No, the reason that I haven’t been to any gigs is simply, THERE AREN’T ANY GIGS. Or at least, there aren’t any gigs that I want to go to. I don’t even really want to go and see bands like 8 Foot Sativa, to be brutally honest. Not really really. I wouldn’t if I were somewhere where I could pick and choose. But I do go because there is precious little else in Dunedin that even vaguely fits my listening profile, current or past. It’s an opportunity for a good cheap piss up with friends as much as it is a chance to see a decent band or two…

Refuel

The last gig I went to was Sinate, an 8ft offshoot, and at least one of tonight’s support acts was going to be the same, so I could just plagiarise the review for that gig and have done with it. Who’s going to know? I don’t even really know enough about death metal to be able to write a convincing blog post about the relative merits of 8 Foot Sativa versus Sinate.

I do remember really liking Osmium, tonight’s first act, when I saw them last year. More than Sinate in fact. So, I was a leetle peessed that Mrs ByTor invited people over for dinner, meaning I would not be able to escape down the hill until the gig had already started. Bumholes, I was quite looking forward to Invercargill’s top death metal act.

I wandered into the reasonably full ReFuel bar halfway through the second band, the curiously named ‘Mirikachinist’, a Dunedin band. Firstly, WTF people? Why would you call your band something that people can neither spell nor pronounce? Curious indeed. Anyway, like most metal bands in this part of the world, they clearly grew up listening to Pantera. The rule for metal bands in this part of the world is ‘no band may take to the stage without at least one member sporting a Pantera shirt with the sleeves cut off’. The other rule is ‘no band may leave the stage without performing at least one Pantera cover’.

I don’t know Pantera’s ‘work’ but I know enough to know I don’t like it. And I’ve seen them with Dimebag Darrel and I wasn’t even paying attention because Phil Anselmo was such a cock. Anyway, Mirikathingybobs are actually pretty good when they’re not pretending to be Pantera. They alternate between the snappy crunchy riffing of early Metallica and the heaviness of Black Sabbath, with vocals so gruff that look like they would be really painful to deliver. They were joined on stage by another be-Panterashirted hooligan for the final number, a Pantera number, judging from the crowd reaction.

Tainted are from Christchurch I am led to believe. Similar sound to Mirikafucksticks, but tighter and performed by slightly more accomplished musicians. I’m not dissing Mirikabollocks, far from it, this lot just look like they’ve been doing it a bit longer. The lead guitarist was quite the flash Harry, sporting a real (or very real looking) Jackson skinny-neck-pointy-head Dave Mustaine shredding machine. He could play it fairly well too, and had extremely fast fingers. There was quite a good interplay between him and the other lead guitarist – not quite in the league of Skeletonwitch or Smith/Murray but proficient nevertheless. The Jackson player’s solos weren’t all 100 notes per second though, there was some evidence of control, and the other attribute so often missing in this genre, restraint. Nice.

8 Feet devil horns

Student gigs don’t really get going until midnight, and $5 a pint is about as cheap as you can get in this town, hence I was quite drunk by the time 8 Foot Sativa hit the stage. So, the quality and authenticity of the ramblings that follow are questionable. What I can confirm without any doubt is that 8 Foot Sativa play very fast and very loud. Like my ears are still ringing 3 days later loud. 8 Foot are a very professional bunch of musicians, really tight and well rehearsed. They are blessed with Bifur and Bofur on guitars and a cave troll on drums – the bassist I recognised from Sinate, with his poppy-outy-eyes stare and semi-permanent devil horns. The one track I actually knew (8 Foot Sativa) came and went to a good reception, this would appear to be their signature track. That’s about all I can remember folks.

I’ve decided not to put myself forward for any international journalism awards this year.

My one previous experience of Refuel was The Mint Chicks 4 or 5 years ago, played at an insanely loud volume. It was so loud in fact, my earplugs began to disintegrate. So, I was understandably cautious as I descended the stairs into the bar for the first band, Warsaw. First up of 4 would be a local band I would imagine – there were quite a few bodies in front of the stage so I guess they probably were. The 3 numbers I saw were fairly decent, if you like Pantera, that is. I don’t particularly, but Warsaw were quite tight and the mix was surprisingly good. Obligatory gruff death metal vocals, belted out by a stocky, Pantera-tattooed, Billy Milano lookalike. It must hurt to sing like that, surely? The music was a 70/30 split – Pantera vs Queens of the Stone Age, and their last one was a Pantera cover, which went down very well indeed. Pantera are really quite popular here, for some bizarre reason :-s

Twist Of Fate - blurry death metal

Twist of Fate were next. Were they local too? Nah, they were far too good… What an awesome band. Again, a heavy QOTSA influence, but damn good though – buzzsaw twin lead guitars reminiscent of early Maiden but graduating to a far more proggy, really intricate sound which was clearly influenced by everybody’s favourite Scandic melodic death metal minstrels, Opeth. They boasted twin vocalists too, one ‘melodic’ and one ‘gruff’, in true Opeth style, but with a bit more interplay, more akin to System Of A Down. Bloody brilliant, up to the point where the guitarist decided to get some crowd participation going on, and incited a game of British Bulldog (or local equivalent thereof) in the audience. I’m not being an old fart here, I am nursing a recently broken toe and can’t have some drunken hairy buffoon stamping on my foot, OK?

Then onto Osmium. A three piece consisting of Groundskeeper Willie on bass, Michael Eavis on guitar/vox and A.N. Other beardy bloke on drums. Bit more of a doomy, stoner rock feel to it than the previous two bands, with a tinge of, you’ve guessed it, Queens Of The Stone Age. Hmm, seems to be a bit of a recurring theme… The vocals were exclusively clean this time, but sounded a little too clean for this sort of music, a bit like, er, Nik Kershaw. Great riffz though - more simplistic than the last lot, but heartily groovable.

Hairy Sinate bassist with poppy-out eyes

Well, I’d never heard of any of the acts on the bill before tonight, and until this point, my entire knowledge of the NZ death metal scene was limited to 8ft Sativa. I was never much of an expert on death metal in the first place, and I’m just out of touch these days but it turns out that Sinate is mostly made up of ex-8ft dudes anyway, so I knew roughly what to expect. I wasn’t wrong. They are very, very heavy indeed. Pure death metal, but not in a particularly good way – I didn’t get into them nearly as much as the previous two acts. I like it heavy and all, but this was just a bit too heavy. I like heavy with a bit of respite, a bit of contrast. This was just heavy with outbreaks of more heavy. Too fast and outta control guitar solos, machine gun drumming, vocals like Lemmy through a distortion pedal – all fine on their own but a little too much when thrown together. I am being churlish though, it was a cracking gig, I just like to moan a lot, if everything’s not exactly how I like it.

Massive kudos to the lead guitarist, though not for his ability to cram 1000 notes from 25 different diatonic scales into each song, but for his wearing a Hawkwind  T-shirt. I wasn’t aware that anyone in NZ had even heard of Hawkwind, let alone knew where to buy a shirt. It struck me as I was wandering home, ears ringing and toe-ache beginning to resurface as the cider wore off, that the Sinate guitarist was probably not even born the first time I saw Hawkwind, and that was in the latter half of their career…

Kudos also goes to the Heavy Metal Tromboner (oo-er missus) busking outside Refuel, and his impressive note-for-note (including all the solos) rendition of ‘Enter Sandman’. He was clearly classically trained to a high level, but presumably got thrown out of the NZ Symphony Orchestra for having long hair and tattoos. ‘Speck.

p.s. Apologies for the desperately poor quality of the images – my Blackberry can only take decent pictures in full sunlight.

Cairo Knife Fight (aka Jack Sparrow and Meg White)

Cairo Knife Fight were first up. I knew absolutely nothing of these, other than they were a two piece. Duos are not generally a good sign though, not in rock and roll at least. That’s a duet, for fuck’s sake. Peters & Lee, Simon & Garfunkel, The Carpenters, Mulligan & O’Hare, I could go on. Anyway, they ambled onto the tiny stage to quite an enthusiastic reception, so evidently they had at least some sort of reputation. All dressed in black, hairy, beardy, be-bandana’d, they looked like a cross between Cheech Marin, Lemmy & Captain Jack Sparrow. As duos go though, they were pretty heavy – one of them with a guitar and the other behind the drums, a bit like an all-male, ugly, White Stripes. A White Stripes with a crucial difference though. They had obviously taken heed of the naysayers’ insistence that you can’t do rock without bass guitar, and added one, abeit in the form of a keyboard that the drummer thumped at with his left hand every now and again. He was quite a long way short of being Neil Peart or Rick Allen, but it kind of worked. The sound was really bizarre – long drawn out quasi space rock ramblings with mantra like muttering and droning over the top, mostly jammed and garbled and extremely loose but oddly, it worked. The guitarist broke his bottom E string half way through their final number and it didn’t actually seem to make any difference, that’s what a raucous noise it all was. Not bad. Not ‘alf bad.

So, to the ‘legendary’ Head Like A Hole. A kiwi institution, it would seem, and pounding the circuit since the early 90s. I knew just the one song, thanks to the heavy promotion of the new album ‘Blood Will Out’ on Hauraki Radio, but other than that, my knowledge of them was restricted to a little Wikipediazation the day before the gig. The Urban Factory is the sort of venue where there isn’t a proper backstage, so during the support act, the band were wandering back and forth to the bar and out the front for a smoke. They look like an ageing pub-rock band. ‘Booga’, the lead singer, is a short hairy affair with a feather in his hat and a pair of red leather gloves. Think Bill Oddie c1974. The rest of them are varying degrees of scruffiness, leather, tattoos, cowboy boots. You know the sort. And they all have beards! How rum. They just about carry off the look, just about convince me that it’s not largely affectation but it’s a close run thing. I presume the bottle of Jose Cuervo being passed round the stage inbetween songs isn’t filled with lemonade. I’m fairly certain that Mötörhead would kick their asses in a fight though.

Booga and the boys

Enough about the look though, what do they sound like? I hear you ask. Bizarrely enough, they sound almost as much like a pub-rock band as they look. It’s a dirty sort of scuzzy bluesy rock, very low down, mean and dirty, but pub-rock nevertheless. The problem with Booga is that he can’t sing, and I find that to be something of a disadvantage for singers. The mix is appalling too – they would sound a hell of a lot better if the guitars were louder and he considerably quieter. Guitarist nbr 1 (Nigel something or other) was ostensibly the lead, but the other one (Andrew something or other) more of a rhythm man, although they swapped roles occasionally. Considering they had been playing these songs for the best part of 20 years, they were astoundingly bad at playing them. I’m sorry to sound so cutting (I do cutting ever so well, n’est-ce pas?), but I really appreciate musicianship and there was precious little on show here. Both were utterly transfixed with their fretboards, unable to look away for more than a couple of seconds without losing their place, while displaying a repertoire of a scant few chords and painfully simplistic solos.  However, the tunes were good, for the most part, and they really had the crowd going, which is the main thing. No idea what the lyrics were about, as I couldn’t hear a fucking word, but I would imagine, just from the names of the songs, that the writer, whoever that may be, has a kooky sense of humour. I’ve no idea if they played any of these, but their back catalogue includes such seminal titles as ‘Roland Goes Nuts’, ‘Stained And Piss Yellow’ and ‘Beige Overalls For The Tradesman’.

The crowd evidently appreciated Booga’s dedication of ‘Death of a friend’ to Ronnie James Dio, and it confirmed one of their obvious major influences. HLAH do good cranking rock and roll, a good mix of up and down tempo, a blend of Black Sabbath, The Hamsters, Masters of Reality and Zodiac Mindwarp.  Every song was different, nothing intricate or in the slightest bit, er, fancy, but like AC/DC, they know how to grind out a good riff or two. The best song for me, and one of the most warmly received, was Springsteen’s ‘I’m On Fire’,  which sounds loads better their way (never a big fan of The Boss anyway). They played for a little over an hour, and came back on for three at the end, finishing with ‘Glory Glory’, the current single complete with annoyingly catchy chorus.

I’m sure if this had been London six years ago, I would have left long before the end, but given the (seemingly increasing) rarity with which anyone even remotely half-decent plays in this town, you has to takes what you can get​. If I enjoyed it because I’m gig-starved, it doesn’t really matter, I still enjoyed it.

Oh, and apologies for the poor quality of the pictures, my usual gig camera shit itself so I had to settle for my phone.

Anyway, to satiate my craving to write more shit on the interweb, whilst keeping this blog vaguely on-topic, I thought I’d do show and tell. Today, class, I have brought in a coat. Not just any coat though, a special coat, a magic coat, a wondrous coat of many colours that exudes the essence of pure rock and roll, nay pure metal. See how it shines so. See the quality of the stitchwork, the classic lines, the symmetry of the studs. Sure beats birds nests, sea shells and interesting rocks, do it not? Sure, you may touch it, but wash hands first and don’t be ripping it none.

Full metal jacket (back)

A little background: This jacket started life as a revolting stonewashed denim monstrosity, more than likely purchased from Top Man, Guildford High St, circa 1984. Undoubtedly quite fashionable at the time, its baggy sleeves were presumably meant to be worn pushed up, and the collar turned up too, accompanied by tight jeans and espadrilles. Sans socks, obviously. All topped off with a pair of black Raybans. Anyway, enough of that nonsense.

I metalled it. I metalled it good. I ripped the heinous sleeves off, dyed it proper denim colour and took a trip to East West in Guildford to get me some patches. I must have stood at the counter for hours, sifting through the basket of assorted patches, studs and badges, trying to decide which to spend my hard-earned paper-round money on. I sowed them all on by myself too. Books, Bits & Bobs in Kingston and Kensington Indoor Market were also plundered for heavy metal patch coolness. I’m pretty sure the empty space on the shoulder was formerly occupied by Hawkwind, which was removed in my ‘post-metal’ period, to be given pride of place on a ratty old army surplus canvas knapsack.

Full metal jacket (front)

I’m quite certain there will never again be an occasion when a sane human being would want to wear this jacket, save for a 80s metal themed fancy dress party, but I can never dispose of it. Not ever.

p.s. Available for hire (ideal for 80s theme parties etc). POA.

Murray, King of Rock'n'Roll

Now, if I were to say I were looking forward to this gig almost as much as I had been to AC/DC I would be lying. Not a barefaced lie though – I was actually really very keen to see them indeed, purely because my daughter Amelie was such a massive fan, and I just wanted to see her little face light up when they came out on stage for the first time. Our seats were almost at the front (in the ‘Hot Potato Zone’, no less)  - kudos to the wife for this one though, as she had queued up outside the theatre for almost an hour when they went on sale (unfortunately for her, Tom Jones tickets went on sale at the same time, so the line was somewhat longer than it should have been). It was one of the few times I’ve been in the Regent Theatre when it was anything approaching full, and the atmosphere created by a thousand pre-schoolers is electric. No, actually that’s bollocks, sorry, got carried away. Taking a toddler to a gig is a somewhat tricky experience – you can’t just head straight for the bar, and you can’t even really head straight for your seats otherwise said toddler will have breached the boredom threshold long before the house lights go down. Timing is everything. And chocolate for bribery.

Anyway, the house lights did eventually go down, and the excited buzz of the crowd rose to a crescendo of anticipatory screaming. Sorry,  carried away again – old habits die hard, you see. The stage is done up in a circus theme, and as the ringmaster starts the introduction, I turn to face my daughter, to watch her little face. Then in an instant, all four of her heroes are on the stage, right there in the flesh, in the same room as her, just twenty feet away. Does she register? Nothing. Not a flicker of excitement, zip, nada. Hang on child, that’s The Wiggles right there – the real live Wiggles, not images on a TV screen or in a book. Amelie? Nope, nothing. Gah.

Anyway, she must have enjoyed it, because even though she remained firmly ensconced on my lap, holding onto me for dear life, it seemed, she stared transfixed at the stage for the entire hour. They rattled off all her favourites and I have to say it was a very slick show – lots of costume changes and troupes of dancers and trapezes and tumblers and the like. I’d rather be watching Metallica though…

I’ve been really unlucky trying to see them over the years though, they just never seemed to play when I was around, or when they did, I missed out on tickets. I had in fact resigned myself to the fact that they would be on the ‘biggest regret’ list, seeing as they seem to play NZ even less frequently than the UK. So, imagine my excitement when they announce that they’re visiting Noo Zillund on the ‘Black Ice’ tour. I managed to score some tickets for the second Wellington show (in the Cake Tin) and a reasonably cheap flight up there, and counted that as my Christmas and Birthday presents for the next few years. It would be worth it though. I had 2 or 3 months of anticipation to endure though, before the day arrived.

Fast forward to the day – it seemed as though every other person on the flight up from Dunners was also going to the gig – literally the whole plane cheered when, on touchdown at the other end, the captain welcomed us to Wellington and wished us good weather for the concert. The Cake Tin, or Westpac Stadium to give it its official title, is not half a bad venue. Only 30,000 or so capacity, so pretty small as stadium gigs go, but bathed in evening sun, and not a breath of wind, which is pretty unusual in ‘the Windy City’.

The Checks were possibly worth seeing, but who knows. Missed them, never mind. Shihad are definitely worth missing, but in the interests of trying to get a decent position for the main act, and not spending too long in the bar, we sat through them. Dull dull dull. Duller than dull, in fact. Sterile. Anyway, by about 8.30 they were gone and we were ready to get us some Rock and ROLL.

Mmm me so horny

Firstly, a word about ‘Black Ice’, AC/DC’s current offering. It’s pants, bar perhaps one track. They’ve not written a decent song since the 80s, in my opinion, but I don’t care – surely they know which side their bread’s buttered – 2 or 3 off the new one, maybe one each from Ballbreaker and Stiff Upper Lip, and the rest is going to be Classicsville, Arizona. Oh yes indeed.

I’ve seen all the live DVDs, I know what to expect, but the excitement is almost too much to bear. Finally, the stage lights go down (as much as they can, given that it’s not yet dark) and the giant video screen starts playing the intro sequence. Hilarious teenage smutty nonsense featuring Angus and some scantily dressed ladies and a good deal of innuendo, all taking place on board a train which crashes, with an explosion of pyrotechnics to rival any I’ve seen, through the video screen and all of a sudden there’s a 100 ft high steam train wreck on the stage, and we are off. ‘Rock and Roll Train’ is the first offering, and sounds so much better live through a 30k rig than on my iPod. I can’t get over how awesome the sound is. I’m wearing plugs, de rigeur these days for tinnitus sufferers, but it’s still way way loud, and crystal clear. Probably the best outside sound I’ve ever heard to be honest. The runway projecting out from the stage stretches halfway to the back, and Angus and Brian waste no time in bouncing right down to the end to do their thang. The guitars sound so good man, sooo good. The riffs that Angus and Malcolm grind out are just so damn groovy, nobody can make rock music so damn sexy as thems two. So, they might not have come up with anything original in the last 25 years, but who gives a damn?

An-gus

The old stuff is great, the new stuff is great because it sounds like the old stuff, they’ve most definitely hit on a winning formula there. After the opener, they kick into ‘Hell Ain’t A Bad Place to Be, swiftly followed by ‘Back In Black’, which gets a huge cheer. ‘Big Jack’ from the new album is next, and I feel I should be shocked and appalled that the 62 year old Brian Johnston is wiggling his hips and boogying down the runway, but somehow I’m not. He’s very, very cool. Sure, he can’t hit some of the high notes like he used to, but he just radiates charisma and more than makes up for it with effort. High point of the night for me is next, in ‘Shot Down In Flames’. I have always been slightly skeptical of Johnson singing the Bon Scott ones, but this is just superb, and anyway, it’s all about the riffs isn’t it? I don’t particularly like ‘Thunderstruck’ which for some reason, seems to be the only one they play on the radio in NZ, but live it’s passable. ‘The Jack’ is Angus’s cue to strip off and show the crowd his underpants – there is really something not quite right about cheering on a 50-something year old man dressed as a schoolboy while he does a stripease, but there you go. It’s also the vehicle for him to launch into twenty minutes of widdly diddly solo, a la Nigel Tufnell, but as with everything they do, tongue is firmly in cheek.

Whole Lotta Rosie

Then it’s out with the toys. The colossal bell hanging from the rigging for ‘Hells Bells’ and a 100ft inflatable whore astride the giant train, tapping her foot to the beat, for ‘Whole Lotta Rosie’. It’s all just superb. This is how you do a stadium gig, the scale of it all is just mind-blowing. After half a dozen or so more classics, ‘High Voltage’, ’You Shook Me All Night Long’, ‘T.N.T. etc they disappear. Bloody hell, that went quickly. Cue massive chanting for more. They return minutes later for the final encore, unveiling two banks of giant cannons as they launch into ‘For Those About to Rock’.

The wind picks up just as the final song is being played – it pretty much ruins the sound and plays havoc with the lighter elements of the stage set, and it’s bloody fortunate that it stayed calm for so long otherwise it would have been a different story and I would have been writing about how shit stadium gigs are and asking ‘why the fuck would you try and do a gig outdoors in the world’s windiest city?’. But it didn’t so I’m not.

That was one brilliant concert, and I’m very glad to be able to cross Acker Dacker off the list at long last.

Dolf Datsun, head harmonic generator

Embarrassing. Not the band, they were fucking brilliant, as always. It was embarrassing to be part of the pathetic 50 strong crowd that could be arsed to leave the comfort of their armchairs and get down to Sammy’s. Dunedin really winds me up sometimes – people just don’t go to stuff. I doubt very much if The Datsuns would want to come back to play in front of 50 people again. Hats off to them though, they played a blistering set promoting ‘Headstunts’, with a very creditable amount of enthusiasm and effort, considering. They just get better each time I see them – still pull out the old faves like Harmonic Generator and Motherfucker From Hell, and the new tracks like Eye Of The Needle and Highschool Hoodlums are pretty much up there too. Great gig, bloody Dunedin. Grr.

]]> http://bytorandthesnowdog.wordpress.com/2010/08/19/the-datsuns-an-emerald-city-%e2%80%93-240409-%e2%80%93-sammy%e2%80%99s-dunedin/feed/ 0 bytorandthesnowdog Datsuns Apr 2009 Datsuns Apr 2009 http://bytorandthesnowdog.wordpress.com/2010/08/17/iron-maiden-lauren-harris-%e2%80%93-210209-%e2%80%93-westpac-arena-christchurch/ http://bytorandthesnowdog.wordpress.com/2010/08/17/iron-maiden-lauren-harris-%e2%80%93-210209-%e2%80%93-westpac-arena-christchurch/#comments Tue, 17 Aug 2010 08:35:19 +0000 bytorandthesnowdog http://bytorandthesnowdog.wordpress.com/?p=776 Continue reading »]]> Now, the last time I saw Iron Maiden I left before the end, such was the paucity of material I knew, and such was my horror at the realization that ‘my era’ Maiden ended well before the halfway point in their career. Over the years that followed I thought to myself, every time I listened to Powerslave or Killers or whatever, ‘I would definitely go and see Maiden again if I could be guaranteed only to hear the old stuff’. Lo and behold, a decade later, they come up with ‘Somewhere Back On Tour’ where they promised only material from the 1980s. Fucking get in! Not sure if I would be prepared to fly to Oz for it, but bugger me, they’ve only gone and announced an NZ leg, including a date in Christfuckingchurch!?! The Oz shows sold out in minutes, so just to be on the safe side, I joined the Maiden fan club to get preferential ticket pre-purchase privileges or some such bollocks. This turned out to be a bit of a waste though, because the promoters seriously underestimated a) the credit crunch and b) Kiwi resistance to paying 140 bucks for a ticket, and consequently a week before the gig it was switched from the 30,000 Jade Stadium to the 10,000 Westpac Arena. No matter though, I think most people would much rather see them in the relative intimacy of an arena than a windy stadium anyway. Add to that the torrential rain and flooding in the 48hrs preceding gig day, and the indoor option looked like a winner.

Welcome aboard Iron Maiden Airlines Flight 666

First though, getting to Christchurch. This was a proper road trip, 4 blokes, a box full of metal CDs and a chilly bin full of beer. Pissed by Oamaru, out of beer by Timaru, had to stop and buy a carry out crate from a pub. Maccy Ds for dinner in Christchurch and by the time we got to the Westpac Arena, via Christchurch Airport for a glimpse of the Iron Maiden plane (how rock and roll is that, kids?!), we were steaming and well up for some NWOBHM. Chugged another couple of beers inside while the warm up act was on – who the blinking flip thought Lauren Harris would be a worthy support for Iron Maiden? Apart from her dad Steve, that is. I’ve seen some cracking acts supporting Maiden – Slayer, Anthrax etc, so this was a bit of a let down to say the least. Anyway, she cleared off at last, and the (not quite full) arena was buzzing in anticipation of some good old fashioned ‘eavy metal.

Maiden - it could be 1987

The lights went down, the customary ‘Doctor Love’ by UFO came over the PA, and we were all set. Aeroplane engines, machine gun fire, air raid sirens, oh holy mother of God, they’re going to open with ‘Aces High’, my first and most often (for I have chopped and changed over the last 20 years) favourite Maiden track. As on the intro to ‘Live After Death’, Churchill’s ‘Fight them on the beaches…’ speech boomed over the PA and the crowd went proper Radio Rental. Adrian Smith appeared in the spotlight chugging out the opening riff, then another spotlight on Dave Murray as they brought the intro to a crescendo, then booom! Pyro, lights, drums, bass and there was Bruce Dickinson tearing across the stage like a madman half his age. A third his age even. This is what it’s all about! Senfuckingsational. Murray and Smith were electric, if you’ll pardon the pun – there is no finer sound in rock than twin lead guitars in screaming combat. Steve Harris is a true legend, I even forgave him for serving up his daughter as support, and of course Nicko is always value for money, bashing away there at the back. Although I think Jannick Gers is surplus to requirements (no band needs 3 lead guitars, ffs), he didn’t get in the way too much, and there wasn’t any real evidence of ‘too much guitar’. I wasn’t sure how they went about sharing out the solos – after all, the vast majority were Murray/Smith and only one song (‘Holy Smoke’) was from the Gers era. It worked though, whatever they did.

Heavy fucking metal

As Maiden stage sets go, it was pretty lame, not much more than a lot of backdrops and some ramps for them to run up and down, but who gives a shit when they sound as good as that? The set list was pretty much ‘Live After Death’, with one each from ‘Somewhere In Time’, ‘Seventh Son…’ and ‘No Prayer…’ to fill in the gaps up to 1990. Every album from the 1980s was represented, including a very welcome four from Powerslave, the high point being ‘Rime Of The Ancient Mariner’, one I’d never seen them do before. Even the ridiculous feathery face mask Bruce was wearing for Powerslave couldn’t detract from the massiveness of the evening. ‘The Trooper’, ’Wrathchild’, ‘The Prisoner’, ‘Children Of The Damned’, they were all there – it was just greatest hits heaven, of course finishing up with ‘Iron Maiden’ and ‘Sanctuary’. The best thing though was the knowledge that at no point throughout the night would I hear Brucie utter the words ‘and now we’d like to do something from the new album’. There are loads of 80s bands out there doing the revival/nostalgia thing, cos it’s seriously big bucks, but I defy any of them to do it anywhere near as well as Maiden. The best of British, and then some. The very tiring 4hr homeward drive aside, it was a truly legendary night.