The East London bass player who walked out of a pub band called Smiler in 1975 and started a group of his own on Christmas Day that year was Steve Harris, and the band he called Iron Maiden is older than the new wave of British heavy metal by three and a half years. Is Iron Maiden NWOBHM? The calendar says no. Everything else says yes.
A spring tide explains it better than a calendar. It comes in over an estuary and lifts everything moored there at once, dinghies, crab boats and a houseboat with a rotten keel, and for a few hours they all ride at the same height. Then the ebb tears the weed off the mooring chains and drops most of them back onto the mud on their sides, while the one boat that cast off at the top of the water is already over the bar and out in the channel.
How the wave itself rose, through a pub disco in Kingsbury, a weekly paper and a crop of seven inch labels, is set out in Britain's second wave. The question about Maiden is narrower and harder: whether a band can belong to a movement it predates, and whether it still belongs once it has outgrown the thing entirely.
Is Iron Maiden NWOBHM? The years before the name
The three years between the founding and the phrase were the lean ones. From 1976 punk emptied the London pubs of anyone with long hair and a guitar solo, and Harris carried the band through it the way a whaling master holds a ship on a three year hunt, hands jumping ship at every landfall, a harpoon line snapping in the chase, new men signed on at the next island, and the course never once turned for home. The crew changed. The course held.
What he kept changing was the line-up. More than ten musicians cycled through guitar, drums and vocals in the East End pubs between 1976 and 1978, by the band's own later count; Dave Murray, who would still be there half a century later, joined on guitar in December 1976, left the following year when Terry Wapram took his place, and returned in March 1978. Doug Sampson took the drums in 1978. Then, in November 1978, the singer who gave the early band its street corner rasp arrived, a voice closer to the punks at the other end of the room than to anything in the Led Zeppelin catalogue, and his name was Paul Di'Anno.
The music did not bend toward punk to survive it. Harris wrote long, changeable songs with a galloping bass line under twin guitars, the opposite of the three chord single that was selling around him, and by the time the headlines arrived in 1979 the band had a repertoire already built for it. "Iron Maiden", "Prowler" and "Invasion" were tight enough by the last days of December 1978 to be cut in two days at Spaceward Studios in Cambridge for the demo that became The Soundhouse Tapes. "Phantom of the Opera" and "Running Free" were already in the live set before the album that followed. The songs were waiting. The movement arrived to meet them.
The records that are the wave's own
Every credential the wave demanded, the band held by the spring of 1980: a demo passed across the decks at the Soundhouse, a single pressed with its own money, a slot on an EMI sampler of the new bands, a debut album on a major label. No other band of the period ticked every box on the list. Plenty of bands the wave counts as its own ticked two or three.
Released as a single on 23 May 1980, "Sanctuary" is the sound of the band with its elbows out, a riff that tears through the verse at a punk tempo while the two guitars harmonise over the top of it, and Di'Anno spitting the words rather than singing them, and its live B-sides, "Drifter" and a cover of Montrose's "I've Got the Fire", were taped at the Marquee in London on 3 April 1980. It is the wave in miniature. It is also better played than most of the wave.
The same year produced the one record that pulled the band off the wave's own ground, a single made to measure for radio. "Women in Uniform", a cover of a 1978 song by the Australian group Skyhooks, came out on 27 October 1980, produced by Tony Platt and backed by a promotional film shot for television. Platt remixed the track without the band's approval to chase a hit, and Harris has said the episode left him determined never again to let an outside hand near the band's music. It peaked at number 35 on the UK singles chart. Nothing like it was tried again, and the band went back to the ground the wave had found it on, its own songs played its own way.
Taped in Nagoya on 23 May 1981 and released on 14 September 1981, Maiden Japan closes the first chapter: four songs from the stage and the voice that had carried Iron Maiden and Killers on its way out. Behind it Clive Burr drives the drums like a stoker cramming a tug's firebox until the boiler shudders past its red line, towing the whole band behind him at a speed it was never rated for. The singer whose rasp had made the first two albums sound like the pub they came from was dismissed in September 1981, and the man who replaced him, lured away from Samson, was Bruce Dickinson, who made his first appearance onstage with the band on 26 October 1981. The wave's own voice went with Di'Anno.
The other half of the change had come the autumn before. The guitarist who had grown up on the same street as Dave Murray, the two of them the only boys in the neighbourhood with long hair, and who took over from Dennis Stratton in October 1980 was Adrian Smith, and the pairing of Murray's fluid legato with Smith's more composed, melodic leads became the model every twin guitar band of the decade measured itself against. Killers, released in February 1981, was the first album they made together. The wave had nothing else like it.
The case against, and why it fails
The case against membership rests almost entirely on 1975, and it is weaker than it looks. Most of the bands the wave counts as its own had been rehearsing for years before anyone named them: Diamond Head formed in Stourbridge in 1976, Def Leppard in Sheffield in 1977, Angel Witch in London the same year. A movement of teenagers is always older than its headline. What decided membership was when a band reached a record, not when it first carried an amplifier up a pub staircase.
Set the rule against the band that shared a stage with Maiden on the British Steel tour and the difference is plain. Judas Priest had five studio albums and a CBS contract before May 1979. Maiden had a demo tape and a residency in the pubs of the East End. The first band taught the wave; the second was in the class.
Maiden did not join the wave. The wave formed around it.
Harris and his bandmates have said in interviews over the years that the band was already playing the same set before the press found a name for it, treating the label as something applied to Maiden rather than something it set out to earn. Both things are true at once. A band can predate a movement and still be the spearhead of it. Maiden was both.
The label fits some of the class far more awkwardly, and the band that turned toward American radio earliest, at the price of its own home audience's patience, is weighed in is Def Leppard NWOBHM. Maiden never had that argument with its audience. It had it with its own calendar.
After 1982, a band on its own
The exit came quickly. Released in March 1982, The Number of the Beast went to number one in Britain and turned a pub band into an arena campaign. The North American leg alone ran from 11 May to 23 October 1982, support slots with Rainbow, Scorpions and Judas Priest among them. By 1983 Maiden were recording in the Bahamas, and by August 1984 they had set out on the World Slavery Tour, 189 shows in 331 days that ran through to July 1985. None of that was the wave any more. It was the band on its own.
Behind it the movement went back to where it started. Hundreds of bands had put out a single or an album apiece and the market could not absorb all of them, so the flood turned into a glut and the glut into a clear-out, and by 1984 most of the class of 1980 were back on the club circuit or out of music altogether. Def Leppard's Joe Elliott later put the scale of it plainly: of the whole wave, only his band and Maiden were still standing under their own name. The phrase that had described a few hundred bands came to stand, abroad, for one of them, and for millions of listeners outside Britain the new wave of British heavy metal simply means the first two Maiden albums and whatever sounds like them.
Is Iron Maiden NWOBHM? Yes, beyond dispute, and more completely than any other band: it came up through every channel the wave had, made the records that sound most like the wave's own voice, and then carried that sound further than the movement itself ever travelled. It was formed early and it arrived on time. It is the one band the wave produced that the wave could never hold.
