The above is Angel and the Gambler live 98. Steve plays basically the whole thing, strumming chords with his nails.
When did Steve start playing so many power chords on his bass? His early bass work was always very busy, fast finger work and fills. There may have been the occasional chord like he may play them in the big stops in Hallowed but mainly no chords.
Then on Seveth Son, especially the title track I would notice how he would play the first best of a bar by letting a chord ring out and then play the rest with fingers.
This would become his style in the 90s with simplier less and less busy basslines with nearly all root note lines, often punctuated with a power chord at the start of the bar.
This isn't a criticism, I just found it interesting, and noone ever talks about it much. I'll read magazine articles about maiden and they'll talk about his two fingers clacking away but no one ever mentions that he's been strumming his bass (almost like lemmy) nearly as much as he's been clacking away at it for the past few decades.
Which brings me onto the Blaze era where Steve began to actually play almost entire songs in power chords. He would play certain parts like this for heaviness and thickness in the sound but then finger for the faster parts. Songs like Angel and Lightning are played nearly the entire thing strummed. This carries on Into the reunion, Blood Brothers at Rock in Rio for example.
I just found it interesting how he almost totally changed his style of playing.
When do you remember him playing bass chords in the eighties?