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Seventh Son of a Seventh Son

Seven deadly sins, seven ways to win...

About Me

Note:This is not Iron Maiden's official myspace.
In 1988, SEVENTH SON OF A SEVENTH SON became the seventh album released by Iron Maiden.
The entire tracklist includes:
1.Moonchild
2.Infinite Dreams
3.Can I Play With Madness
4.The Evil That Men Do
5.Seventh Son of a Seventh Son
6.The Prophecy
7.The Clairvoyant
8.Only the Good Die Young
Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son is a special album. It is the last of the great classic albums and represents the culmination of the creative evolution that began with Somewhere In Time. It's also Iron Maiden's seventh studio album, which makes a neat tie-in with the album's title and the subject. The guitar and bass synths are still present, but are somewhat less intrusive and seem to complement the music more effectively than before. For Maiden, guitar synth is like a woman's make-up – if you specifically notice it, then there's too much of it. Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son seems to have achieved a good synth balance in most songs.
Other albums have had the feel of concept albums, most notably Killers because of the incredible cohesiveness and similar feel of its songs. However, Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son is the first album with a definite theme and story that carries through the songs. Although all of the songs have mysterious, magical, and occultic themes, the true story is told on the last half of the album, beginning with 'Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son'. It might be possible to tie in the earlier songs, but not without wild speculation. However, the album does begin and end with similar passages:
"Seven deadly sins, seven ways to win Seven holy paths to hell, and your trip begins Seven downward slopes, seven bloodied hopes Seven are your burning fires, seven your desires..."
According to ancient western myth (of which I've been unable to find a source), the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter or the seventh son of a seventh son possesses heightened occultic abilities. The album is based on the fantasy novel Seventh Son by Orson Scott Card that tells the story of such a child, who from the moment of his birth is subject to manipulation by the forces of good and evil, and must come to terms with his powers and how to use them.
The story that unfolds along the various songs on this album can possibly be summarised as follows:
* 'Moonchild': the Devil addresses the parents of the Seventh Son of a Seventh Son, mostly the mother, and warns them that "all resistance is futile."
* 'Infinite Dreams': the Seventh Son's father, himself a Seventh Son, has visions he does not understand and that torture him.
* 'Can I Play With Madness': the Seventh Son's father looks for an explanation of his visions and consults a prophet; he doesn't like what he's told.
* 'The Evil That men Do': the Seventh Son of a Seventh Son is conceived; the father possibly dies.
* 'Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son': birth of the child with supernatural powers; Good and Evil both try to take him over.
* 'The Prophecy': the young man has harnessed his powers to discover that disaster looms; naturally, no one listens to him and the village is destroyed.
* 'The Clairvoyant': the Seventh Son of a Seventh Son is now a seer who has control of his powers, although they quickly submerge him and are probably the cause of his death.
* 'Only The Good Die Young': bitter reflection on the events; was it all worth it? Back to square one.
Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son is a masterpiece in several respects. Its musical complexity and lyrical depth make it a showpiece for the band's song writing and performing abilities, and its power and emotion are epic and spellbinding. For someone who is new to Iron Maiden, this might be one of the best albums to begin with. Many people consider this to be their best album ever.
Sadly, Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son represents the end of an era for Maiden. It is the last album with the classic lineup of Harris, Murray, Smith, Dickinson, and McBrain that had remained stable since Piece Of Mind. It is the last Maiden album with Dickinson in top vocal form and the last album with a unified mood and feeling until years later with The X Factor.
As Iron Maiden bassist and founding member, Steve Harris, says: "There are some albums, no matter how hard you try or how good they are, they just don't seem to have that same magic that some other albums have. Then there are those you record when, almost without trying, somehow you come up with an album that has all the magic in the world and, for reasons of its own almost, it just becomes one of the best things you've ever done. Well, that's what Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son is to me – simply one of the best albums this band has ever done. Maiden has done since then albums that I think are as good as Seventh Son... – for instance, I'd put The X Factor in the same bracket – but I don't think we've done one yet that's actually better."
Better than the best? Impossible. For, as Steve rightly says, that's what Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son is: a magnificent achievement by a band operating at the very peak of its creative powers. It was certainly the best album the Harris-Dickinson-Murray-Smith-McBrain line-up of Maiden would ever release. Strange to relate then, that it would be their last.
Recorded this time not at laidback Compass Point, in Nassau, where their three previous album had all been at least partly conceived, but in the more disciplined surrounds of Musicland Studios, in Munich, Germany, during February and March of 1988, Seventh Son... would be Maiden's first full-on 'concept' album.
It would also be their most integrated work yet as songwriters, with Adrian, Steve and Bruce all working together on some of the album's most pivotal tracks. "I remember the day Steve called me to talk about the idea he had for the album," says Bruce. "He said he'd been reading about this mythical figure – the seventh-son-of-a-seventh-son – which was supposed to be endowed with special paranormal powers, like being able to see into the future. And because the next album was actually going to be Maiden's seventh studio album, Steve thought it might be a good idea to somehow write some songs around this general theme. I thought it was a brilliant idea and got to work straight away on some ideas..."
Unlike previous collections, five of the eventual eight tracks that were recorded for Seventh Son... were integrated band compositions, with two actually credited in tandem to Bruce, Adrian and Steve, a rarity until then.
Even more remarkable, both tracks were actually superb. The first, 'Can I Play With Madness?' (which had actually begun life as an Adrian ballad called 'On The Wings Of Eagles' before Bruce and Steve played tricks with it), revealed a new playful side to the band. It was a very dark humour, to be sure, but one worth staying up for, and Can I Play With Madness became the surprise big hit single from the album, reaching No. 3 in the UK charts, in April 1988 – Maiden's highest-charting single yet!
The other track Bruce, Adrian and Steve came up with, 'The Evil That Men Do', was one of the most compelling out-and-out rockers on an album crammed with such heavy highlights. It wasn't just dyed-in-the-wool Maiden fans that thought so, either, and The Evil That Men Do became the second big hit single from the album that summer, when it reached No. 5 in the UK in August.
Of the other three band-compositions, the first is the mammoth album-opener, the wonderfully stratospheric 'Moonchild', a mini-masterpiece which Bruce and Adrian had written together. The second was 'The Prophecy', which Steve and Davey had put their heads together on, and is easily the blonde-haired guitarist's most memorable contribution since the nifty and never-to-be-forgotten 'Charlotte The Harlot', from the very first Iron Maiden album, eight years before. The last of the three, and the track that actually ends the album and, prophetically, this chapter in the band's story, was a rare Steve and Bruce collaboration entitled 'Only The Good Die Young'; a wonderfully raunchy number that captures Maiden at their most melodic and upfront, and packing enough wallop to end the album on a suitably raucous note, it made you wonder why Steve and Bruce didn't write more often together? "We did, after that," says Steve with a shrug. "We did before that, too, actually. But Bruce and I both have very strong personalities and we're both able to write songs on our own, so it wasn't that often that we would write together, perhaps, but we always worked well together when we did."
But no Maiden album would be the genuine article, however, without at least three Steve Harris-penned numbers as its backbone, and so, thankfully, it proved with Seventh Son...
From the lilting, Hendrix-esque guitar flourishes and extravagant over-the-top climax of 'Infinite Dreams' – which became the band's fourth Top 10 hit single from the album, when it reached No. 6 in the UK, in October 1988 – to the masterfully performed 10-minute-plus title track, 'Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son' – the most powerfully evoked moment on a Maiden album since the daddy of them all, 'Rime Of The Ancient Mariner', from Powerslave, four years before – and concluding 'The Clairvoyant', a semi-serious take on the incongruities, both real and imagined, of the world of mediums and mystics, which was also destined to liven up the UK charts when it was released as the third single from the album that year – all three tracks were unarguably amongst the best songs Steve has ever written for the band.
Maiden's most innovative album to date, Seventh Son... was also their first album to feature full-blown keyboards. Having dipped their toes in the water, so to speak, with their extensive use of guitar-synthesisers on their previous album, Somewhere In Time, now Maiden unashamedly embraced the new technology of the age.
"For me, it was the best album we'd done since Piece Of Mind," states Steve unequivocally. "It was much more 'progressive', and I thought the keyboards really fitted in brilliantly. Because people think of Maiden as a 'metal' band they don't always realise, but groups like Jethro Tull and Genesis, that's the music I grew up with..."
Released in May 1988, Seventh Son... went rocketing straight to No. 1 in the UK, and in America it became their fifth million-selling album in a row. As was expected by now, the sleeve was another lavish Eddie creation, this time, however, Maiden's monster mascot is seen only from the exposed torso up, his ghostly white form reflecting the icy surrounds of this mythical end-of-the-universe setting, jets of fire leaping towards the sky from his exposed brain.
The stage show for the subsequent Seventh Tour Of A Seventh Tour, as it had inevitably been dubbed, was also far less literal than previous extravaganzas, with Eddie becoming less the stage-stalking hoodlum of old and more like an esoteric symbol for a whole different world, his image now spread across the entire landscape of the backdrop. The highlight of the tour, of course, was when Maiden headlined Castle Donington's legendary Monsters Of Rock festival for the first time, in August 1988. Only AC/DC had ever headlined Donington before without having played there lower down the bill first, and as Bruce says, Maiden were determined to turn the event into an occasion to remember. "We'd actually been asked to do Donington practically every year since I'd joined the band," he recalls. "But we'd always turned it down, the timing had just never been right before. Then, with the new album just released in '88, the timing couldn't have been more perfect and so we decided to make the most of it."
And how. As history would record, Maiden would preside that day over the finest Monsters Of Rock bill ever assembled, and supporting them that day were some of the biggest names in Eighties rock: Kiss, David Lee Roth, Megadeth, Guns N'Roses and Helloween. As a result, over 100,000 people came to Donington that year, still now the biggest attendance ever recorded for the event, and Maiden turned in a fantastic two-hour set that no-one who was there that day would ever forget.
As Steve says, it should have been their proudest moment. Unfortunately, what the band did not know until later is that the event had also been marked by tragedy. Earlier in the afternoon, two fans – 18-year-old Alan Dick and 20-year-old Landon Siggers – had both been crushed to death as the crowd rushed to the front of the stage for the start of the Guns N'Roses set. Realising something was wrong, the GN'R boys had stopped playing while both lads were retrieved by St. John's Ambulance staff and whisked into the emergency medical room beneath the stage, but it was too late.
As Steve says now: "It was just a terrible, terrible tragedy that no-one was really to blame for. Obviously, once we found out, we were devastated. We had put on a great show that year, one of our best ever, but there was no way we could think about that now or enjoy it. There was certainly no after-show party that night, or for a long time afterwards. I've got kid of my own and my heart really went to the families."
Though Donington '88 was a record-breaking occasion that Steve and the band could rightly feel proud of, there was no way any of them would ever be able to think about that day again with anything but sorrow. But the show must go on, as they say, and Maiden headlined the Monsters Of Rock bill all over Europe that summer. Then, after a mini-break at home in England, in October, the band set out on what was billed as a brief 'Thank You' tour of Britain: 10 major dates in the run up to Christmas that would see Maiden making their first headline appearances at the largest indoor venues in the UK, from the NEC Arena, in Birmingham, where they played for two nights, to the Wembley Arena, in London, where again they played for two nights.
The NEC shows were filmed for a new Maiden live video which would be co-directed and edited by Steve, and released the following year. But Maiden's final show was back at their beloved Hammersmith Odeon, in London, on December 12. The scene of so many Maiden triumphs in the Eighties, it was a fitting venue at which to play what would turn out to be not just their final show of the year, nor just the decade. But the last show ever by this particular line-up of the band.
Not that anybody except the Seventh Son himself could have foreseen that then...

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Music:

Member Since: 10/31/2006
Band Website: Info. taken from: maidenfans.com/imc/
Band Members: Bruce Dickinson-Vocals
Steve Harris-Bass & Keyboards
Dave Murray-Guitar
Adrian Smith-Guitar
Nicko McBrain-Drums
Influences: Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Judas Priest.
Sounds Like: METAL


Record Label: EMI
Type of Label: Indie