With the Maiden England tour rolling through Europe and soon heading for North and South America, here’s our series of in-depth features about Iron Maiden’s glorious 1980s, that incredible decade which is being celebrated on the concert stage right now.

The phenomenon that brings hundreds of thousands of rock fans together these days started more than 30 years ago, as the earliest line-ups of Iron Maiden struggled to find their sound while also finding their audience. Our feature on the birth of the Iron Maiden sound charts the journey through producers and studios until the band finally ended up in London’s Battery Studios with the legendary Martin Birch behind the console.

Kick-off, right there!

What then?

Why, get Bruce Dickinson and Nicko McBrain on board and launch the dawn of Maiden’s classic era, the one that would produce no less than 5 classic studio albums and 1 monumental live record in just six (!) bloody years. Enter The Number Of The Beast and Piece Of Mind, pushing Maiden to the plateau that would send them into the stratosphere over the next few years.

With Powerslave and their first live album Live After Death, Maiden became the biggest metal band on the planet, in no small part thanks to the guitar partnership of Dave Murray and Adrian Smith.

Maiden kept their profile high, but had to struggle through the making of their Somewhere In Time album, mainly because singer Dickinson was not in agreement with the musical direction of the project. Smith saved the day with three insanely great tunes, and thus paved the way for the final record of the classic era, the very one that is the main focus of this year’s Maiden England tour: Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son.

Enjoy this feature about the end of Maiden’s classic era, and enjoy the show wherever you see it this summer. Stay tuned for our reports from the road as the summer progresses!