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Zare said:
Am I stupid or we've never discussed the plumbing theme of the World Piece Tour stage?
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Finally! World Piece Tour stage show has always been bit of an odditidy out there and discussred surprisingly little indeed.

That stage setup is so confusing. I get that they probably weren't quite ready yet to execute a show in the scale of what World Slavery/Somewhere on Tour/Seventh Tour would eventually reach, but given that there clearly is effort to go out with slightly more elaborate and extensive stage props, it's just a bit weird that they really chose to... go with plumbing, given the already rather impressive and striking visual offerings of their records.

I think MaidenRevelations covered it quite well.
 
Zare said:
Am I stupid or we've never discussed the plumbing theme of the World Piece Tour stage?
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It's a strange choice for a stage design, but the album cover isn't so ''rich'' and is not appropriate for stage, I think. This stage is 50/50 for me. Not every cover can make a good stage (like NPFTD, for example... btw, the one for FOTD would have been great if it was made of wood). The chess floor for World Piece Tour was great though.
 
Is plumbing, chess floor and white boxes trying to simulate a sanatorium? I never looked it that way. Chess floor, huge rooms and ceilings, white walls with exposed plumbing, it's like an early 20th century medical institution.
 
Zare said:
Is plumbing, chess floor and white boxes trying to simulate a sanatorium? I never looked it that way. Chess floor, huge rooms and ceilings, white walls with exposed plumbing, it's like an early 20th century medical institution.
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That might very well be the case... The possibly attempted visual landscape doesn't quite pull it off as intended, though. But that seems logical indeed.
 
Yeah and if you have the World Piece Tour program. You can notice that some members of the killer crew wears doctors uniforms and I think they go into the stage at the end of Iron Maiden song to catch Eddie that is trying to escape. :nuts2:
 
Yeah I'll be honest, that was a bit of a revelation for me as well. I think the theme would've honestly worked better with something like generic white tiles on the "walls" of the stage. Maybe have padded walls near the drum riser, for obvious reasons.
 
Check out Poland 1984. Then see Monteral 1983 and Philadelphia 1986.

Notice the stage lighting in 1984 gig. It's OK, the stage details are visible. Now check POM/SiT show. The stage is dark. The details are not visible. I intentionally did not put Dortmund because it was a double-stage top tier festival so the lighting was superb (and recording gear too, those "Bofors" cameras!)

Seems to me like 1983/1986, as opposed to 1984, weren't budgeted for live shots.

Which is cool, I won't say we knew that but comes out logical. What I did not know is there was a stage. I thought the first "full" stage was Powerslave.

Then again if you think about evolution of the stage set in the 80s, it is quite iterative. They had props and effects and Eddies in Dianno days. They added stage risers for TNOTB. They defined the boxed riser shapes on POM, added a floor and thematic props and details over those risers. For 1984, they made enormous effort on the riser's livery, props and added a backdrop. In 1986 they made riser shapes more complex and then made an enormous effort on the props.

So technically you could say that plumbing was the prototype for Egyptian theme, how the stage is shaped, laid out, etc. The top margin of those riser boxes include a window and that window includes this "plumbing", or the stage theme. If you check out stages throughout their history, even stuff like En Vivo, you'll recognize this design pattern. The leap was big but I still think this bunch of pipes has some historical significance.
 
Zare said:
Check out Poland 1984. Then see Monteral 1983 and Philadelphia 1986.

Notice the stage lighting in 1984 gig. It's OK, the stage details are visible. Now check POM/SiT show. The stage is dark. The details are not visible. I intentionally did not put Dortmund because it was a double-stage top tier festival so the lighting was superb (and recording gear too, those "Bofors" cameras!)
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Robert Ellis, who did shoot quite a number of shows in 1983, explicitly says on his fantastic book “The First Five Years” that the Dortmund shows were, by far, the best lit of the whole tour.
 
GhostofCain said:

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www.therocklibrary.com
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Thanks for the link, I haven't seen this one before. With shipping its $130 to the states. I do want that as i tend to collect those sorts of things but I just preordered that Neal Kay book from Maiden Croatia and am not looking to spend $200 in a month on books. Maybe in a couple months after I get all my holiday spending paid off on the credit card.
 
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