The classic Iron Maiden album “the religious right” literally tried to destroy
It’s difficult knowing what to do when the original member of a band leaves. It’s an unenviable position that Iron Maiden found themselves in two albums down.
After their first couple of records, it was clear that Iron Maiden had some real potential. Their sound was larger than large, littered with distortion, pounding bass and the kind of drums that could shake a building to its foundations. However, that original lineup wasn’t destined to be, as singer Paul Di’Anno wasn’t giving the band his all.
While he was touring with Iron Maiden, he had a serious drug and alcohol problem, which made him an unreliable frontman and also led to him losing his voice on multiple occasions. It led to Maiden deciding to kick him out, which left them scratching their heads as they pondered over who could take Di’Anno’s place. In came Bruce Dickinson.
“I knew that I had joined a great band,” said Dickinson when discussing the decision to join Maiden. “I also knew I could make it even better. In Samso,n I’d created this big, operatic-type voice. And I had a vision: my voice glued on to Maiden equals something much bigger.”
The rest of the band got on board with Dickinson right away, and they set to work on their new album with him on lead vocals. His style of singing was unique, very much rooted in hard rock, but tinged with an operatic style, which separated him from a lot of other vocalists making music at the same time. It’s something that bassist and chief songwriter, Steve Harris, was keen to capitalise on.
The album they all wound up making together was arguably one of Iron Maiden’s most famous, The Number of the Beast. There are plenty of great tracks on the LP, some of which are still considered the band’s best decades later. It’s often hard for some groups to recognise they’re putting together a classic at the time of creating it, but for Iron Maiden, the potential of their third album was pretty clear.
“We knew when [we] were making the album that it was special,” Dickinson admitted. “And you can hear that excitement on the record.”
One of the biggest songs from the album is the title track, a song written by Harris which centred around the 1978 movie Damien: Omen II. The song was about a young antichrist who had begun seeing images of the devil everywhere he looked, but there is a question mark lingering over whether the images are real or not. “Basically, this song is about a dream,” said Harris, “It’s not about devil worship.”
It didn’t matter what the actual meaning of the song was; the religious people from around the world heard it and grew immediately resentful. The fact that a rock band was so gleefully singing about the devil was blasphemous, and so people would take to the streets to set fire to copies of the album.
Suffice to say, this only increased record sales, as when a piece of music is received with that amount of hostility, onlookers are going to be curious about what’s actually on it. The numbers spoke for themselves, as the band originally put $28,000 into the creation of the album, and within the first six months, they had made $1.5million.
“It gave us loads of publicity,” said Dickinson, “The kids who did want to buy our records were like, ‘Oh cool! The religious right are burning their records! I better buy half a dozen!’”
In trying to destroy the album, the religious protestors managed to make it even more popular.
