Lately I found on youtube ‘Iron Maiden - Children of the Damned - Hammersmith 10/10/1984’. I am not sure if I am allowed to put a link here but you’ll easily find it yourselves.
I did a comparison to the official release using Audacity. It is in fact the very same performance and you can clearly hear the bits and pieces they doctored on. I always wondered what those overdubs might be like since I could never tell for sure from just listening to the record. I did not know they did that to COTD at all.
Now what they did here is basically just three times replacing the vocals of the long lasting line ‘damned’, two times in the first chorus and 3rd time at the very end of the song, the very memorable long vocal phrasing over the fading last chord. Of course I have no idea whether these overdubs are studio or live recordings from other nights, but they are very well done and do not change the overall listening experience. However there is a little more pitch stamina (is that a word?) on those long notes, where Bruce tends to do some bluesy type phrasing during the performance and thus the chorus is a little closer to the studio version.
In the last chorus for me it is now very obvious where the actual cut is made because right before it Bruce is a little flat out of key and all of a sudden the next note starts clearly higher.
One more thing I noticed is that the twin guitar lead that goes into H’s solo sounds somewhat not in tune on the bootleg. This may well be because of the quality of the source but if I was to guess where the reported overdubs of ‘out of tune guitar’ (more or less their own words) happened, then for me it has to be that bit.
Please be kind: I did this just for fun and for the sake of nerdiness and for sure finding this out does not take anything away from the great Live After Death for me!