There are 6 songs that were left over from the AOB sessions! We only know 4 - Ghost Of Cain, Wicker Man, Nightmares and the 9-minutes long song that should be on the new album. I hope we get to hear the other 2 someday.
Wicker Man: One of six tracks from the sessions for Accident Of Birth, a fantastic track which just never got finished up and is now done.
About TCW: You can hear the development in the sound, just the physical sound of the way the guitars have been handled. And that's very much Roy growing as a producer and having the confidence to make decisions. We discussed a sonic concept for the album, just the idea that this album should be really heavy, just in terms of the tone of it.
80 percent of the record was written by Roy and myself, and actually 80 percent of the last record was done that way as well. I think having Adrian join was such a big deal for other people, that it sort of overshadowed things. And it's wonderful that Adrian is there, I'm not wishing to decry Adrian's contribution. But the contribution of Roy is absolutely huge.
The lyrics are kind of trippy, but it's basically a concept album about alchemy. But alchemy, as I was researching it, rapidly started to feel a bit flat. So one day I just decided to make this album three-dimensional. I didn't have a whole load of time. We had two months to write the album, and then two weeks to rehearse it, six weeks to record it, and then two weeks to mix it. I started trying to write stories and things like that, but as soon as I started to do that, the thing became wooden. I said to myself, I have to just let go and let this thing develop, which again was kind of nerve-wracking, because Roy would be there coming up with great backing tracks, and I felt like I was lagging behind. I had 80 percent of the pieces of at my feet and then there was the last 20 percent. But I thought if necessary, I'm going to have to wait until Hell freezes over to get this right. Because that 20 percent is going to make it or break it.
About a Reunion with Maiden: I really think the whole deal with all of this boils down to me and Steve. That's it. There's no friction anywhere else I don't think (laughs). We share the same manager. We're both with Rod Smallwood. I mean, we sit and talk about this in the pub and things like that. And people say, 'are you getting back together with the band?' And I say, 'look, you want me to get up there tomorrow and sing a Maiden set? Hang on, let me go find my boots.' Not a problem. And it would be great. I could walk on stage with them and we could do a concert tomorrow night, and it would be absolutely fucking mega! But, I don't think that's quite the point. For some of the people involved, there's more to it than that. There's two things here, a live situation and a record. One question is, will anything ever happen again ever under any circumstance? The other one is could something happen live? And that would be great, it would just be like a really cool laugh. As for records, I'm not really sure how that would happen. Because let's just say this. The way I make records now is very, very, very different from the way I made them in the past. I'm not sure how we would close the gap between the way I work and the way Steve works now.
But having said that, there's no reason at all if he wanted to go have some fun, you know, in addition to the fun he's having now, and do some shows, sure, fuck it, yes. And you don't have to fire anybody or anything else like that. I'll go on stage, we'll do a half dozen songs, and we'll go have a drink. But it's not as simple as all that. There's all kinds of complexities and things which I'm not going to go into. And I'm perfectly happy with what I'm doing at the moment musically. Because, I made a great record, and I'm going out promoting it. And really that's where my life is at right now, and that's my future. This record is my future.
Chemical Extras!
Return Of The King: An extra track for Japan, which is a pretty cool track.
Real World: From the sessions for this album. It's actually a big, anthemic, kind of rock radio power rock thing. It just doesn't fit on the album, it's altogether too cheerful (laughs).
The Midnight Jam: A midnight jam, from the last album's sessions. What we did is we got lots of candles out and sat around and had a jam for about five minutes on this theme. The lyrical idea was after the end of 'Taking The Queen', if we'd carried on with the same story of the destruction of the city, the burning, the desolation, the lost love and the devastation, what it would have sounded like. So it's a real trippy, late night, chill out track.
^From TCW sessions? I thought it was from the AOB.
Acoustic Song: This is a little acoustic thing between me and Roy. It's just a pretty little song. I remember everybody freaking out, I remember calling Roy up and asking him how the mixes went on the b-sides, and he went, 'you never told me about the acoustic track! Everybody's going nuts about this stuff, that you sang on it!' And I was like 'Oh, it was just ten minutes on the back of an envelope.' And that's always the way, you know, the quick little stuff you do, people love it.
About some Maiden albums:
Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son: Seventh Son really revitalized my enthusiasm. I loved the idea of doing a concept album. It was a great idea. I was probably responsible in a large part for the cover, with Derek. The idea was to do something surreal, a surrealist Eddie. And Derek came up with that, which I was really pleased with. I guess what I found strange is that we took the album to a certain point, and then it never got developed any further. And in the same year, while we were in the midst of mixing or something, I heard some advance tracks from Queensryche's Operation: Mindcrime, and was blown away. And I remember thinking, I was driving down a street through a park in Germany and heard these four tracks from Mindcrime, and stopped the car, and sat there with my head in my hands, and thought that they had made the album that we should have made. Seventh Son should be this. And could be this. If we'd only forced it, if we'd only thought it through and sat down and planned it and discussed it. You just don't make a concept album like that in five minutes. You don't just loosely glue a few things together and say okay, that's a concept album. So that was my feeling. I was proud of it, but there was always this thought, God damn it, artistically we were in second place. Review-wise we were as well. In terms of the way the world perceives everything, Mindcrime was a ground-breaking album. And Seventh Son was not quite. For Maiden fans it was, but there was this feeling I had then, that there was this world of Maiden and there was the rest of the world.
No Prayer For The Dying: No Prayer For The Dying was an album that I have to share collective responsibility and also blame for possibly being the worst sounding Maiden album ever, with the exception of the first Maiden album. We all went into a sort of collective madness and recorded in this antiquated Rolling Stone mobile, in a barn in the middle of winter. In a fit of the enthusiasm, we thought 'gosh, we'll be terribly hip because we'll be agricultural' and we were running around with straw in our hair doing guitar solos and things.' And it just sounds like a dreadful album. Just the sonic quality of it. It's awful.
Fear Of The Dark: As a result of the bad experience recording No Prayer, Fear Of The Dark sounds considerably better, much more like a Maiden album. But at that point, I guess I was starting to get a little disenchanted with the complacency. I suppose complacency would be the right word, at least that's the way I saw it. We weren't doing anything on Fear Of The Dark that we didn't do on every other damn Maiden album. And I was like, 'ah, shouldn't we be trying a bit harder? Like, shouldn't we be worried?