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In 1983, PIECE OF MIND became the fourth album released by Iron Maiden.
The entire tracklist includes:
1.Where Eagles Dare
2.Revelations
3.Flight of Icarus
4.Die With Your Boots On
5.The Trooper
6.Still Life
7.Quest For Fire
8.Sun and Steel
9.To Tame a Land
Piece Of Mind is my favourite Iron Maiden album, although The Number Of The Beast and Powerslave are incredibly close. It was my first Maiden album, and was very influential in guiding the evolution of my musical tastes.
"And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes;
and there shall be no more Death.
Neither sorrow, nor crying.
Neither shall there be any more Brain;
for the former things are passed away."
– Revelations ch. xxi v. 1. (Quoted inside the Piece Of Mind sleeve)
What does it mean? It might be alluding to the eastern concept of nirvana, which when achieved features the extinction of individual consciousness and desire (hence, no 'Brain'). It could also be referring to Christianity, implying that it is for brainless morons. But it is most probably referring to the lobotomisation of Eddie... you can see on the album cover that he has had is brain removed and his skull is now screwed shut.
The original idea for the cover was to kill Eddie, but the band thought that it was too extreme. The trepanation is, according to a Bruce Dickinson interview, an allusion to an old Aztec ritual during human sacrifices. The album was originally going to be called Food For Thought, but they finally decided to give it a more subtle name.
Commercially Piece Of Mind was a huge success, and was even voted the number one metal LP of all time in a KERRANG! magazine poll. It was also the first album with drummer Nicko McBrain, completing a line-up which would last through four studio albums – the longest stable line-up in Maiden history.
Piece Of Mind, their fourth album, was the one where Iron Maiden finally shed their New Wave Of British Heavy Metal skin, and emerged as one of the biggest-selling and most influencial rock bands of the Eighties.
In America, where the album sold more than a million copies (earning Maiden their first Platinum Disc), many fans had never heard of the NWOBHM; few even now recalled that the band had once had a different singer (Paul Di'Anno).
"It was the best album we'd done up 'til then, easily," explains bassist Steve Harris, "and it was our most successful, and the two things just sort of wiped out the past. It was like the beginning of a new era for the band – musically, and in every other sense." Indeed, Piece Of Mind was the beginning of a golden era in the Iron Maiden story, in which they went from being regarded as brash upstarts to becoming the ruling rock royalty of the day.
As Geoff Barton – founding editor of Kerrang! magazine and the writer who had first discovered the band in 1979 – says now: "The Eighties belonged to Iron Maiden. There may have been bands that sold more copies of a particular album at a given time, but there was no band more consistenly popular year-in, year-out with the hardcore metal fans. As a result, they won about every section in every Readers' Poll Kerrang! ran from about 1982 to 1988!"
Piece Of Mind was also the fourth Maiden album to feature a new member: drummer Nicko McBrain. The band had parted company with Clive Burr at the end of the Beast On The Road world tour in 1982. Without dwelling on what was, in truth, a less than amicable split (Clive still refuses to speak about it), it's fair to say that, from the band's point of view anyway, the reasons were entirely musical. The pressures and demands of Maiden's increasingly long tours had simply taken their toll on the young drummer.
Fortunately for Maiden's fans, Clive's replacement, former Pat Travers and Trust drummer, Nicko McBrain, proved to be an inspired choice. Nicko (real name: Michael Henry) was – and remains – a larger-than-life character who had played with numerous outfits in the Seventies, including keyboardist Billy Day, The Blossom Toes, The Streetwalkers (featuring former Family vocalist Roger Chapman and guitarist Charlie Whitney), and the Pat Travers Band.
Maiden had first met Nicko, in 1981, when he was in French socio-political rockers Trust, who were supporting the band on tour. "But Nicko's as English as baked beans," guitarist Dave Murray recalls, "so he spent most of the time hanging around with us. And when Clive left, he was just the first bloke we thought of."
Good job they did. Like the arrival of vocalist Bruce Dickinson into the line-up on the band's previous album, Number Of The Beast, Nicko's vastly greater range and technique than his predecessor brought a new and unpredictable dimension to Maiden's music.
"The thing with Nicko is that he's got amazing technique and amazing energy," says Steve. "No matter what I ask him to do, I know he'll be right on the money every time. And that gives you tremendous confidence as songwriter, to try and really push back the boundaries." As guitarist Adrian Smith say: "Nicko always had the chops and the technique, we knew that, but in Maiden he really exploded – to the point where a lot of stuff we did after he joined was then founded on his playing."
As if to underline the point, Piece Of Mind opens with a tremendous flourish of percussion, which then ignites into the rip-roaring riff from 'Where Eagles Dare', and the start of one of the greatest Maiden albums ever.
Recorded at Compass Point Studios, on the beautiful Bahamian island of Nassau, in January 1983, Piece Of Mind was the first album to feature what is now nostalgically regarded as the 'classic' Harris-Murray-Smith-Dickinson-McBrain line-up of the band.
As usual by now, Martin Birch was again the producer and the backbone of the album was built around a fistful of Steve Harris-penned songs, including the soaring, aforementioned album opener, 'Where Eagles Dare'; the blisteringly brutal 'The Trooper'; the epic vista-vision 'Quest For Fire' (inspired by the 1982 movie of the same name); and the misty atmospheric album-closer, 'To Tame A Land' (replete with lyrics inspired by reading Dune, Frank Herbert's labyrinthine novel that was later made into an equally incomprehensible movie starring Sting).
Steve had also had a hand in both 'Still Life', a tasty piece of teen angst he and Davey concocted together, and the all-guns-blazing 'Die With Your Boots On', which was a rollicking good idea Bruce and Adrian had been working on and which Steve then helped them finish off. 'Revelations', one of the strongest tracks, however, was all Bruce's work. Destined to become an immense song when played live, the lyrics, he says, were written "as a dig at all the loony 'moral majority' nut cases in America that accused Maiden of being satanists."
Just to really ram the point home, the band even converted a quote from the Bible (Revelations, Chapter 14, Verse 1), which reads: 'And God shall wipe away all the tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more Death. Neither sorrow, nor crying. Neither shall there be any more pain; for the former things are passed.' Except they had inserted the word 'Brain' for 'pain', as a pun on the title of the album.
Also, listen out for the joke 'backwards masking' message between the tracks 'The Trooper' and 'Still Life' – another prank for the religious freaks to get wound up about; it was, in reality, nothing more sinister than Nicko spouting gobbledegook! "We thought, right, you want to take the piss, we'll show ya how to take the piss!" laughs Nicko now. Of the two remaining tracks – the catchy, surprisingly rock-steady 'Flight Of Icarus' and the more up tempo but equally groovacious, 'Sun And Steel' – both were numbers that Bruce and Adrian had teamed up to write together. Not only were they both great tracks, but their inclusion marked the beginning of a song-writing partnership that would blossom as the years went by.
"Steve seemed to prefer writing on his own," Adrian explains. "I suppose because he always knew exactly what he wanted to go for and what Maiden should sound like. Whereas, with me and Bruce, we just started writing off the top of our heads, and the combination of the two seemed to work really well together."
As if to confirm that view, 'Flight Of Icarus' not only became Maiden's latest hit single in the UK – where it reached No. 11, in April 1983 – but it also became a sizeable 'turntable hit' on the radio, another first for the band.
That said, it was undoubtedly the take-no-prisoners follow-up single, The Trooper, which most Maiden fans recall best from those days. As Steve points out: "Hit singles are alright, but they're not really what Maiden's about. 'The Trooper', which no normal radio station would play because it's too fast and heavy or whatever, that's what we're really all about and I didn't want the fans to forget that." Released in Britain on May 16, 1983, Piece Of Mind roared like a lion straight into the UK chart at No. 3. Though Michael Jackson's Thriller would actually prevent them from going on to No. 1, Piece Of Mind was Maiden's most successful album yet, eventually selling more than two million copies worldwide!
And of course, there was another stupendous version of Eddie on the album sleeve. Straight-jacketed and bound by chains, the top of his hairless skull clearly padlocked down, we are greeted by a lobotomised fiend who appears to have quite literally flipped his lid. "The original title for the album had been Food For Thought," Steve explains. "It was only when we came up with the idea of this lobotomised Eddie that we decided to change the title to Piece Of Mind."
On tour, Eddie became the brain-damaged mascot for a new generation of sense-overloaded rock fans as Maiden embarked on their longest tour yet: 10 months and twice as many countries that quickly became dubbed, the World Piece Tour.
But the highlight of their near-year on the road had to be when, against the advice of supposedly better informed music business heads, Maiden went out, in the Summer of 1983, and headlined their own US tour for the first time. "Everybody told us we were mad to do it," Bruce recalls. "They said it was too soon and that we'd never sell enough tickets. But we went out and did it anyway and proved them all wrong."
Greeted by packed arenas wherever they went, that first headline tour in 1983 was the making of Iron Maiden in America. "It was amazing," Steve says, "we knew it was a bit of a risk but we thought, to hell with it, let's just go for it." Their reward was their first American Top 20 hit, the Piece Of Mind album eventually settling at No. 14, and selling more than a million copies for the band, thereby earning them their first US Platinum Disc. From the earliest days of Cream and the Jeff Beck Group, through to those of Seventies Goliaths like Zeppelin, Sabbath, and Purple, on up to early Eighties superstars like Judas Priest, UFO and Def Leppard, America has always demonstrated an enormous appetite for British hard rock and heavy metal.
Now, it seemed, it was Iron Maiden's turn to command the Platinum spotlight.
