Who was auditioned to replace Blaze?

Meliegree

Evening The Odds.
Ok, yesterday I found an interesting and old article from MTV website:

http://www.mtv.com/news/1430372/iron-maiden-bruce-dickinson-meet-to-discuss-reunion/

And this part caught my attention:
Dickinson left the group after eleven years in 1993 to concentrate on his own material and was replaced by Blaze Bayley, formerly the singer for Wolfsbane. Sources close to the band say that Bayley is now out of the group regardless of Dickinson's status. Hard Radio reports that Iron Maiden has invited vocalists to audition.

Do we know anything about that? Who was on Steve's list to replace Blaze, beside Dickinson? This part of Maiden history is a mystery for me to be honest.
 
Do not forget: people were (also) invited to audition, after they sent their tape in. E.g. Doogie White:

6:10:
 
@Meliegree this has already been discussed at length in another thread quite recently. :)

https://forum.maidenfans.com/thread...r-bruce-dickinsons-replacement-in-1993.70819/
But this thread is about replacing Bruce, right? It's 11 pages so I don't want to read all of it - this part of history I know. I'm curious about the end of Blaze-era - he was thrown out of the band, Bruce was not (yet) there but Steve and Rod had probably some kind of plan B and prepared auditions for other guys. So the question is - Who was being auditioned for Blaze replacement if Dickinson would not come back?

If answer is in thread that you posted - I will read all of it :D
 
Do not forget: people were (also) invited to audition, after they sent their tape in. E.g. Doogie White:

6:10:

You missed the point f Meliegree's question: it is about vocalists invited to audition after Blaze was ousted from the band.
 
Ok, yesterday I found an interesting and old article from MTV website:

http://www.mtv.com/news/1430372/iron-maiden-bruce-dickinson-meet-to-discuss-reunion/

And this part caught my attention:

"Dickinson left the group after eleven years in 1993 to concentrate on his own material and was replaced by Blaze Bayley, formerly the singer for Wolfsbane. Sources close to the band say that Bayley is now out of the group regardless of Dickinson's status. Hard Radio reports that Iron Maiden has invited vocalists to audition."

Do we know anything about that? Who was on Steve's list to replace Blaze, beside Dickinson? This part of Maiden history is a mystery for me to be honest.

Thanks for posting that link. Interesting read.

As far as I remember, Blaze being out of the band was only officially mentioned at the same time that Bruce and Adrian's return was announced. Therefore, I would take MTV reporting those comments from Hard Radio about Maiden having invited vocalists to audition with a pinch of salt. However, I guess we would never know if some feelers were put out to other vocalists in case Bruce's return did not materialise.
 
However, I heard from several sources that Blaze known that his time with the band is coming to an end before the end of the tour — things like no encores can support that idea. So I'm 90% sure that he was fired before last show. Now it's not entirely confirmed at this point if Bruce was going back to the band, from what I know there was meeting with Rod, Steve, and Bruce but Steve was not completely ok with that idea, so I think that there is a slim chance that there were some other vocalists that they wanted to check.

But this was 20 years ago, and we still don't hear from this guys so either it didn't happen, they signed some NDA or Bruce and Steve high-fived reunion before any serious auditions.
 
Thanks for posting that link. Interesting read.

As far as I remember, Blaze being out of the band was only officially mentioned at the same time that Bruce and Adrian's return was announced. Therefore, I would take MTV reporting those comments from Hard Radio about Maiden having invited vocalists to audition with a pinch of salt. However, I guess we would never know if some feelers were put out to other vocalists in case Bruce's return did not materialise.

Yes, I'm pretty sure the first anyone heard about Blaze being out of the band was when Bruce and Maiden were on the front cover of Kerrang.
 
Yes, I remember that also. But I know how optimistic and everything-is-fine-as-it-meant-to-be is the Maiden PR machine in situations like this, so it's evident that there are some things behind the scenes that we don't know. Sadly- maybe we will never know.
 
Pinch of salt I'd say as well. It was probably all very well organized.

The Ed Hunter thing was already in the mold. Harris needs a singer relatively quickly, that means if Dickinson deal goes through the window, he has a shortlist of demos and vocalists to invite to audition.

A possibility.
 
And I can repeat again that I believe that "reunion" happened in very late 1998. And there was no downtime between Blaze/Bruce at all.
 
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Regardless of that, using the timeline of events inside Bruce's own band. They supported his decision and him getting back was decided when they were on tour. They were on tour until Dec 8th 1998, as the last leg was in April 1999. Therefore, by my belief, the decision was made in early December 1998.
 
Nicko said the band knew Bruce was coming back in November of 1998. They also knew Adrian was rejoining. To me that suggests that it's unlikely any auditions were held or even considered since it appears they went straight to Bruce after Steve had been convinced Blaze had to go. A backup plan might've been considered, but even then there very likely weren't any auditions and MTV's source was straight up wrong.

I mean, they cite sources that speculate Bruce might have no desire to return full-time when the decision was already made months back and no other options were even in consideration by that point. I wouldn't put too much faith in the whole article as a result.
 
The only question then is this:
When did Band members say that they known about Bruce return? Because if MTV source is from 1999 and band members talked about Bruce smooth return in, let say, 2001 - 2002 it may be just PR thing to make things look better. But that's my tinfoil hat speaking ;)

Either way that's interesting for me :)
 
Too bad archive.org didn't archive this site, but this is off VXI tour wiki -

"Singer Rejoins Iron Maiden". VH1. 1998-02-10. Retrieved 2012-02-16.

Therefore a 1999 reunion is out of the question.

I think Bruce was immediately dissatisfied about sales and crowd sizes for a hugely successful The Chemical Wedding. Maiden wasn't satisfied with Blaze. The reunion deal happened in the middle of both VXI and TCW tour.
 
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