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In 1992, FEAR OF THE DARK became the ninth album released by Iron Maiden.
The entire tracklist includes:
1.Be Quick or Be Dead
2.From Here to Eternity
3.Afraid to Shoot Strangers
4.Fear is the Key
5.Childhood's End
6.Wasting Love
7.The Fugitive
8.Chains of Misery
9.The Apparition
10.Judas Be My Guide
11.Weekend Warrior
12.Fear of the Dark
The first thing about Fear Of The Dark that leaps out and kicks in the arse is the cover artwork, which for the first time in Maiden's career is not by Derek Riggs. This picture is by Melvyn Grant, who has a long resumé of cover artwork on many popular fantasy and horror novels. Apparently the band liked Grant's picture better than Riggs's;although I wish Riggs's picture was also available for comparison. But in any case, it doesn't matter much because Grant's picture is excellent and sets a great mood for the album.
As with No Prayer For The Dying, many fans consider Fear Of The Dark to be a sub-par album by Maiden standards. In my opinion there is some excellent and possibly classic material here, in songs such as 'Afraid To Shoot Strangers', 'Childhood's End', 'Wasting Love', and 'Fear Of The Dark'. But overall, the album is not as consistently superb as the albums from the golden era, and contains quite a few uncharacteristically short songs.
Fear Of The Dark represents the end of another era for Iron Maiden – after the tour, Bruce Dickinson left the band to begin a solo career until his return in 1999. Unfortunately, one can almost sense Dickinson's discontentment on this album. He continues the rough and raspy style of singing that we first heard in No Prayer For The Dying and on a few songs it sounds like he has completely lost his voice. Ironically enough, his traditional clear and powerful voice returned on his solo albums, some of which are extremely good.
Fear Of The Dark was digitally recorded and mixed at Steve Harris's own Barnyard Studios in Essex. As with No Prayer For The Dying, there are still some traces of synth on the album, but much less noticeable than in Somewhere In Time and Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son.
In closing, I just want to emphasise that despite what you may have heard or read elsewhere, this is not a bad album! It is a little less consistent than some of the earlier albums, but it contains classic material too. Don't be afraid to buy it after you've gotten all of the golden-era stuff.
Fear Of The Dark, the ninth Iron Maiden album, would prove to be a watershed in the band's career. A far more out-going and accessible recording in many ways than its beetle-browed predecessor, the darkly glowering No Prayer For The Dying, on the surface at least Fear Of The Dark sounds like a band marching hard and happy again after a long lay-off. Having successfully completed their first world tour together with Adrian Smith's replacement, former Gillan guitarist Janick Gers, the new line-up had really begun to gel in the studio. Everybody sounds really up for it this time, and the more rounded nature of the material ensured Fear... would be not just Maiden's most enjoyable album since the classic and hit-laden Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son collection, four years before, but that it would also be one of their most successful.
Beneath the surface, however, tensions were already beginning to brew to ensure Fear Of The Dark would also, astonishingly, be the last album Maiden would ever make with singer Bruce Dickinson. In retrospect, a landmark recording then, Fear Of The Dark was a remarkably fine and confident-sounding album for a group apparently not far from approaching the point of breakdown. Ironically, I remember bassist and founding member Steve Harris describing it to me at the time as, "like the start of a new chapter for the band."
Indeed they were. Not least Bruce and Janick's head-spinning, speed-of-night album-opener, 'Be Quick Or Be Dead', a blustering tornado of guitars and blurred drums which also became the band's first flag-waving hit single from the album, reaching No. 2 in the UK in April 1992. That and other equally compelling new contributions like the singer's bluesy, knockabout collaboration with guitarist Dave Murray, 'Chains Of Misery', or the splendidly Zeppelin-esque epic he also co-wrote with Janick, the menacingly marauding 'Fear Is The Key', seemed to banish any remaining doubts about Bruce's long-term commitment to Iron Maiden. That said, with hindsight it is all too easy to read between the lines of tracks like 'Judas Be My Guide', the painfully self-deprecating soul-barer that Bruce also co-wrote with Davey, or 'Wasting Love', another wincingly self-critical ballad Janick had written and Bruce had put the words to, and say that the singer was already voicing his discontent in the only way, until then, he knew how.
As Bruce confirms now: "I was still commited to Maiden 100 per cent for that album, no question! As far as I was concerned, I'd done the solo thing, now I was back with the band and intent on making the best of it. But I suppose there must have still been some nagging doubts in my mind about whether I was doing the right thing or not, I just wasn't allowing myself to think it."
For the time being, however, those feelings would remain heavily cloaked as Bruce, however unwittingly, made sure his last album with Maiden would actually be one of his best.
12 tracks recorded in Steve's newly-installed home studio, in Essex, the Fear Of The Dark album would be built, as ever, around the backbone of some finely wrought numbers that only Steve Harris could have penned. There were, of course, at least two gloomy epics for long-time Maiden connoisseurs to get their teeth into, both of which were destined to become major set-pieces in the new live show.
The first, 'Afraid To Shoot Strangers', is an almost unremittingly bleak, smoke-filled musical landscape that Steve would later describe as the setting for "a Gulf War poem." People watched the war at home on TV, he pointed out, "but instead of bringing them closer to the reality of war, it seemed to take them even further away. It became like a computer game..."
The second of Steve's cornerstone numbers is the swooping, monolithic title track itself, 'Fear Of The Dark'. Taking his own childhood fear of being left alone at night in the dark and turning it into a much more adult metaphor for the fear of losing control and tailing off into the madness that seems to threaten all of us at certain peculiar times of our lives, 'Fear Of The Dark' provides a suitably frantic finale to the album which bears both its spirit and its name.
"It's about being scared but not really knowing what of," Steve explained at the time. "They say that everybody has a secret fear of something, they just don't always know what it is – until it's too late," he added enigmatically.
But Steve had also branched out this time and broken up the intensity with tracks like the playful, chug-along boogie of 'From Here To Eternity', and the similarly bluesy, almost Who-like 'Weekend Warrior', which he had co-written with Janick. While, elsewhere, new Steve songs like 'The Apparition', 'Childhood's End' and 'The Fugitive' all displayed a new maturity to Steve's writing. The subjects were no less serious than before but now he had managed to introduce a new-found accessibility into the material that had not often been evident in the past.
"You can't make everything you write into this huge epic," he shrugs bashfully. "You have to have a bit of contrast too." Maiden fans could only agree and when it was released in May 1992, Fear Of The Dark shot like a rocket straight into the UK charts at No. 1 – Maiden's third album to do so, and their first of the Nineties: proof positive of the band's enduring appeal, no matter the whims of fashion. As if to emphasise the fact that Maiden had truly arrived unscathed into the Nineties, the band even took the somewhat surprising step of inviting other artists as well as Eddie-originator Derek Riggs to come up with ideas for the Fear Of The Dark sleeve.
"We just wanted to see if we could do something new with Eddie," explains Steve. "It didn't mean we didn't want Derek involved again, we just thought for the album sleeve itself, we would try and go for something a bit different this time."
The 'new' Eddie was eventually supplied by Melvyn Grant, and is no less gruesome than you would expect him to be. On stage, too, Eddie continued to assume ever more menacing guises, the Fear Of The Dark motif of the new tour allowing him to be transformed on stage each night into a veritable walking nightmare that not even Freddy Krueger and Jason combined would want to tackle.
The Fear Of The Dark world tour had opened to rave reviews in Scandinavia, in May, and would wind its way across the rest of the continent throughout the summer. Several shows were taped for a forthcoming live album. But the highlight of that summer tour was undoubtedly the band's second headline appearance at Castle Donington's fabled Monsters Of Rock festival, in August.
You can find out more about it on the Maiden – Live At Donington CD, which contains the band's entire scintillating set that day. But suffice to say, Maiden's second stormin' headline appearance at Europe's most prestigious annual rock festival capped the moment for Maiden and their fans in 1992 brilliantly.
Like nearly 75,000 others, I was there and was, literally, swept away by how energised, how alive and kicking the band were on stage that day. I had not seen Maiden shine so hard on stage since their Rock In Rio heyday in the mid-Eighties.
When the first leg of the Fear Of The Dark tour ended in Japan, at the start of November, the plan was to take a two-month break while Steve completed mixing the tapes for the forthcoming live album, ready for release in time for the second part of the tour, which was due to begin again in the new year.
But while Steve was busy in the studio, Bruce was now considering a leap into the dark of his own. Where it would leave the rest of us, not even the band knew yet. One thing we did know: it would not mean the end of Iron Maiden. That would never happen until Steve Harris said so, and Steve has never been a quitter. Indeed, as history now records, Maiden would return bigger, better and more bloody-minded than ever with a fantastic new frontman, former Wolfsbane singer, the incomparable Blaze Bayley.
Fear Of The Dark did not mark the end of Iron Maiden. Just the end of an era...
