Forostar
Ancient Mariner
Paul Stenning, author of GUNS N' ROSES "The Band That Time Forgot" and AC/DC "Two Sides to Every Glory", has posted sample excerpts from his upcoming 130,000-word biography on IRON MAIDEN, entitled "30 Years of the Beast - The Complete Biography 1976-2006".
Due in September, "30 Years of the Beast - The Complete Biography 1976-2006" is described by the author as "the remarkable true story of IRON MAIDEN from the year of their inception to the present day. This is a painstakingly deep and accurate history of the band, told by the author — a lifelong MAIDEN fan — and a whole cast of characters who were there at the time. These include: Janick Gers, Bruce Dickinson, Steve Harris, Paul Di'Anno, Derek Riggs, Neal Kay, Dennis Stratton and many more."
http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fusea ... cdacf1088f
Someone pointed out to me today I needed to "sell" the Maiden book and point out why it is different from the official biog. At first I thought 'fuck off' but actually he is right. All I've been doing is telling people the book is out soon, but what good is that when they don't know what will be in it!?
So, thanks to this helpful individual I am putting up some samples so people know what they would be getting. First off, here is the basic outline of Chapter 1, I've left the first 1500 words intact. After that there are more sample paragraphs so you can see where the book is going and what style, anecdotes you can expect etc etc.
I'm very interested to hear peoples comments so don't be shy! Here we go:
Chapter 1 Birth Of The Beast
When Stephen Percy Harris spilled into the world on March 12th 1956 in Leytonstone, Greater London, there would have been little indication that the newborn Arry would later be positioned at the forefront of the British heavy metal movement. A month before Harris birth Elvis Presley had only just entered the American charts for the first time, setting a precedent for dangerous rock n roll for years to come. As Steve Harris grew up and progressed through adolescence there was scant evidence of his future musical prowess. Along with three sisters, he was raised primarily by his mother, while his father worked away for long periods as a truck driver.
Harris was obsessed with sport, specifically football as a young boy, and by 1972 when he finished his schooling at Leyton County High School, he was offered a trial by his favourite football team West Ham United.
The club had been formed from a merging of the Thames Ironworks and Shipbuilding Company Ltd. and, coincidentally, had originally been nicknamed 'The Irons'. Only in 1900 was the team renamed West Ham United once the club became a limited company with their nickname also changing to 'The Hammers'. West Ham's most memorable period came in the 1960s, a decade in which they managed to win the F.A. Cup, the Charity Shield and the European Cup Winners Cup. They were also League Cup Finalists in 1966 and enjoyed the honour, in the same year, of providing three players to England's World Cup winning side. Of all the players involved in the World Cup final against West Germany, perhaps the three most significant were the three immortal West Ham players Geoff Hurst, Bobby Moore and Martin Peters.
By the time Steve Harris joined his favourite club, the Hammers were in a somewhat less respectable position, and it wasnt until 1975-6 that they enjoyed another trophy heyday winning both the European Cup Winners Cup and F.A. Cup in that period. By this time however, Harris was concentrating on music!
"I was on their books for about eight months", Harris would later say, "and at that time I was playing every day of the week between West Ham, my Saturday and Sunday clubs, and school. I played Saturday afternoons for Melbourne Sports Reserves and on Sundays for Beaumont Youth, which is where I got discovered by a famous West Ham scout called Wally Serpa. I couldnt believe it when I heard West Ham were interested. It was great, but fourteen is the wrong age really because all I wanted to do was start having a few beers and meet a few birds which doesnt mix with playing football. They want you in bed early and all that stuff. In a sense it disillusioned me because I thought, if I cant be dedicated to the club I really love then whats it all about? It did me in a bit, really. If it had been a couple of years later it maybe wouldve been a different story."
Harris love of West Ham was fanatical, but as far as a career in the game was concerned, he gradually came to the realisation that a future in music could perhaps offer a less stringent lifestyle. A friend of his named Pete Dale had peeked his interest in music. Initially Steve considered the likes of Genesis, Jethro Tull and Black Sabbath "weird", but after borrowing a few albums from Dale he began to grow into the music, while coming to the realisation that a musical career route would allow him to still drink beers and see birds. And so it was in 1972 that Steve settled on learning an instrument, at the relatively advanced age of sixteen.
"Like many others, I started by learning the guitar, he says. I even spent a few years learning the classical guitar, then I gave up because I got bored of it. In fact, I wanted to play the bass, and I had been told that in order to do that I absolutely needed to learn the bass chords on an acoustic guitar. When you think of it, this is pretty stupid, and I know now that you can play the bass without wasting your time like I wasted mine. As soon as I started playing with a band, I gave up the acoustic guitar and I focused exclusively on the bass. Sometimes I think its better when you start late because you get too many preconceived ideas, especially if you get someone teaching you when youre a kid. I think its wrong to get too many of those kind of ideas in the first place."
The influences for Harris bass studies were wide and varied. It was no surprise that in a golden era for rock he focused on such prominent musicians as Chris Squire of Yes and The Whos John Entwistle. There was also Wishbone Ashs Martin Turner and, more obscurely, Rinus Gerritsen from Golden Earring whose style had a major impact on the young Harris. He would later often credit Golden Earring as steering much of his upfront image.
Harris did not take lessons, preferring to teach himself from records. "I used to listen to early Free, early Sabbath, stuff like that. I liked some of the Free bass lines, fairly simple, but really nice technique." It has always been a natural progression for a true and honest musician to write his own material and Steve was no different. In fact he had written his first song, titled Burning Ambition when he was just 16. This track would later appear as an Iron Maiden b-side on their 1980 debut single Running Free.
It was at this point Steve began the first vestiges of a real band. "When I first started playing we used to muck about in my house. I used to have a couple of guys coming over from school, just sort of messing about," he explains. "This guy used to play guitar, and he was a lot better on guitar than I was on bass at the time, and I used to just try and jam in with him. Then we decided, Ah, well, weve got to get a drummer! So we got this guy; anyway, he had this kit. He was pretty useless, but we didnt really know at the time. We thought he was alright, but as we started to progress and get a bit better, we realised he wasnt any good, and we sacked him."
Actually, as Steve admitted, the rest of the band wasnt very good at that time either, and they were predominantly playing cover tunes. "They were doing more rock-boogie sort of stuff, like Savoy Brown, early Fleetwood Mac. I wasnt really advocating the sort of stuff they were playing. I just thought, Well, its good experience for me. I played about sixteen gigs with them."
Although this band has gone down in the annals of Iron Maiden history as a serious and exciting group and with a name like Gypsys Kiss they were bound to be remembered, if for that alone. The reality however was rather a different story, as Harris was the first to acknowledge, and he soon moved on to join a more mature troupe known as Smiler. The other members of this outfit were older, so Steve figured he would "learn a lot, Which I did. I think I was about eighteen and they were twenty-six, which I thought was really old at the time! Only problem was, when I started writing my own songs, they didnt want to play them because they thought there were too many time changes and that sort of thing. So I figured, alright, and I just left to form Iron Maiden."
The main reason Steves songs did not sit well with Smiler was the simple fact that he was ascribing to the progressive rock ethic, and according to Harris the remainder of the band were against experimentation, themselves preferring a kind of rockabilly sound. By Christmas 1975 Steve had formed the very first line up of Iron Maiden with Paul Day on vocals, two guitarists, Terry Rance and Dave Sullivan and drummer Ron Rebel.
An 'iron maiden' was a medieval torture device and this matched Harris vision for a nasty heavy rock band. However he was not the first to coin the name. Five years previously there had been an early doom group by the same name [originally they had called themselves Growth and then BUM]. However, for their debut album, Maiden Voyage, the Essex four-piece was to be known as Iron Maiden. It is intriguing to note that they hailed from the same county as Steve Harris, and also their most famous song Ballad of Martha Kent featured harmonies very similar to Heaven Can Wait [a later Harris/Maiden track].
KEY PARTS OF THE FIRST CHAPTER
Future Maiden fan club secretary Keith Wilfort recalls his Maiden initiation. "I first came into contact with Iron Maiden in May 1976. Some friends from work and I were driving around looking for somewhere to go for a drink and as we drove by The Cart and Horses Pub in Stratford, East London, we heard some rather good music coming out and so we decided to stop in and check it out. When we got there, the band were half way through playing 'Transylvania' so we stayed around for the rest of the show. It was memorable due to the fact that at the end a fight broke out between two punters and also one of my friends, who was wearing a new white jacket,s got spattered with fake blood during Iron Maiden. Den Wilcock the singer used to put blood capsules in his mouth and during the climax to 'Iron Maiden' would run a sword through his mouth and spit the 'blood' out. The line up at that time was Steve, Den Wilcock, Bob Sawyer and Dave Murray with Ron Rebel on drums. We liked what we saw and went back the next week and gradually over the next few months got to know the band. We went to other gigs they played in and around London and became familiar faces. Wed buy them drinks and vice versa and sometimes give them lifts to and from gigs. I sort of became the official number one fan; Id get T-shirts printed with designs signifying Maiden song titles and the band catchphrases"...
..........Talking of his audition, keyboardist Tony Moore explains, "I remember them starting the first song and the volume, power and tightness was both frightening and exhilarating in equal measure. The jump from silence to giant power chords and thundering drums made my heart jump. I started to try and find my way into the song, listening for the riffs, identifying chords, looking for space to add my part. Alternating between tweaking the synth to produce ethereal sounds, vamping on the piano and attempting to follow the intricate guitar melody lines that Terry was throwing out with effortless ease. I am not sure how long it all lasted or how many songs we played, but fairly quickly Steve and Dennis came out and asked me if I wanted to join the band.
I was over the moon. I didnt think I had done a particularly great job, but I HAD got on with everyone really well, and my attitude has always been very positive and professional. I agreed and that was it, I was in the band!"
Moore has a refreshing viewpoint on the direction of the Iron Maiden material. Coming from a less rock-oriented background than the others he observed the Maiden style as follows. "I think Steve saw this as an opportunity for a new wave of British rock music that was dynamic and fresh and impossible to ignore. During rehearsals he always wanted everything to be played as fast as possible. It was as though he had absorbed the spirit of punk and could instinctively see WHY speed appealed to people. It made the heart beat faster when you heard it. Combine this with exemplary musicianship; anthemic rock themes with cinematic lyrics and the result would be both groundbreaking and yet familiar. I could see that Steves vision was clear and focussed and I was happy and inspired to follow him. Even though the bands music was not the kind of thing I had played or really listened to before, I got on with Steve very well as we swapped stories of the great gigs wed seen and how we would be a part of the new generation of bands whose shows were legendary"..........
..........Maiden really hit the jackpot when they acquired Paul DiAnno who had previously sung for the obscure outfit Bird Of Prey. Steve Loopy Newhouse says of DiAnno, "Paul and I used to hang about in the same crowd when we were kids in Leyton, London. We also went to the same school, George Mitchell High School for boys. I cant really remember how we actually met, but it must have been around 1970-ish. Paul was a year younger than me, but I think we became instant friends and stayed best friends for many years. He was quite a cool character, with wide musical tastes, from Queen to Bob Marley and even Emerson, Lake and Palmer. It was actually a guy called Trevor Searle who named me Loopy. That was a few years later." Prior to singing with Maiden, Paul had sung in a couple of dodgy punk bands, including Rock Candy, who were one of the few who actually made it out of rehearsals and onto the pub circuit..........
'Loopy' Newhouse remembers the day Maiden and DiAnno first joined together; "Paul was my best mate, he says. We went everywhere together. It was a warm summers day in 1977 and we were going to see some band play at the Red Lion in Leytonstone. We met up with a couple of guys from Rock Candy, including Trevor Searle. We had already heard that Maiden were looking for a new singer, and it just so happened that Steve Harris was there to see this band as well. Trevor knew Steve, and introduced him to Paul. They chatted for a while, and Paul was offered an audition for that following week. Paul had no problem convincing Iron Maiden that he was good enough for the job, and shortly came round to tell me all about it. I had helped Rock Candy with their equipment, so I had an idea of what was needed Humper and General Dogsbody! If you have those qualities mate, youre in. So that was it. Every rehearsal, I was there to hump the equipment up the stairs, set it up, get ear damage, take it apart, and take it back down the stairs again. Later on in life [with Maiden] although we all got the equipment in and out of studios or gigs, I started working closely with Dougie Sampson, and became his drum roadie. My job was to set up the kit, clean it when necessary, and generally look after Doug drinks on stage, fag before the encore, etc"..........
..........At first Maidens rise through the pub ranks was hardly meteoric and the early gigs were not paying exorbitant sums. The fee was usually �25 with a few beers thrown in if you were lucky. It was a matter of chipping in your day job money, Dave Murray remembers. "Steve borrowed �3,000 off his aunt to keep us going. Those early days in the pubs and clubs were good fun. Youd turn up about seven oclock and have a few pints with your mates and youd be carrying your little carrier bag with your stage gear in. Youd go into the toilet to get changed and thered be people taking the piss. Its pretty much the same now, but we dont get changed in the bogs"...........
.........By mid-1976 punk exploded across the UK and changed the hitherto unblemished classic rock scene. As a bastion of professional, quality music radio DJ Neal Kay was not enamoured with the unwholesome punk scene. "Punk was my enemy, I wanted to destroy it even then, because they were destroying real music, he says unabashed. They couldnt sing, they couldnt write they couldnt do fuck all except gob, spit and curse and I dont approve of that onstage. That is impure, its not real music, its not classic rock. Somehow punk got in to the mainstream, the suit and tie guys thought they could make a quick buck out of it I suppose, but it wasnt for the music it was for the fashion. I loathed Johnny Rotten more than any one character and I loathe his manager even more, shameful bastard, someone should shoot him!"..........
..........."Maiden were one of those bands who came to me with a demo tape in very early 79, thats how it first started," recalls Kay. "It was Steve who came to me one night and I was so rude to him. I didnt know who he was, they were just a small band from East London. And in Steves usual manner, he approached me. No ego, just very quiet. He put a tape in my hand and said, ere mate give this a listen will you, and I turned round and said, yeah you and half the country, when Im ready I will and I forever hate myself for that.
I took it home and I couldnt stop bloody well playing it. I thought fucking hell, whats going on here? I had Goosebumps all over my arms, and I was head banging up and down the lounge and throwing myself about. I thought this is it, this is really happening. So I phoned Steve up and said Hey, youve dropped this tape off with me. Im going to tell you something now, you are going to be real big, real famous and incredibly rich youve got everything it takes'. And he laughed. And then of course I said the same thing on the back of The Soundhouse Tapes EP which carried my sleeve notes."
Due in September, "30 Years of the Beast - The Complete Biography 1976-2006" is described by the author as "the remarkable true story of IRON MAIDEN from the year of their inception to the present day. This is a painstakingly deep and accurate history of the band, told by the author — a lifelong MAIDEN fan — and a whole cast of characters who were there at the time. These include: Janick Gers, Bruce Dickinson, Steve Harris, Paul Di'Anno, Derek Riggs, Neal Kay, Dennis Stratton and many more."
http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fusea ... cdacf1088f
Someone pointed out to me today I needed to "sell" the Maiden book and point out why it is different from the official biog. At first I thought 'fuck off' but actually he is right. All I've been doing is telling people the book is out soon, but what good is that when they don't know what will be in it!?
So, thanks to this helpful individual I am putting up some samples so people know what they would be getting. First off, here is the basic outline of Chapter 1, I've left the first 1500 words intact. After that there are more sample paragraphs so you can see where the book is going and what style, anecdotes you can expect etc etc.
I'm very interested to hear peoples comments so don't be shy! Here we go:
Chapter 1 Birth Of The Beast
When Stephen Percy Harris spilled into the world on March 12th 1956 in Leytonstone, Greater London, there would have been little indication that the newborn Arry would later be positioned at the forefront of the British heavy metal movement. A month before Harris birth Elvis Presley had only just entered the American charts for the first time, setting a precedent for dangerous rock n roll for years to come. As Steve Harris grew up and progressed through adolescence there was scant evidence of his future musical prowess. Along with three sisters, he was raised primarily by his mother, while his father worked away for long periods as a truck driver.
Harris was obsessed with sport, specifically football as a young boy, and by 1972 when he finished his schooling at Leyton County High School, he was offered a trial by his favourite football team West Ham United.
The club had been formed from a merging of the Thames Ironworks and Shipbuilding Company Ltd. and, coincidentally, had originally been nicknamed 'The Irons'. Only in 1900 was the team renamed West Ham United once the club became a limited company with their nickname also changing to 'The Hammers'. West Ham's most memorable period came in the 1960s, a decade in which they managed to win the F.A. Cup, the Charity Shield and the European Cup Winners Cup. They were also League Cup Finalists in 1966 and enjoyed the honour, in the same year, of providing three players to England's World Cup winning side. Of all the players involved in the World Cup final against West Germany, perhaps the three most significant were the three immortal West Ham players Geoff Hurst, Bobby Moore and Martin Peters.
By the time Steve Harris joined his favourite club, the Hammers were in a somewhat less respectable position, and it wasnt until 1975-6 that they enjoyed another trophy heyday winning both the European Cup Winners Cup and F.A. Cup in that period. By this time however, Harris was concentrating on music!
"I was on their books for about eight months", Harris would later say, "and at that time I was playing every day of the week between West Ham, my Saturday and Sunday clubs, and school. I played Saturday afternoons for Melbourne Sports Reserves and on Sundays for Beaumont Youth, which is where I got discovered by a famous West Ham scout called Wally Serpa. I couldnt believe it when I heard West Ham were interested. It was great, but fourteen is the wrong age really because all I wanted to do was start having a few beers and meet a few birds which doesnt mix with playing football. They want you in bed early and all that stuff. In a sense it disillusioned me because I thought, if I cant be dedicated to the club I really love then whats it all about? It did me in a bit, really. If it had been a couple of years later it maybe wouldve been a different story."
Harris love of West Ham was fanatical, but as far as a career in the game was concerned, he gradually came to the realisation that a future in music could perhaps offer a less stringent lifestyle. A friend of his named Pete Dale had peeked his interest in music. Initially Steve considered the likes of Genesis, Jethro Tull and Black Sabbath "weird", but after borrowing a few albums from Dale he began to grow into the music, while coming to the realisation that a musical career route would allow him to still drink beers and see birds. And so it was in 1972 that Steve settled on learning an instrument, at the relatively advanced age of sixteen.
"Like many others, I started by learning the guitar, he says. I even spent a few years learning the classical guitar, then I gave up because I got bored of it. In fact, I wanted to play the bass, and I had been told that in order to do that I absolutely needed to learn the bass chords on an acoustic guitar. When you think of it, this is pretty stupid, and I know now that you can play the bass without wasting your time like I wasted mine. As soon as I started playing with a band, I gave up the acoustic guitar and I focused exclusively on the bass. Sometimes I think its better when you start late because you get too many preconceived ideas, especially if you get someone teaching you when youre a kid. I think its wrong to get too many of those kind of ideas in the first place."
The influences for Harris bass studies were wide and varied. It was no surprise that in a golden era for rock he focused on such prominent musicians as Chris Squire of Yes and The Whos John Entwistle. There was also Wishbone Ashs Martin Turner and, more obscurely, Rinus Gerritsen from Golden Earring whose style had a major impact on the young Harris. He would later often credit Golden Earring as steering much of his upfront image.
Harris did not take lessons, preferring to teach himself from records. "I used to listen to early Free, early Sabbath, stuff like that. I liked some of the Free bass lines, fairly simple, but really nice technique." It has always been a natural progression for a true and honest musician to write his own material and Steve was no different. In fact he had written his first song, titled Burning Ambition when he was just 16. This track would later appear as an Iron Maiden b-side on their 1980 debut single Running Free.
It was at this point Steve began the first vestiges of a real band. "When I first started playing we used to muck about in my house. I used to have a couple of guys coming over from school, just sort of messing about," he explains. "This guy used to play guitar, and he was a lot better on guitar than I was on bass at the time, and I used to just try and jam in with him. Then we decided, Ah, well, weve got to get a drummer! So we got this guy; anyway, he had this kit. He was pretty useless, but we didnt really know at the time. We thought he was alright, but as we started to progress and get a bit better, we realised he wasnt any good, and we sacked him."
Actually, as Steve admitted, the rest of the band wasnt very good at that time either, and they were predominantly playing cover tunes. "They were doing more rock-boogie sort of stuff, like Savoy Brown, early Fleetwood Mac. I wasnt really advocating the sort of stuff they were playing. I just thought, Well, its good experience for me. I played about sixteen gigs with them."
Although this band has gone down in the annals of Iron Maiden history as a serious and exciting group and with a name like Gypsys Kiss they were bound to be remembered, if for that alone. The reality however was rather a different story, as Harris was the first to acknowledge, and he soon moved on to join a more mature troupe known as Smiler. The other members of this outfit were older, so Steve figured he would "learn a lot, Which I did. I think I was about eighteen and they were twenty-six, which I thought was really old at the time! Only problem was, when I started writing my own songs, they didnt want to play them because they thought there were too many time changes and that sort of thing. So I figured, alright, and I just left to form Iron Maiden."
The main reason Steves songs did not sit well with Smiler was the simple fact that he was ascribing to the progressive rock ethic, and according to Harris the remainder of the band were against experimentation, themselves preferring a kind of rockabilly sound. By Christmas 1975 Steve had formed the very first line up of Iron Maiden with Paul Day on vocals, two guitarists, Terry Rance and Dave Sullivan and drummer Ron Rebel.
An 'iron maiden' was a medieval torture device and this matched Harris vision for a nasty heavy rock band. However he was not the first to coin the name. Five years previously there had been an early doom group by the same name [originally they had called themselves Growth and then BUM]. However, for their debut album, Maiden Voyage, the Essex four-piece was to be known as Iron Maiden. It is intriguing to note that they hailed from the same county as Steve Harris, and also their most famous song Ballad of Martha Kent featured harmonies very similar to Heaven Can Wait [a later Harris/Maiden track].
KEY PARTS OF THE FIRST CHAPTER
Future Maiden fan club secretary Keith Wilfort recalls his Maiden initiation. "I first came into contact with Iron Maiden in May 1976. Some friends from work and I were driving around looking for somewhere to go for a drink and as we drove by The Cart and Horses Pub in Stratford, East London, we heard some rather good music coming out and so we decided to stop in and check it out. When we got there, the band were half way through playing 'Transylvania' so we stayed around for the rest of the show. It was memorable due to the fact that at the end a fight broke out between two punters and also one of my friends, who was wearing a new white jacket,s got spattered with fake blood during Iron Maiden. Den Wilcock the singer used to put blood capsules in his mouth and during the climax to 'Iron Maiden' would run a sword through his mouth and spit the 'blood' out. The line up at that time was Steve, Den Wilcock, Bob Sawyer and Dave Murray with Ron Rebel on drums. We liked what we saw and went back the next week and gradually over the next few months got to know the band. We went to other gigs they played in and around London and became familiar faces. Wed buy them drinks and vice versa and sometimes give them lifts to and from gigs. I sort of became the official number one fan; Id get T-shirts printed with designs signifying Maiden song titles and the band catchphrases"...
..........Talking of his audition, keyboardist Tony Moore explains, "I remember them starting the first song and the volume, power and tightness was both frightening and exhilarating in equal measure. The jump from silence to giant power chords and thundering drums made my heart jump. I started to try and find my way into the song, listening for the riffs, identifying chords, looking for space to add my part. Alternating between tweaking the synth to produce ethereal sounds, vamping on the piano and attempting to follow the intricate guitar melody lines that Terry was throwing out with effortless ease. I am not sure how long it all lasted or how many songs we played, but fairly quickly Steve and Dennis came out and asked me if I wanted to join the band.
I was over the moon. I didnt think I had done a particularly great job, but I HAD got on with everyone really well, and my attitude has always been very positive and professional. I agreed and that was it, I was in the band!"
Moore has a refreshing viewpoint on the direction of the Iron Maiden material. Coming from a less rock-oriented background than the others he observed the Maiden style as follows. "I think Steve saw this as an opportunity for a new wave of British rock music that was dynamic and fresh and impossible to ignore. During rehearsals he always wanted everything to be played as fast as possible. It was as though he had absorbed the spirit of punk and could instinctively see WHY speed appealed to people. It made the heart beat faster when you heard it. Combine this with exemplary musicianship; anthemic rock themes with cinematic lyrics and the result would be both groundbreaking and yet familiar. I could see that Steves vision was clear and focussed and I was happy and inspired to follow him. Even though the bands music was not the kind of thing I had played or really listened to before, I got on with Steve very well as we swapped stories of the great gigs wed seen and how we would be a part of the new generation of bands whose shows were legendary"..........
..........Maiden really hit the jackpot when they acquired Paul DiAnno who had previously sung for the obscure outfit Bird Of Prey. Steve Loopy Newhouse says of DiAnno, "Paul and I used to hang about in the same crowd when we were kids in Leyton, London. We also went to the same school, George Mitchell High School for boys. I cant really remember how we actually met, but it must have been around 1970-ish. Paul was a year younger than me, but I think we became instant friends and stayed best friends for many years. He was quite a cool character, with wide musical tastes, from Queen to Bob Marley and even Emerson, Lake and Palmer. It was actually a guy called Trevor Searle who named me Loopy. That was a few years later." Prior to singing with Maiden, Paul had sung in a couple of dodgy punk bands, including Rock Candy, who were one of the few who actually made it out of rehearsals and onto the pub circuit..........
'Loopy' Newhouse remembers the day Maiden and DiAnno first joined together; "Paul was my best mate, he says. We went everywhere together. It was a warm summers day in 1977 and we were going to see some band play at the Red Lion in Leytonstone. We met up with a couple of guys from Rock Candy, including Trevor Searle. We had already heard that Maiden were looking for a new singer, and it just so happened that Steve Harris was there to see this band as well. Trevor knew Steve, and introduced him to Paul. They chatted for a while, and Paul was offered an audition for that following week. Paul had no problem convincing Iron Maiden that he was good enough for the job, and shortly came round to tell me all about it. I had helped Rock Candy with their equipment, so I had an idea of what was needed Humper and General Dogsbody! If you have those qualities mate, youre in. So that was it. Every rehearsal, I was there to hump the equipment up the stairs, set it up, get ear damage, take it apart, and take it back down the stairs again. Later on in life [with Maiden] although we all got the equipment in and out of studios or gigs, I started working closely with Dougie Sampson, and became his drum roadie. My job was to set up the kit, clean it when necessary, and generally look after Doug drinks on stage, fag before the encore, etc"..........
..........At first Maidens rise through the pub ranks was hardly meteoric and the early gigs were not paying exorbitant sums. The fee was usually �25 with a few beers thrown in if you were lucky. It was a matter of chipping in your day job money, Dave Murray remembers. "Steve borrowed �3,000 off his aunt to keep us going. Those early days in the pubs and clubs were good fun. Youd turn up about seven oclock and have a few pints with your mates and youd be carrying your little carrier bag with your stage gear in. Youd go into the toilet to get changed and thered be people taking the piss. Its pretty much the same now, but we dont get changed in the bogs"...........
.........By mid-1976 punk exploded across the UK and changed the hitherto unblemished classic rock scene. As a bastion of professional, quality music radio DJ Neal Kay was not enamoured with the unwholesome punk scene. "Punk was my enemy, I wanted to destroy it even then, because they were destroying real music, he says unabashed. They couldnt sing, they couldnt write they couldnt do fuck all except gob, spit and curse and I dont approve of that onstage. That is impure, its not real music, its not classic rock. Somehow punk got in to the mainstream, the suit and tie guys thought they could make a quick buck out of it I suppose, but it wasnt for the music it was for the fashion. I loathed Johnny Rotten more than any one character and I loathe his manager even more, shameful bastard, someone should shoot him!"..........
..........."Maiden were one of those bands who came to me with a demo tape in very early 79, thats how it first started," recalls Kay. "It was Steve who came to me one night and I was so rude to him. I didnt know who he was, they were just a small band from East London. And in Steves usual manner, he approached me. No ego, just very quiet. He put a tape in my hand and said, ere mate give this a listen will you, and I turned round and said, yeah you and half the country, when Im ready I will and I forever hate myself for that.
I took it home and I couldnt stop bloody well playing it. I thought fucking hell, whats going on here? I had Goosebumps all over my arms, and I was head banging up and down the lounge and throwing myself about. I thought this is it, this is really happening. So I phoned Steve up and said Hey, youve dropped this tape off with me. Im going to tell you something now, you are going to be real big, real famous and incredibly rich youve got everything it takes'. And he laughed. And then of course I said the same thing on the back of The Soundhouse Tapes EP which carried my sleeve notes."
