However, he also realised the group didn’t have the necessary firepower to ensure that happened unless changes were made to the current team.
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The recording: “When we were working, he cracked the whip”Īcutely aware of his band’s burgeoning army of fans, Harris realised that Maiden’s next album, Killers, simply had to hit to spot.
But playing to 40,000 people… When they turned the lights on and you could see them all, that sent a shiver through me.” “Playing in pubs you can see the whites of people’s eyes and that can be scary if you’re not used to it. “We’d never played to so many people in Britain before, and at one point Dave Lights turned the spotlights on the audience, and as far back as you could see, there were people,” Harris recalled in Mick Wall’s Maiden biography, Run To The Hills. Prestigious support slots with Judas Priest and KISS presaged Maiden’s first major headlining tour, while an inaugural Reading Festival slot proved both triumphant and terrifying for the fast-rising London band.
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Despite flying in the face of changing musical trends such as the mod revival, new wave, and the fledgling New Romantic scene, Iron Maiden had broken into the UK Top 5 with their debut album, but that created pressure in itself, for the record’s success meant the band were hardly off the road during 1980. It’s to Steve Harris and co’s credit that Killers exudes the quality it does, as the circumstances surrounding the album’s recording could easily have consumed lesser bands. The backstory: “We’d never played to so many people in Britain before” Listen to Iron Maiden’s ‘Killers’ album here.
A creative development from the band’s spiky, self-titled debut album, Killers is one of the most pivotal releases in Maiden’s body of work. Commercially, it was eclipsed by its illustrious successor, The Number Of The Beast, but it was more than a mere stepping stone to the gargantuan chart success Maiden have continued to enjoy throughout their career, up to and including the release of their 2021 album, Senjutsu. It was up to me to interpret it.Iron Maiden’s second album, Killers, went gold on both sides of the Atlantic, yet it remains one of their most unsung releases. There were kabuki masks and tattoos, Japanese water dragon… all sorts.
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Artist Mark Wilkinson told us that Steve Harris emailed him pages of imagery for reference: “There were samurai warriors and creatures from Japanese oni mythology – ogres with one or more horns growing out of their heads, plus an extra set of fangs. Maintaining the stark black backdrop from The Book Of Souls – with an expression and posture echoing Killers, where TBOS echoed the debut sleeve – our hero manifests in terrifying Samurai form, ready to captivate a new generation of wide-eyed youth. With an extra pair of fangs poking through bloody gums, battered metallic battledress, copious bloodstaining and an arsenal of weaponry at hand, Senjutsu is Eddie at his most flat-out bloodthirsty, shit-scary. No wonder the box set also included a seventeen-inch poster of the image.
However, in the Senjutsu Super Deluxe edition, the Blu-Ray cover of the epic Writing On The Wall animated video adds a giant Samurai Eddie flashing his great big sword, as well as the rest of the Biker Horsemen of the Apocalypse. There are few more metal images than the Grim Reaper on a motorbike surrounded by flying eagles. Bursting through a copy of the Mirror carrying the tragic news of the R101 disaster (the subject of the song), Eddie reaches to grab the stricken airship out of the clouds, as the vast shadow of long-time Maiden sleeve art cameo the Grim Reaper surveys his grim handiwork. His mane of neon green fibre-optic hair is pretty fetching, too.Įddie’s first head-and-shoulders cover portrait since 1980, Mark Wilkinson’s Mayan Ed for The Book Of Souls is a focused triumph, our tribal-scarred hero peering out of a jet-black background, leaving behind the cluttered tableaux of recent years to reassert the snarling menace and attitude that first made us fall in love with the mad old bastard.įor a limited Record Store Day picture disc gatefold, Maiden turned to Hervé Monjeaud, the French artist who redesigned Derek Riggs’ Maiden England video sleeve for its 2013 DVD reissue, for the Empire Of The Clouds release. Being sucked into a computer universe seemingly works wonders on our hero’s teeth, displaying a straighter and whiter set of gnashers here than we’ve ever seen in Eddie’s ‘ead before. (Image credit: Iron Maiden) Speed Of Lightįor Speed Of Light, the first single from Maiden’s sixteenth studio album, Eddie was reimagined as a digi-hopping game invader, popping up in all manner of classic era video game archetypes as he battled his way through til the bitter end.
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