When it came to making the follow-up to 1983’s Piece Of Mind album, Iron Maiden knew they needed to come up with something a bit special. That was Powerslave.
In January 1984, when Iron Maiden arrived at Le Chalet Hotel in Jersey, in the Channel Islands to begin writing material for their next album, they were five men on a mission. The previous 12 months had seen them accomplish a successful career transition from standard bearers for the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal into internationally recognised rock stars with their first headline tour of America, including prestige shows at New York’s Madison Square Garden and Los Angeles’s Long Beach Arena – and their first US Top 20 album with Piece Of Mind. Now it was time to bring the hammer down.
“For me, Piece Of Mind was the best album we’d done up to that point,” Maiden bassist and founder Steve Harris told me. “People still talked about [previous Maiden album] The Number Of The Beast, because of the title track and Run To The Hills, which were both big hits, and because it was Bruce’s [Dickinson, singer] first album [with Maiden]. But Piece Of Mind was the one for me.”
The first Maiden album to feature the classic line-up of Harris, Dickinson, guitarists Dave Murray and Adrian Smith and drummer Nicko McBrain, Piece Of Mind was also the first record to fully integrate Dickinson as a songwriter.
He had written Run To The Hills, Maiden’s first Top 10 single, but it was on Piece Of Mind that he began the songwriting partnership with Smith that would flourish more fully over the coming years, not least on the bugling, Dio-esque Flight Of Icarus, one of the album’s two chart singles.
However, it was the other song Dickinson co-wrote with Smith that really demonstrated what they would bring to Maiden: Sunlight And Steel, which introduced an extra-large dose of rock groove to Maiden’s trademark galloping metal.
“I never saw myself as a heavy-metal speed merchant,” Smith told me. “Definitely not a shredder! I grew up listening to Eric Clapton and the sort of blues rock that bands like Zeppelin and Purple were doing. I loved rock guitar, but it had to have melody.”
“We both grew up loving Machine Head by Deep Purple,” Dickinson recalled. “It was definitely part of the appeal that Ian Gillan was such a great singer and Ritchie Blackmore was such an awe-inspiring guitarist, but it was the songs that mattered to us most – all the ones that got you first time, like Smoke On The Water and Highway Star. So when Adrian and I first started writing together it was natural we would gravitate more to that kind of thing. “
