idea of ‘Let’s just do it ourselves.’ People released their own singles, got deals with indie labels. Then punk kind of morphed into new wave and new romantic, but we didn’t morph into anything – we just kept going.”
Maiden’s self-titled debut album entered the UK charts at No. 4 in 1980. However, by the time they released Killers, Di’Anno was burned out. A wild figure who liked booze and drugs, he left the band in 1981 after a long, high-pressure tour. Dickinson joined after a comically obvious “secret chat” with Maiden manager Rod Smallwood, held under a huge floodlight in the middle of the hospitality area at Reading Festival. A very different character from Di’Anno, Dickinson had what soon became one of the most instantly recognizable trademarks in metal: an octave-shattering, vibrato-heavy voice built to make an impact. He was also disciplined, with the stamina needed for months on the road.
“It was like being a striker for the Conference and they say: go and play front and center for Man City,” he says. “But I was grossly overconfident because I was 21 years old.””Of course I’m going to get the gig, because I can do exactly what you want and a whole lot more.” I knew how ambitious Steve was, and I understood where he wanted to take the music. It was clear the band could be absolutely massive. I loved how technically skilled they were as musicians — there were no limits, musically.
Dickinson’s vivid storytelling — what he calls “theatre of the mind” — became a key signature of Iron Maiden. He packed in endless literary references, from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and even Alan Sillitoe’s 1950s social realism with The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. There are just as many historical battles, epic political struggles, and violent scenes, heard in songs like Paschendale, Alexander the Great, and The Trooper.
Iron Maiden settled in to record The Number of the Beast (1982). With three instant classics right off the bat — the title track, Run to the Hills, and Hallowed Be Thy Name — plus deeper cuts like The Prisoner and Children of the Damned, the album delivered what Maiden had only hinted at before but never fully nailed: theatrical, epic heavy metal that was both melodically soaring and raw, aggressive, and immediate.
“When you go in with a batch of songs, you don’t necessarily think you’ve made a classic album,” Harris says in his typically understated way. “I just think: well, we’ve made a damn good album, and people will either like it or they won’t.”
For all his Coleridge-quoting, Charge of the Light Brigade-inspired songwriting, Harris has a steady, grounded manner, like a stoic football manager — very different from the swashbuckling Dickinson, whose view of The Number of the Beast is almost the complete opposite. “Did we know it was special? Yeah, we did! We’d stay in the studio afterward listening back. We’d sit there drinking Watneys Party Sevens” — the era’s instantly recognizable cheap seven-pint mini-keg. “We built a wall of those things and wouldn’t get home until four in the morning after stopping recording at eight or nine. The rest of the time we just sat there pinching ourselves, going: bloody hell, isn’t this great?”
Throughout the early ’80s, a routine was set: write and record an album every year, tour, and then — if they were lucky — get a few weeks off for Christmas. For the follow-up album Piece of Mind (1983), they went all out. Smallwood took a gamble by booking arenas instead of theaters across the US — including Madison Square Garden. It paid off. Maiden were now a platinum-selling arena act, though they still operated outside music industry norms: no glossy videos, little radio play, and even less mainstream media coverage.
“When you’re in your 20s, it’s amazing how much punishment your body can take,” says guitarist Adrian Smith over a video call. “But a band like Maiden had to keep that schedule because we never had a massive hit single and waited for royalty checks to land on the mat. We went out there and brought the music to the people. It pays off later, though, because people remember that. But we got to the point where we should have taken a break… it does catch up with you.”
The grueling, grimly named World Slavery Tour in support of 1984’s Powerslave was a perfect example. By the end of it, the band was exhausted, especially Dickinson.
“That was definitely a rough patch for me,” he says. “I had no life. It started to feel like a golden cage. And that can’t be right. I began to wonder: is it worth it? Because I’m young enough to do something else. I was thinking of quitting to become a fencing teacher. I wanted to…”Walk away, because that’s better than losing your soul and everything that comes with it.” He was worried he was losing touch with “the reason I got into music in the first place: because it was a form of dramatic storytelling.”
While dedicated Iron Maiden fans might be familiar with what amounts to a pretty heavy reading list, does it ever bother them that casual listeners have no idea how deep it all goes? “I wouldn’t say annoy, that’s too strong,” says Dickinson. “But it is irritating when people say, ‘You’re just a bunch of shallow idiots, and that’s why you make the kind of music you do, because you can’t do anything else.'”
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Dickinson performing at Ozzfest 2005 at the Hyundai Pavilion in San Bernardino, California. Photograph: Karl Walter/Getty Images
By 1990, heavy music was changing. Hard rock bands like Guns N’ Roses and thrash metal acts like Metallica were huge, and Maiden’s over-the-top storytelling was in danger of feeling outdated. After 1988’s concept album Seventh Son of a Seventh Son, 1990’s No Prayer for the Dying was meant to be a return to Maiden’s core sound. A shaky mobile studio, once used by the Rolling Stones, was set up on the grounds of Harris’s country house in Essex. The album included “Bring Your Daughter… to the Slaughter,” which became one of the only heavy metal songs to ever top the UK singles chart. But not everything was going well, and Smith—one of the fastest and most melodically intuitive guitarists of the era—decided to leave.
“These things are never clear-cut,” he explains. “But I was in a kind of turmoil. I just couldn’t seem to come up with anything… Seventh Son, I was happy with that, and it was getting bigger. But I wasn’t into going back to a more garage sound. They said, ‘We can tell you’re not happy from your body language.’ We had a meeting. That was it.”
At the time, Dickinson was a big fan of Alice in Chains and Soundgarden, which he called “edgy, musical, and emotional.” “There’s this huge pool of talent, and I was looking at it thinking: are we still relevant, or is the Iron Maiden look starting to feel a bit worn out? And nobody seemed to care.” So he also left in 1993. “It was a time of reflection and self-doubt. Realizing that I had been part of an institution since my early 20s and didn’t know how to do anything else outside of it—I found that absolutely terrifying.”
Harris remembers that a lack of communication in the band at the time was a serious problem. “It was almost like: ‘Alright, I’m leaving.’ ‘Oh, OK—well, that’s it then.’ We didn’t really talk about it. It could have been avoided, but you could argue that people needed to go away and find their own space.”
After the rise of grunge and then nu-metal, the 90s became even harder for many 80s metal bands, including Maiden. They kept going without Dickinson and Smith—both of whom worked on various solo and band projects, sometimes together—and brought in Janick Gers (now one of three guitarists in the 2026 lineup, alongside Smith and longtime member Dave Murray) and singer Blaze Bayley, formerly of Wolfsbane. The albums they recorded during this time—The X Factor and Virtual XI—were strong, but Maiden’s popularity was fading, especially in the US, where for the first time in decades they struggled to sell out theaters, let alone arenas.
“It was tough in America,” says Harris. “But metal was struggling everywhere. With a long career, you learn to ride the ups and downs, but you keep going no matter what.”
Dickinson and Smith rejoined the band in 1999 and recorded the impressive Brave New World. Dickinson recalls a secret meeting between himself and Harris, set up by management. “I just found the whole thing…””Ridiculous,” he laughs. “The level of paranoia about me and Steve being seen together in public—I mean, it was like something out of a Len Deighton novel. I said, why don’t we just meet up and talk? And Rod Smallwood said, no, no, no! So we ended up doing it at a yacht club in Brighton marina, where Rod cleared everyone out.”
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Iron Maiden on stage at the PGE stadium in Warsaw, Poland. Photograph: John McMurtrie
This led to a tight, energized Iron Maiden headlining the 2001 Rock in Rio festival in front of 250,000 people. Since then, the albums have come at a slower pace than in the 80s, but the quality has stayed high, with a notably progressive, slow-building element coming to the forefront. Both Harris and Dickinson are longtime prog rock fans, name-checking bands like Jethro Tull, Van der Graaf Generator, the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, and Genesis. But while the songs may be longer and more complex, they’re often heavier too. Post-millennium albums like 2015’s The Book of Souls and 2021’s Senjutsu proved that combining their intense, high-energy style with unapologetically proggy theatrics could keep them as vital—and in demand—as ever.
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The always cheerful Harris seems almost sad at the thought of the current tour ending. “It looks like we’re taking next year off,” he says. “Personally, I didn’t want to, but that’s just me. I’m only one of six people, no matter what anyone thinks. They don’t all just do what they’re told,” he says with a laugh. “Otherwise, we’d be doing stuff next year too.”
As for new music, “anyone can go on about the early stuff, but what’s the point of doing Run to the Hills Part Two or The Trooper Part Two?” But he won’t give details on a possible next album. “We usually get together in rehearsals, have a chat, see what everyone wants to do, and go from there.”
Dickinson, meanwhile, gives off the same confidence he had as a 21-year-old, even as he sips coffee in a fancy hotel. “Any song on the planet, if you give it to Iron Maiden, it’ll always sound like Iron Maiden,” he says. “That’s incredible. You give the Rolling Stones something and ‘oh my God, it’s the Rolling Stones!’ – well, Maiden is like that too. Don’t ask me how, don’t ask me why, don’t ask me where the magic comes from – at that point, my analysis skills go out the window. It just is.”
Iron Maiden: Burning Ambition is in cinemas from 7 May. Eddfest is at Knebworth, Hertfordshire, 10 and 11 July.
Frequently Asked Questions
Here is a list of FAQs based on the article about Iron Maidens 50year career written in a natural conversational tone
BeginnerLevel Questions
1 What is this article about
Its a retrospective interview with Iron Maiden as they celebrate their 50th anniversary They talk about the bands history the physical toll of touring their famous disagreements and how they almost fell apart
2 Wait someone almost quit to become a fencing teacher
Yes That was band manager Rod Smallwood Before managing Maiden he was a fencing teacher He says he almost gave up managing the band in the early days to go back to teaching
3 Why does the article mention terrible communication skills
The band members are brutally honest about how they rarely talk about their feelings or problems They often just get on with it or argue through their instruments Thats how theyve survivedby not overthinking things
4 Whats the hard living part about
They talk about the insane touring schedule endless nights drinking exhaustion and the physical damage from years of loud music and travel They admit it wasnt always healthy
5 Is Iron Maiden still making music
Yes They are still touring and writing music The article focuses on their longevity and how they keep going after five decades
IntermediateLevel Questions
6 How did the band handle their biggest lineup changes like when Bruce Dickinson left in 1993
The article suggests they just moved on They didnt have long dramatic meetings Bruce left they hired Blaze Bayley and kept working They later reunited without much fanfarethey just started playing again
7 Whats the secret to their survival according to the band
They say its a mix of stubbornness a shared love for the music and a strange unspoken trust They are not best friends who hang out but they are fiercely loyal to the band as a project
8 The article mentions hard living Did any of them have serious health scares
Yes Bruce Dickinson had a cancerous tumor on his tongue in 2015 He beat it Steve Harris has talked about the physical strain of playing bass for three hours a night at their age The article hints that theyve all had close
