WHISKY A GO GO, LOS ANGELES
Iron Maiden’s unstoppable frontman takes the West Coast by surprise
IN THE DAYS leading up to this Friday night, the marquee above LA’s storied Whisky A Go Go advertises the gaudily named ‘The House Band Of Hell’ as that evening’s performer. It is, of course, a cheeky ruse by Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson himself, who takes to social media two days before to reveal that The House Band Of Hell are actually him and his solo band.
Considering that Bruce hasn’t played a live solo show since Tony Blair was PM – Wacken, 2002, to be precise – this announcement doesn’t land so much as detonate across the city. In fact, when Lita Ford was performing her Thursday night here, Maiden superfans were already queuing up for the following night.
With a capacity of 500, the venue offers an uncommon level of intimacy for an icon like Bruce, and by the time doors open at 8pm, throngs of fans decked out in 40 years’ worth of Iron Maiden t-shirts have formed a noisy black centipede that winds around the block in both directions. The puzzling lack of an opening band charges the venue with an undercurrent of tension that finally breaks when the band storm out and pile into the powerful strains of Accident Of Birth at the stroke of 10. The sound quality is masterful and his current band – guitarists Philip Näslund and Chris Declercq, keyboardist Mistheria, and the propulsive duo of bassist Tanya O’Callaghan and drummer Dave Moreno – are fearsomely tight, playing shoulder-to-shoulder at times on the venue’s modest stage.
At 65 years, Bruce’s voice remains defiantly unaffected by the passage of time, effortlessly hitting high notes that threaten the structural
