Weekend Warrior

How good is Weekend Warrior on a scale of 1-10?


  • Total voters
    9
A pleasant clean intro leads into a forgettable verse with laughably growly vocals, and a flaccid, repetitive pre-chorus. More shitty verse and weak pre-chorus, and then we break into a truly bizarre chorus that's musically catchy but vocally atrocious. A chorus of comically growly Bruces compete for all the oxygen in the room at different notes but the same volume. WTF.

Another round of verse to chorus dreck leads into an OK solo, a surprisingly nice harmonized interlude and some more decent solos before plunging back into the sewage. A little more ear bleeding and the song finally ends with some nice clean notes.

Strangely, I think this could be a pretty good song if it weren't for Bruce's abortion of a vocal performance and some questionable decisions on the vocal harmonies. But as it stands it's pretty terrible overall. 3/10.
 
It's funny, I forgot to re-vote and give it a 10, but your posting in this thread got me to correct that error. Nice one, Jer. :ok:
 
Nice use of the acoustic guitars on this song... for once one could say. It has the rocky feel of Tattooed Millionaire (same writer) but the result is slightly more generous on time changes and varied sections. Great solos and good harmony in between. I love the "what you're gonna do on Monday" part.
What I don't like much is Bruce's interpretation (not as much the raspy voice as the lack of variation in the verses... but one does his best with somebody's else's lyrics on a subject you don't really care about) and the somewhat plodding rhythm: hearing it live would certainly do the song more justice.

7/10
 
I love this song a lot, I give it 9 though it's not quite the same 9 as SSoaSS
I’ve been reading through your comments. A lot of them I disagree with. And while I prefer The Apparition over Weekend Warrior, thanks for supporting Maiden’s football hooligan jam with me. :D
 
Okay, you all can start to rest easy now. Despite its bit of an influx a while ago, "Weekend Warrior" has fallen a bit for me. I still like it, but not so much. Chorus and solos are awesome, verses not so much. I do love the rasp on here though. Overall, it's good but not great. 7
 
I think people here dislike the song because they make a strange paralel between the song and football. But this song uses hooliganism as key approach to a bigger subject: identity. Or if you prefer: teeneagers identity.

The guy described in this song is a teenager who has a desperate need for an identity. In my country, kids who belogs to "barras bravas" are seeing with certain amount of respect and fear by their peers (except to those who belong to a different "barra"... because the former "is the enemy"). Anyway, the person who looks at this "hooligan kid" is an adult. For me is one of his teachers at school. I'm a teacher too, and everytime some of my students started to tell the story of last weekend game, it always remembered me this song.

It seems that this teachers knows him since he was a boy and saw this "evolution". Anyway, he realizes that he's in a group he doesn't want to be and cannot go away (You've gotta get out gotta get away//But you're in with a clique it's not easy to stray//You've gotta admit you're just living a lie//It didn't take long to work out why) ... but they are pretty cool, and being associted to them makes you cool to (It's hard to say why you got involved//Just wanting to be part//just wanting to belong...). He's concious of what he has done, and he knows those have been bad things, but ath the end, isn't it a childs game? (Some of the things that you've done//you feel so ashamed//After all it's only a game... isn't it?) It is interesting because kids, especially those with familiar and or social problems, consider those actions as "kid's games". Anyway, this guy knows that he cannot "keep his lie" too long, since on Monday he needs to behave differently (
You're a weekend warrior when//you're one of the crowd//But it's over, just look at you now...).

What is even more interesting is the fact that these people doesn't like football at all. During all the match they are more concerned of what they will do with th fans from the other team, or how they are going to challenge the police officers or guards in charge of the security. You can ask them about the players that were playing in that match and they rarely name 3 or 4 of them. As we say in my country they are "Hinchas de la barra y no del equipo" (fans of the fan's club and not the team itself). I'v tried it a lot of times with mys students and the one that named more players couldn't raise its number over 7.

Good analysis.

A lot of fans seem to be "embaressed" that the lyrics are about football hooligans, but the lyrics could just as easily apply to metal/music fans in boring 9 to 5 jobs going out and running amok on cocaine every weekend. I don't think there's even a single line of lyrics that suggest the song is only about football hooligans.
 
I always thought about it more as ageing beery bovver boys getting pissed and getting into fights, rather than specifically football.
 
I always thought about it more as ageing beery bovver boys getting pissed and getting into fights, rather than specifically football.
I could never find time to think about the lyrics because I was too busy envisioning Bruce chugging a gallon of bleach right before he went to the studio to record the vocals.
 
This is not so bad song that most people thinks. Yeah, easily it could have been a B-side (along with The Apparition). It's a rocker. Starts with a acoustic intro, the verses are not bad, the pre-chorus could have been better, but the actual chorus is very good. Bruce's raspy vocals suits the song IMHO. But the real highlight are the brutal solos - they are really amazing, actually the whole instrumental section is perfect. Great twin-lead guitar harmonies (FOTD album is full of them). Imagine if the song ends with solos only (one after one) - maybe that would have convinced people to like it. (At the moment I do not remember a Maiden song to end only with solos or one long solo...). After the solos the song repeats the beginning of it. It's a better song than The Apparition. 7/10.
 
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