Why was the Dance of Death tour so short?

Collin

Collin

Chasing Ponce De Leon's Phantoms
New topic. Enough of the fake news in album #17 thread. :ninja:

Why was the Dance of Death tour so short?

The tour spanned over 2 years across all major continents (AUS being the only exception.) A decently sized European tour was the first leg, but South America and especially the US got very little shows on the second leg. USA got the worst of it... 6 Shows. 2 cities. One of the shows was cancelled bringing it to 5. Canada received 2 shows. I will say that Maiden did tour the US a little bit during the 2003 Give Me Ed Til' I'm Dead tour, but they also toured Europe a lot too. The DoD Tour was over by early February of 2004. Another show would not be played until May of 2005 and AMOLAD would not be recorded until early 2006.

Is there any reason they decided not to tour the US and South America a bit more during 2004? I find it odd that they hardly played any shows during that year in particular.
 
I think if you look at interviews from around the reunion tour era, they were pretty conservative about how much touring activity would take place going forward. They talked about doing a tour and then having an extended break. It wasn’t until 2008 and the massive success of SBIT that they really started to tour heavily again.

With North America specifically, they probably didn’t want to flood the market. There was no guarantee that NA would have a high demand for Maiden or metal in general (outside of nu metal) in the 21st century. You can also look at Give Me Ed as pretty much being the first leg of the Dance of Death tour. Similar to TFF when they only hit a couple dates in NA in 2011.
 
There's nothing I can back this up with, but I feel like the band rode the "reunion" wave for the first 2/3 years and then lost some perspective. Somehow everything clicked again at the 2005 tour.
 
Also, I saw Maiden at Donington in 2003 just before the release of DOD. The rest of the bill was rubbish, Nu-metal and associated bands hadn't quite been washed away yet so maybe the market for proper metal hadn't recovered quite as much then. Also look at the rubbish Maiden had supporting them at the time Muderdolls and Funeral for a Friend, that's a snapshot of what was trendy at the time, absolute muck.
 
I can definitely understand the market thing. But wouldn't playing for 4 nights in New York be flooding the local market? I would expect at least a few scattered dates around the country. For example, instead of 4 nights in New York they could have played Chicago, Dallas, and Miami instead?
 
Collin said:
I can definitely understand the market thing. But wouldn't playing for 4 nights in New York be flooding the local market? I would expect at least a few scattered dates around the country. For example, instead of 4 nights in New York they could have played Chicago, Dallas, and Miami instead?
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I can't remember what the reasoning for it was, but I have a vague memory that there was a reason, maybe that's were they thought there was a market at the time. From what I remember on the official forum back then, there was a lot of US fans and especially Australian fans pissed off that Maiden weren't playing their neck of the woods. But I think Maiden just hadn't recovered in english speaking countries yet at that stage, they didn't play much in the UK either around then having avoided a british tour for BNW. I remember dancing around the job when the Dublin gig for DOD was announced, as it was the first Irish gig in 7 years and at the time I honestly expected they would never have come back, as I didn't think the market was there. They ended up selling out the old Point for the first time. I think there was a switch happening around that time where it suddenly became acceptable for youngsters to listen to old school bands like Maiden again.
 
Collin said:
I can definitely understand the market thing. But wouldn't playing for 4 nights in New York be flooding the local market? I would expect at least a few scattered dates around the country. For example, instead of 4 nights in New York they could have played Chicago, Dallas, and Miami instead?
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Eh, New York was in a 3,000 seat theater. So, I wouldn't really call that flooding a market.
 
Zare said:
There's nothing I can back this up with, but I feel like the band rode the "reunion" wave for the first 2/3 years and then lost some perspective. Somehow everything clicked again at the 2005 tour.
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I definitely get that too. Maybe they didn’t think it had legs beyond the initial album and tour. Somewhere Back In Time and AMOLAD each proved that there was a lot of commercial and creative potential and 2000 wasn’t just lighting in a bottle.
 
Between November 2002 and February 2004, they hardly stopped working: work on DoD, GMETID tour then DoD Tour. Though they were "only" in their mid-forties, they may have thought it was enough, and they wouldn't risk touring the US, which is in general commercially ungrateful to the band when they play anything that is not a 1982-1988 greatest hits set.
 
This is odd too. They were playing pretty big venues on the BNW tour (ex: Tacoma Dome, Pacific Colloseum in Vancouver, Madison Square Garden) they really downsized pretty well after that.
 
Collin said:
This is odd too. They were playing pretty big venues on the BNW tour (ex: Tacoma Dome, Pacific Colloseum in Vancouver, Madison Square Garden) they really downsized pretty well after that.
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That's not really so odd though. They were playing big festival shows in Europe and South America too at the time because they marketed it as the return of Bruce, Adrian and the return of Iron Maiden. They went from playing an indoors arena in Rio de Janeiro at the end of the Virtual XI tour to headlining Rock in Rio in 2000. The music buisness had basically forgotten Maiden existed during the Virtual XI tour....so advertising it as a comeback/reunion made a lot of headlines and sold a lot of tickets. After the initial hype things settled down a bit again after that.
 
SixesAlltheway said:
That's not really so odd though. They were playing big festival shows in Europe and South America too at the time because they marketed it as the return of Bruce, Adrian and the return of Iron Maiden. The music buisness had basically forgotten Maiden existed during the Virtual XI tour....so advertising it as a comeback/reunion made a lot of headlines and sold a lot of tickets. After the initial hype things settled down a bit again after that.
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Wouldn't that be the Ed Hunter tour though?
 
Collin said:
Wouldn't that be the Ed Hunter tour though?
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Naw, the hype was higher and garnered more attention from more media outlets when it came to the first Iron Maiden album being released with Bruce and Adrian back in the band. A comeback/reunion album. It was a scoop for promoters, festivals etc to book Iron Maiden at the time. The Ed Hunter tour was more like a small warm-up compared. Most of the mass media didn't really react until the new album news dropped.
 
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After the BNW tour they won back a lot of fans and have been building on that ever since really. But it's natural that in some markets they had to downsize a bit because the media attention naturally wasn't the same for the Dance of Death tour as it had been for BNW.
 
If you get a chance to read the No More Lies EP booklet, they state something about consolidating their touring by performing larger shows after the DOD tour. Maybe they were prepping their audience for this with a shorter DOD tour. They followed through on the ‘big shows’ tour the Early Days tour but abandoned the idea from AMOLAD onwards.
 
They toured North America extensively in 2003; the demand was probably not there for another extensive tour so shortly after that.
 
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Mosh said:
I definitely get that too. Maybe they didn’t think it had legs beyond the initial album and tour. Somewhere Back In Time and AMOLAD each proved that there was a lot of commercial and creative potential and 2000 wasn’t just lighting in a bottle.
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Exactly.

Black Bart said:
Between November 2002 and February 2004, they hardly stopped working: work on DoD, GMETID tour then DoD Tour. Though they were "only" in their mid-forties, they may have thought it was enough, and they wouldn't risk touring the US, which is in general commercially ungrateful to the band when they play anything that is not a 1982-1988 greatest hits set.
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There's a problem with that line of thought and that's the AMOLAD tour. Where American arena audience got the least classics per concert compared to every "classic rock" band ever. Then we have full classics SBiT but then again TFF tour where setlist again had little "classics" and was based on reunion albums only.

To me that doesn't sound like the band trying to get up the audience's arse for profit, it sounds like they simply had less belief in what they do. Few years on they had full belief in doing full new album in front of the demanding arena audience.
 
If profit was the issue I think they’d simply just alter their set list for America (which they had done before). It seems weird that they would choose to ignore a huge market just because they’d rather play new songs.
 
When did that happen, apart from Ozzfest where they didn't headline and had to adapt?

And I strayed a bit off point there - they just didn't fancy playing DoD live as much as AMOLAD.
 
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