The most memorable thing for me is still my first Maiden show in 2003, Give Me Ed tour; I had just graduated from high school a few days earlier and was super-psyched for the show. I even won a Heaven Can Wait stage pass on the local radio. A few hours before the show, me and a few other guys who also won the stage pass met up with a person from the organization, they gave us the stickers to put on our shirts and advised us to do it right away, which proved fatal for me and another guy later on.
Anyway, I was jumping and singing during the whole show, and a song or two before HCW, I noticed that the precious sticker was...
missing! I looked all over the floor (a football field), but there was no real hope of finding it there. I tried calling the person who gave us the passes, but thanks to my crappy old cellphone, I only managed it a few moments before HCW, and it was very much too late. I remember talking to Wally Grove who was in charge of letting people pass through a side barrier to go backstage, trying to explain to him that I lost the stage pass, but to no avail ("I'm sorry mate, I can't let you in without the pass!"). And that was it, other people passed through and went backstage. All I could do was stand there, thinking how big of an idiot one must be to have this happen to them.
I came back to my friends after HCW had finished, they told me that they didn't see me on the stage, and I explained why. I was subjected to both compassion and ridicule for the next few weeks.
But anyway, in 2008 I got the chance again and didn't lose the sticker, and got up on the stage to sing HCW during the Somewhere Back in Time tour (and so did the other guy who had lost his sticker back in 2003). It's really funny that I only have a few mental snapshots of it, of us walking behind the stage, the crew using flashlights to point out where to walk and watch our step, seeing Janick on the far left sides sitting on a piece of equipment, seeing the first row crowd going insane, and the scarab-themed floor of the stage, a crew member limiting how far towards the center of stage we were allowed to go. Unfortunately, I was among the last ones to get on stage so I didn't get near Steve. And it was one of the shows where they didn't have an official photographer, so there was no hi-res HCW photo for us, as it has been for many of the other shows on the tour. But it's a nice memory nonetheless.
Also, I don't know about you guys, but I rarely remember anything about a show, maybe just a few "snapshots" here and there. Maybe it's because I'm singing all the time? Who knows...