When Axl Rose claimed Iron Maiden were “just a political organisation”
Rock and roll has always been more about the attitude than the message. As much as many fine composers have released songs that are all about trying to make the world a better place, it sometimes comes down to whether the tune makes someone want to dance or it doesn’t. Although Axl Rose has had more than his fair share of great tunes under his belt in Guns N’ Roses, he admitted that Iron Maiden was the blueprint for everything that he didn’t want his group to be.
Before we even start, though, let’s make it crystal clear that Guns N’ Roses and Iron Maiden don’t even feel like they are in the same conversation. They both have sold millions of records that fit under the broad genre umbrella of ‘hard rock’, but you were never going to mistake Rose’s furious shriek for the air raid siren voice of Bruce Dickinson.
Then again, both bands’ sounds had enough in common to get Rose on tour with the group when they were first starting to take over the world. Whereas GNR were already bringing rock back to its roots on Appetite for Destruction, Iron Maiden was going through one of the more experimental sides of their catalogue, including using synthesisers on the album Seventh Son of a Seventh Son.
More than anything, Maiden seemed like a band that was taking themselves far too seriously as far as Rose was concerned. He just wanted to make music that makes people feel good about being alive. Meanwhile, Dickinson was about to give you a history lesson about classic literature on ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’.
When asked at the time what he thought of the metal legends, Rose thought there was no correlation between them and Guns N’ Roses, saying, “They’re nice guys, but it’s just like a political organisation, and your albums kind of like your political stance. They are completely different than ours. I just think that they don’t have anything to do with rock and roll. What they do is what they do, and I don’t know what that is. I hope to never be like that”.
For someone who seemed so gung-ho about tearing the band through the mud, Rose did end up getting a little bit too big when making his next album. Across Use Your Illusion I & II, you can hear Rose getting into the same extravagant music that Iron Maiden, albeit with a focus on more singer-songwriters of yesteryear than trying to make some grandiose metal epic.
There are even more than a few songs that had a few similarities to what Maiden had been doing a few years before. A song like ‘Coma’ is the same style of epic based on sweeping riffs like in the metal icons’ tunes, and ‘Civil War’ was the first time that the band actually decided to get a touch political on a track.
Still, that kind of cribbing from the metal band did nothing to dissuade Bruce Dickinson, who later said he threatened to punch Rose after their touring cycle didn’t pan out together. If anything, though, the rock world was witnessing a change in rock and roll history, and the pendulum was swinging towards Rose a lot more often than it did for Dickinson circa 1988.
