Steve, however, thinks that Adrian had been unhappy for a long time: "There was always something wrong. Sometimes he'd have his head down and we'd pull faces at him - you know, trying to cheer him up - but he wasn't having none of it. Then, before going in and doing Seventh Son..., I said to him, 'Look, do you want to be on this next album?' and he was, like, 'Yeah, yeah. Course I do.' I said, I just wanted to hear you say it, that's all.' But we did the Seventh Son... album, did the tour, and he seemed a little bit more up. But towards the end of it again, and going into the next album, Adrian seemed really negative about a lot of things. He just didn't seem to have the passionany more, and so it came out again, the six-million-dollar question, 'Do you or don't you want to be in the band?' And he was, like, 'Well, I don't know. I haven't had time to think about it.' And I thought, 'Well, hold on a minute,' you know? 'All I want to hear is, "Of course I bloody do. Don't be stupid."' That's the sort of answer we wanted. I know he's quite indecisive, to say the least - his nickname on the tour was Willy Orwonthe - but this was serious."
"It was decided to have a band meeting," says Adrian. "It was mainly Steve that did the talking. He said, 'You don't seem happy or into it any more,' and I said, 'Well...' and took a deep breath and went on for about an hour, talking about how I felt. I'd just done an album really expressing myself, really happy singing and playing. I knew Maiden was its own thing, and I was still happy to contribute to that, but it didn't look like I was going to get much of a chance to do that on the next album. I felt we needed more time to work on new songs, but the mobile had arrived and I hadn't written any songs and I was just very unhappy."
"So we sort of said, 'OK, you know, perhaps we'd better make the decision for you, then,'" says Steve, "and we said, 'If you're not 100 per cent, then you can't do it.' And he sort of shrugged his shoulders and said, 'I was hoping it was going to go the other way.' He was hoping that we still wanted him. But he had to want to be there first. It was awful for me, 'cause I really like Adrian. Personally, I was probably closer to him than anyone, and it gutted me. It gutted me that he didn't want to be there any more, but I thought, 'We've got to be strong about this. We can't keep someone there just hanging,' you know?"
"I wish I could have just gone in and said, 'Yeah, great, whatever,' you know?" says Adrian. "But life is not black and white. There's always doubts, especially as you get older, and it all happened over a couple of agonising days. There were lots of long phone calls. It was all very emotional. Maiden had been my life for ten years. It had become like a family to me