The Future Past Tour 2024

Speaking of Bruce and his mouthings and public image overall, I'd say he has kind of softened up a bit over time; the cancer & autobiography and The Book of Souls cycle saw him doing a lot more press and interviews than he used to before that, even with relatively small medias e.g some not-that-huge YouTube channels and such. And for most of the time, it's been surprisingly warm and good-spirited, albeit carefully crafted chatting and storytelling, although it also comes with his (sometimes) annoying trait of just winging when it comes to few details... So be it for better or worse, he's a... storyteller indeed. :D

Anyway, he has become a lot more prominent and even seemingly approachable character in Maiden media space after The Trooper beer emerged and the previously mentioned things happened, where as between DOD & Maiden England period he wasn't out there that often and whenever he was, it was mostly some cool stuff like Ed-Force 1 and such. Of course the world of media has also changed a lot over this time, but anyway.

With all that, his Bruxit (thanks @GhostofCain!) self has become very notable, contradicting with a lot of things and principles he has stated earlier and while some of that kind of goes with the"businessman" thing, some of his early 2000s brag seems to be back as well and he's just coming up with some very daft stuff often enough... e.g those quite insensitive remarks on his "Evening wit/Spoken word" shows and whatever.

This is how I see it, anyway. In a nutshell, he's become a lot more approachable (from a media perspective) over the past ten years or so, but that has also made some of his more... musty views painfully public. Uhhh.
 
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Yes, let's go back to "I think there is going to be setlist changes" vs "NO! Maiden will not change the set" and then we complete the lap with "X song will replace song Y, but song Z is out of the question because a) it gives Bruce's voice a rest, B ) Steve will never drop "Iron Maiden", but might want The Parchment instead of Celts and C) weren't you listening, no song will be replaced so the whole discussion is moot!".

After that we start worrying about crowd attendance, number of shows (and how fast Bruce's voice will start to get a bit worn) and when, oh when, will they enter the studio and launch the next tour.

:D

Oh, I forgot; will they cheapen out and have Newton obliterate, sorry, mix the live album or will he be busy with KK and go with Shirley?

Have I covered all major topics yet, aside from commenting on tour vids?
 
Unless they announce dates earlier than September we have almost a whole year of making stuff up to get to, so go ahead, write your fanfiction.
 
matic22 said:
- Openly mocking Metallica because of the Napster lawsuit in 2003 and praising file sharing

-Bruxit itself

Both of those things aged like milk.
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Has it? Encouraging people to download Wildest Dreams was the right move back then and still is today. Maiden were acknowledging the reality of the new technological revolution while Metallica was trying to stand in the way of a tidal wave. There is a problem with artists being properly compensated for their music but that is on the greedy record companies and streaming services that don't play fair. Piracy never was the problem.
 
Mosh said:
Has it? Encouraging people to download Wildest Dreams was the right move back then and still is today. Maiden were acknowledging the reality of the new technological revolution while Metallica was trying to stand in the way of a tidal wave. There is a problem with artists being properly compensated for their music but that is on the greedy record companies and streaming services that don't play fair. Piracy never was the problem.
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That's true. However, I think that if more artists warned about the potential impacts of piracy, we would have a different kind of recording industry. As the artists were all for downloads on one side and suing the piracy services on the other, there was no in between. Long before the streaming services (circa 2008-2014) there was a big gap. Piracy was still there and the streaming services were being born. IMO that was the time when it was decided what will be the future path of record industry. And the divide between major groups/artists made it impossible to have the cohesion needed to sway the recording industry into the way that would rightfully benefit the artist using new platforms. Instead, piracy market grew and grew and out of it were born the streaming services that take original music for granted and were adopted by a new generation of people.

So, it's not black and white. Lars and his toothpick's stances were also too extreme at that time. But, let's face it, he was kinda right. And if we look the whole picture, most of artists took one ore the other side, while record labels sat on their pile of money. And all of the hard-pro or hard-against Napster artists are guilty for the situation the recording industry is in today. It just amuses me, when you look at Senjutsu sales nowadays and remember the rants Bruce went on in 2003. And he would never confess that he might have been wrong at that time. No matter what he says about beers and shirts and so on. That's damage limitation. The fact is that the record industry collapse has hurt IM LTD.

But back to speaking about Bruce... What I don't like about him is that in recent years, he still holds onto some of those pretty extreme views on things, despite them having been proven to be wrong. And simply can't say "I was wrong". Because we all are sometimes. And more... He has a spoken word tour where he speaks about those. Hopefully, solo tours will be in their place in the future.
 
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Mosh said:
the greedy record companies and streaming services that don't play fair.
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I don't understand why the record companies don't take all their content off the streaming sites and make their own streaming service. Spotify and the likes don't do anything other than provide a platform. If it has no content the punters would leave it and go to wherever the content was.
 
srfc said:
I don't understand why the record companies don't take all their content off the streaming sites and make their own streaming service. Spotify and the likes don't do anything other than provide a platform. If it has no content the punters would leave it and go to wherever the content was.
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It has been tried - that is essentially what Tidal attempted to be. It seems to me like it is just too expensive and the pricing models (very low subscription costs for unlimited access) don't allow for much of a profit. Almost every major artist who was a streaming holdout (Taylor Swift, Metallica, Tool, list goes on) has eventually gotten on the streaming bandwagon, which tells me that this is the best way for now.

matic22 said:
That's true. However, I think that if more artists warned about the potential impacts of piracy, we would have a different kind of recording industry. As the artists were all for downloads on one side and suing the piracy services on the other, there was no in between. Long before the streaming services (circa 2008-2014) there was a big gap. Piracy was still there and the streaming services were being born. IMO that was the time when it was decided what will be the future path of record industry. And the divide between major groups/artists made it impossible to have the cohesion needed to sway the recording industry into the way that would rightfully benefit the artist using new platforms. Instead, piracy market grew and grew and out of it were born the streaming services that take original music for granted and were adopted by a new generation of people.

So, it's not black and white. Lars and his toothpick's stances were also too extreme at that time. But, let's face it, he was kinda right. And if we look the whole picture, most of artists took one ore the other side, while record labels sat on their pile of money. And all of the hard-pro or hard-against Napster artists are guilty for the situation the recording industry is in today. It just amuses me, when you look at Senjutsu sales nowadays and remember the rants Bruce went on in 2003. And he would never confess that he might have been wrong at that time. No matter what he says about beers and shirts and so on. That's damage limitation. The fact is that the record industry collapse has hurt IM LTD.

But back to speaking about Bruce... What I don't like about him is that in recent years, he still holds onto some of those pretty extreme views on things, despite them having been proven to be wrong. And simply can't say "I was wrong". Because we all are sometimes. And more... He has a spoken word tour where he speaks about those. Hopefully, solo tours will be in their place in the future.
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I agree that ethically, Lars was in the right to want protection of his intellectual property. The problem is that it ends up hurting the fans more than anyone else, and ultimately those are the people who are going to buy concert tickets, merch and other avenues to financially support the band. I think Bruce was correctly seeing the writing on the wall (no pun intended) by acknowledging that the future of turning profits in the music industry is not with album sales. When the world changes you have to adapt.

I do think that you're right that there was no cohesion among the artists at a critical time when a path forward could have been found. A lot of people didn't have the ingenuity, but also were too caught up in legal battles and fixing things in the immediate to think about the future of music. Streaming really should have been a no brainer and by the time artists starting getting actively involved in the streaming industry it was way too late.
 
Iron Lurker said:
Beast on the Road tour in the USA Maiden were in my town to do a headline show and they did an in-store appearance at my local record store for autographs. I previously had a copy of NME I bought just because it had a big pic of the Eddie mask on the cover. It was the one with the interview with Steve and Bruce. I brought that for them to sign. Everyone else just signed it but when it got to Bruce he looked at it and sneered and made a comment of something like "why do you have this rubbish?" But he signed it. I was 15 and clueless but later saw where they were really unhappy with that interview and what NME said about them. Unfortunately have moved a few times since then and it has been lost.
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Oh, the infamous NME interview from 1982. That’s one Rod Smallwood would have loved to censor!

I have met Bruxit several times and I have been relatively lucky as he has never been openly unpleasant to me (@Poto has a friend who was not that lucky!), although his disinterest was obvious at times.

The first one was the best. It was on 22nd December 2006, the day of the first AMOLAD tour gig in London, when I bumped into him near Harrods while I was sightseeing with my better half and Bruce was picking up his late wife with his convertible Jag with the roof down (that was striking as the temperature was barely above freezing! Bruce was wearing a coat and a wooly hat though). I asked him very politely for a picture and he happily obliged. I thanked him, he thanked me, and hours later I saw him on stage at one of the best Maiden gigs I have ever seen.

The second one was at the Canterbury Cathedral gig in December 2011 with Ian Anderson (also one of the finest things I have witnessed live). Bruce walked past where we were sitting to have a chat with his late wife before the start of the gig. On the way back, a couple of fans noticed him and asked him for autographs. He signed my ticket and I wished him luck with his new aviation company, but he was much more interested in having a chat with a young girl who was at Uni in Canterbury.

The third time was at a one-off talk about his career in aviation he gave at Heathrow Airport back in March 2013. Bruce was having a chat with a friend about airplanes and I waited patiently with my copy of Skunkworks to see if I could get it signed and have a quick chat with him once he had finished talking. After some time, he noticed I was there, signed the album, and then decided that a buxom fan who proceeded to tell him some story with some vague archeological links was much more interesting (funnily enough, said fan did not have a clue who had recorded the Skunkworks album I had with me :lol: ).

The last one so far, was at the official premiere of the Scream for me Sarajevo film in London in 2018, although it was not really the premiere, because the film had already been screened at a film festival for the War Child charity in 2017, but Bruce was not there (I was though, and managed to have a nice chat with Chris Dale). Bruce did a Q&A with journalist/official sycophant (take your pic) Dom Lawson and then they screened the film. After that, as I was heading out of the cinema so I could catch a train back home, I bumped into Bruce. I thanked him for the music and taking part in the documentary, he thanked me for my kind words, and that was it. A nice memory of that night was ordering a beer next to Rod Smallwood (I did not let him jump the queue) and seeing a good number of people from Phantom Management there.
 
GhostofCain said:
...he was much more interested in having a chat with a young girl who was at Uni in Canterbury.

The third time was at a one-off talk about his career in aviation he gave at Heathrow Airport back in March 2013. Bruce was having a chat with a friend about airplanes and I waited patiently with my copy of Skunkworks to see if I could get it signed and have a quick chat with him once he had finished talking. After some time, he noticed I was there, signed the album, and then decided that a buxom fan who proceeded to tell him some story with some vague archeological links was much more interesting (funnily enough, said fan did not have a clue who had recorded the Skunkworks album I had with me :lol: ).
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I met him once backstage during the Brave New World tour, and my experience was similar. I took my then-girlfriend, and we both had our backstage pass/stickers stuck to our shirts like everyone else at the meet and greet. Went up to talk to Bruce, gave him a brief greeting, and he said hello. He then turned to my then-girlfriend, said hello to her, and proceeded to take his Sharpie directly to her backstage sticker (which was over her boob) to sign it. She laughed and waved him off, he put on a mock-pouty face and laughed too, exchanged a few parting words, and moved on. Oh, Bruce...whatta horndog. :yes:
 
Amazing stories, @GhostofCain and @CA Bryers.

Poto said:
He was a massive fan, but has not seen the band since 2010. He took it quite hard.
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Wow, what happened?

Personally, I think I would never try to have any interaction with Bruce and Adrian just because I fear the 'magic' could end right there. I'd rather admire them - as artists - from a distance.

The others members of the band seem very receptive, though. Harris seems very shy, but if I had to pick one to have a chat, it'd be him. Pretty sure he would be the most "honest" from the band to answer many of my questions.

Do you people have more stories like this? Keep them coming!
 
Shavasku said:
Amazing stories, @GhostofCain and @CA Bryers.



Wow, what happened?

Personally, I think I would never try to have any interaction with Bruce and Adrian just because I fear the 'magic' could end right there. I'd rather admire them - as artists - from a distance.

The others members of the band seem very receptive, though. Harris seems very shy, but if I had to pick one to have a chat, it'd be him. Pretty sure he would be the most "honest" from the band to answer many of my questions.

Do you people have more stories like this? Keep them coming!
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I got the impression Adrian kept a low profile outside of actual stage and official publicity but I could imagine him being down to earth. He comes across as that in interviews.

Janick for the win if you want a chinwag, though. He's known for being an active part of pub scene locally.
 
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