Iron Maiden: Burning Ambition

Maiden! Maiden!

Maiden! Maiden! Maiden!

It doesn't matter

whether you're male, female,

Muslim, Christian, Catholic, Jewish. It doesn't matter.

If you're a Maiden fan, you're an Iron Maiden fan.

You're part of one fucking world

and one family, my friends.

Hey, come on!

Yeah!

It was always about the fans.

Always.

Thank you. Good night.

When you play in a country for the first time

or a city for the first time,

you're going in there not really knowing what to expect.

But the intensity of the reaction is amazing.

Thank you!

Er, thank you.

The whole thing was just like a dream.

It was like slow motion.

Surrounded by hundreds of fans...

twenty-four seven.

Any long careers,

you're gonna have ups and downs.

There's no two ways about that.

And you just kind of ride with it.

But the hardcore fans

were just with you through thick and thin.

You know, it's quite amazing to live and go through that.

At the end of the day,

I'd rather spend time with the fans than anything else.

Maiden! Maiden!

Maiden! Maiden!

It's about a sense of belonging,

belonging to the Iron Maiden family.

In that sort of community, that bond,

where we've connected on a shared love

of the same music, the same melodies,

they touch us in the same way with different backgrounds.

I do accounting work.

I'm a psychiatrist.

In the army. I work in the bomb squad.

I'm a musician.

A lecturer in war studies at King's College, London.

Play in a heavy metal band.

I'm a partner of the largest Latin-American investment bank.

I'm the CEO of Metal Blade Records.

I'm a retired New York City police sergeant.

And I'm a music journalist.

It feels like you're part of

a exclusive club,

but the only price of admission is loving the band.

Like, whenever I see a Maiden shirt out in the wild,

you can kind of give 'em like a bro nod

and go like, "Right on," like, throw you the horns.

Through all the years, I've been going

to hundreds and hundreds of concerts.

And I've been on the pit. I've been on the first line.

I've been there giving it all.

Now I'm older, I'm in the back.

But still, I jump and I scream.

You could feel this was legit.

Like, this was music being made by people that loved this music

and cared about this music just as much as we did,

even in those early days.

There's no way I'd go on stage

and play what I didn't wanna play. You know?

Even other... some... you know, some other forms of rock music.

I wouldn't... wouldn't do it.

You know... I would rather sweep the streets.

And I did in fact for a while.

I'm not interested in doing sessions just for money.

It's no secret that Steve Harris is the one sort of

steering the uncompromising nature of Iron Maiden.

When you say Steve Harris, we just say The Boss.

Because he is the mastermind.

He was an East Ender, just like us.

He was a road sweeper.

But he looked the coolest road sweeper in all the world.

He had the hair. He had the bags coming out of his belt.

I just knew that he was gonna make it

because he had that way about him, that determination.

The Iron Maiden

and the new wave of British heavy metal

really was an answer

to everything that was happening

at that time in England.

Are we going to have

another winter of discontent

as some politicians have claimed?

For many areas of Britain,

chronic inflation and unemployment

was taking its toll.

I mean, we didn't have a lot.

But then, no one did.

You know, we didn't think, "Oh, we ain't got anything."

It was just the same for everyone.

So it was just pretty normal.

At the time, all you've worried about

is getting a new amp that sounds all right

and some speakers that ain't blown

and you wanna just get out and do some gigs.

Steve said to me, "We've got some gigs.

"Would you like to do a bit of roadie-ing?"

And I said, "Yeah, of course."

I said, "Oh, I'll make you some lightboxes up."

Back then, we used to break into old warehouses

and we'd get a big pram and we'd load it all up,

anything I could get my hands on

and turn into lighting of some description.

And it just progressed from there.

Even like the first few gigs we did,

we were picking up fans straight away,

and the reason being was

'cause we were playing our own material.

I mean, we were already playing locally

around the East End of London.

But it started to really snowball for us.

Maiden! Maiden! Maiden!

Maiden! Maiden!

Friday night at The Marquee,

and East End rock band Iron Maiden

are playing the second of three nights at the club.

These gigs, at the end of a gruelling

concert hall tour covering forty venues,

are by way of a thank you to their delirious fans.

I mean, it's... So, like, what is it, ten to eight

and you can't get in The Marquee?

If I had a pound for every time I've seen Iron Maiden

I'd be a rich man by now.

If the heavy metal boom

is being taken seriously by the fans,

it's certainly causing a stir

in the offices of the record companies.

But when Iron Maiden formed, punk was what was selling.

And when the band were first offered a recording deal

they were told punk was what they had to play.

I didn't wanna play punk or new wave.

I... I didn't wanna have spiky hair

and dress in, you know, stupid clothes.

You know what I mean?

I wanted to play rock music.

Labels tried to make us more marketable, I suppose,

'cause punk was the thing that was happening,

so they wanted to take us down that road.

Next thing would obviously be for us to get our hair cut.

That would've been, "Fuck off."

Luckily enough, Rod come along

at a time when it was just badly needed.

And of course Andy come along a few years later

with all the business side of stuff.

They'd both go and bat away

a lot of the issues that we didn't wanna deal with.

But Rod's the bombastic Yorkshireman.

He'll just take no prisoners with the way he does things.

I put a barbed-wire fence around the band creatively.

No one gets within that fence.

They do exactly what they wanna do

with whoever they wanna do it with and that's it.

Yeah, come on!

We didn't get any radio play back in the day.

We didn't get any radio play for many, many years actually.

The industry didn't know what to make of us.

They didn't know what the appeal was.

But it's just made everybody,

the fans included, just more tight

and, you know, just more standing against it all.

So we were a bit of the underdog

in the music scene,

but we were the underdog

at just about everything really.

I've never really liked being in front of a camera,

especially these days.

So we thought this time round

it's much more interesting to be

looking at some other visuals than us while we're talking.

Because we're not as good looking as Eddie.

We weren't very familiar with who these band members were.

We didn't know any of their names

because you had the album cover

and there's Eddie.

He's face of the band.

He's on every album cover.

It's just one of those things that draws you in,

even without knowing the music.

I remember seeing Eddie when I was a kid

and just being like, "What is that?"

It kinda scared the shit out of you.

The origins of Eddie really came from the fact that

the guys in the band were actually quite shy.

And I just dug the idea of having a character

to put across the vibe of the band.

So I was with EMI having a meeting

and I noticed some artwork on the wall by Derek Riggs.

I had Derek come round with samples of his artwork.

In the middle of all that was the first album sleeve.