On 22 March 1982, EMI released The Number of the Beast, and Bruce Dickinson, the new man in the saddle, rode out at the head of Iron Maiden for the first time on record. The album went to number one on the UK chart, the band's first, and became their first record inside the American Top 40. A debut and a conquest in the same season. The frontier of heavy metal moved that spring, the old fence posts were ridden into the mud, and the line has never been drawn back.
The East London squadron that had spent two albums as the spearhead of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal changed riders in the middle of the campaign: after Killers in 1981 Paul Di'Anno was gone, the singer from Samson took his place, and the band rode straight into Battery Studios in London with Martin Birch in command, writing and cutting the whole of its third album in a matter of weeks. Steve Harris on bass. Dave Murray and Adrian Smith on guitars. Clive Burr on drums, for the last time on a studio record.
Dickinson told Consequence on 22 March 2022 that he "did most of my vocals in a dilapidated kitchen", stripped bare, with wet plaster on the walls. Nobody would guess it. The voice on this record sounds like a rider handed a stallion already at full gallop who decides, against every piece of sensible advice, to use the spurs.
The column at full gallop
"Invaders" is the skirmish line, three and a half minutes of longships run up onto a Saxon beach, blunt and quick, a warning shot across the field. Then "Children of the Damned" pulls the column back to a walk, opening low and quiet before it climbs, and it is the first place on the album where the change of rider pays for itself: a voice that rises into the high register and stays there, holding the line above the guitars instead of shouting from somewhere behind them. The whole case for the new singer, argued in four and a half minutes.
"The Number of the Beast" is the lance couched and the horse at full stretch. The riff that drives the title track is one of the few in the genre that a listener can carry home after a single hearing, and the break in the middle, where Murray and Smith cut in one after the other, is the brightest steel on the record. It is also the song that brought the protest lines to the gates on the American tour. Harris wrote a heavy metal song; a good part of a continent heard a summons.
Then comes "Run to the Hills", and the central image of this record stops being an image. Riding out onto the American frontier and telling the settling of it from both sides of the line, the people driven off their land and the cavalry doing the driving, the song is built exactly like the thing it describes, Clive Burr's drums sounding the bugle, Harris's bass setting the gallop underneath. The two guitars come over the ridge in formation and trample flat any notion that a band this heavy could not also write a chorus that a whole arena sings back. Heavy metal had its cavalry charge. It still uses it.
In the middle of the record, "The Prisoner" and "22 Acacia Avenue" both run past six minutes. They are the heavy horse of the offensive, slower to turn and harder to stop.
The lame horse and the last charge
One horse goes lame, and everybody on the field can see which. "Gangland" is three minutes and forty-nine seconds of a column that has lost its bearings, busy where the rest of the arsenal is purposeful, crowded where the rest of it breathes, and it sits in the worst possible place, directly in front of the closer. The band's own catalogue later came round to the same view: the 1998 remaster moved "Total Eclipse", left off the original LP and issued as a B-side, into its seat. It is the only real limit here. It is also the reason the number stops one step short of the very top shelf.
"Hallowed Be Thy Name" is where the charge crosses the line. Seven minutes and thirteen seconds on a condemned man's last hour, from the cell to the gallows, it opens slow and grave and then breaks into the full gallop, the guitars riding abreast, the rhythm section driving them on, the voice out in front with its lance lowered, and by the time it ends the record has broken down every fence standing between British heavy metal and the rest of the world. Nothing Maiden rode out with afterwards went further. Very few songs by anyone have.
Forty-four years on, every band with a galloping bass and a singer aiming at the rafters is still riding the trail this record cut.
This is the record for anyone who has ever wondered where the modern heavy metal singer came from, where the twin guitars learned to charge in formation, and where a British band first took the American field. Leave it on the shelf and most of what the genre did after 1982 reads like a stack of replies to a letter never opened. Eight songs, one lame horse, and a charge that has not stopped since.