Roy: I just said, ‘Hey, it’s your solo record, let’s have fun.’ He’s written riffs, but we’ve never had him play guitar on a record of anything. With Resurrection Men, Bruce was like, ‘Can you get us a [surf guitar pioneer] kind of sound?’ I said, ‘Here’s an amp that does that, so show me what you’re thinking.’ He ended up doing really well ’cos he was inspired by us vibing on it.
And that requires quite a lot of stuff because we're not just re mixing, we are also - what's the expression? - reimagining some of the albums.
So some of the albums that should have been frankly a bit heavier like ‘Balls to Picasso’ we can stick some new stuff on. And there's some stuff that didn't get mixed onto the album that was recorded that we can take a view on as well.
This one we can swap it around a little bit. If we start doing rehearsals and we go, ‘wow, this feels great. Why don't we chop in another song.
It has long been obvious to me that comics and metal should be related.
One of the things I really love about the album is that we have an album full of stealth emotion here," he continues. "It takes you to a lot of places emotionally you're not expecting to go, and that's extremely rare for a metal album. I genuinely feel that we've done something — probably unwittingly — that's really, really extraordinary. I mean, not just saying that 'cause I've got a big head; when I listen to the record, I actually feel humbled by it. I'm like, 'How did we do that.
We started collating songs that we had. The first thing that we did when we got back together was we wrote two brand new songs. And they were “Afterglow Of Ragnarok” and “Many Doors To Hell.” And I went, “Wow, those are pretty catchy. Wow, great!” We already had all the other songs. Some of them were less developed than others. “Mistress Of Mercy” was just a thrashy guitar riff and a chorus. We hadn’t developed the tracks or done backing tracks for it or anything. There were no drums on any of the songs. There were guide guitars. There were no keyboards on any of the songs. The lyrics were half-finished, or in some cases, not even half-finished on probably half the tracks. So there was a fair bit of fixer-upping to do. The great thing was that we had these two new tracks that we did full-on.
Sonata - But the first verse of that song is the only time I ever sung it. The same with the chorus. The second verse, I couldn’t think of anything to sing, so I didn’t sing anything, then the chorus happened. I’d done that once, so I could do it again. I changed a couple of things as well. And again, the spoken word is all on the spot, made up. The original performance. So, we kept that song, and we sat on it for ages. We didn’t know what to do with it, because it was such a different tune.
Yeah, along with “A Tyranny Of Souls.” So those two tracks were written, and I think “Shadow Of The Gods” came at a similar kind of time frame. I did a vocal on it. I think I did the vocal in 2014. Some of that vocal still is on the record, but most of this stuff, as I say, a lot of it, I had one verse and one chorus. We had to write more words. “Mistress Of Mercy” was really just a sketchpad of me with an acoustic guitar, and then the funny little Jeff Beck guitar riff. That was written on keyboard, because I couldn’t play it on guitar, but I could play it on keyboard. I said to Roy, “Could you play that on the guitar with a beat underneath that’s completely out of time to that. I’m still not sure we pulled that off.
When we did “Fingers In The Wounds,” and Mistheria sent his keyboards over, that changed everything. Because I suddenly went, “We’ll have this big, lush keyboard thing, and then go into this sparse keyboard thing, big rock chorus, and then we’ll go into Morocco, and go to Kashmir or somewhere like that.” There was something rhythmic and weird, and completely left-field. And there’s a few moments like that on the album.
Eternity Has Failed - One of the reasons I put the original demo on the B-side of the first single was I wanted people to be able to compare the demo that I did with Roy, the Maiden version that they did of the demo, and the finished version of my version of the demo, revisited. Purely and simply as a kind of: “This is how creativity works.” You can see what changed.
Bruce insisted to do an album with Janick.
But under the contract with Maiden, every member of Maiden had the right to do a solo album, which the record label in England, EMI, would pay for. And the way we did that, was to basically take a series of, to be honest, musical templates. My favorite song on that record is “Born In ’58,” which for me, is by far and away the best song on the record, because it’s the only one that doesn’t originate in a cliché. That song, Janick had done almost all the instrumental parts of it, and he was just playing a bit. He just played the little intro part of it, and I went, “Hey, what’s that?” He goes, “Oh, it’s just something I’ve done. It’s probably not suitable for this.” And I said, “No, no, no, what’s the rest of it?” And he played the rest of it, and I said, “That’s great.” And that’s it. I wrote the words, and they were personal. They were autobiographical. For me, it’s far and away the best song on the record.
I did Tattooed Millionaire, and to my enormous surprise, all these people liked it. I was like, “Hmm. I wonder what would happen if I did something that was really properly artistic?” Not just a version of AOR, relatively formulaic. It didn’t challenge me in any way, doing Tattooed Millionaire. It was fun. I don’t deny that, and one or two of the tunes in the right context were OK, but it wasn’t really groundbreaking. If I was gonna do a real solo album, I wouldn’t do one like that.
How am I gonna grow? If I just go and live in Maiden World the rest of my life, how am I gonna grow? You can’t grow inside of something. And in fact, the response to Tattooed Millionaire was very often, “It’s not bad as a solo record, that’s cool. Obviously, he had to get something out of his system that wasn’t very important before going back to Maiden.” I was like, “I’m not sure I like where this is going, where my whole identity is sucked in by this Iron Maiden identity. It was as spur of the moment as that. I had no plan. In actual fact, the world outside of Iron Maiden was a huge shock. I was completely unprepared for the level of shock horror from fans. I was like, “I’m just a bloody singer.” I was completely unprepared for how people…it rocked their world. I didn’t expect that.
Rob Halford did Fight, I did Skunkworks. Both of those projects were cool. Neither of them worked, but they had some cool stuff. You have to find out for yourself, exactly. I mean, I learned so much stuff doing Skunkworks. Different ways of writing lyrics, different approach to singing. So we had a blast at making that record, but the band itself, the concept of Skunkworks as a band didn’t work.
Chemical Wedding was, for me, reaching out to a place where I’d never been before. And I think quite a few other people hadn’t been before either. With the guitar sounds, with the heaviness of it, with the whole artistic part of it, with William Blake and the storytelling, with the sort of gothic feel to it, at times.
On The Mandrake Project, I’ve got more songs that I wrote on my own than probably any of the previous records.
What brings us all together is Maiden. So, this is a great place to be. We’re probably one of the biggest heavy metal bands in the world. We mean a huge amount – and I do understand that – to millions of people around the world. And what’s not to love about still being able to do it.
