Nicko McBrain has given the plainest answer yet to a question Iron Maiden fans have argued over for thirty years, and it is a technical one.
"To be fair to Blaze, we didn't transpose the songs," the drummer told Barry Robinson of Classic Album Review while promoting his memoir Hello Boys And Girls!. "We should have gone down a note. We should've stepped it down half a step or a full step, because trying to sing that range that Bruce had, and Blaze was a totally different. Bruce is soprano, almost, and Blaze is a baritone, there was a difference in the timbre of each of the voices."
That is the whole problem in one sentence. Blaze Bayley was asked to sing a catalogue built around a voice sitting several notes above his own, live, every night, with no adjustment made for him.
McBrain calls the Virtual XI tour really tough for the singer and the period "like a dark cloud for me, that period of my life". He also says he was the one Bayley talked to inside the band, the granddad of the group and his confidant.
Bayley has spent the years since playing those songs in his own keys and in his own rooms, including an anniversary set in Norwich last week.