A bit of a sensation for Iron Maiden fans, there has finally come to light a proper soundboard recording from the Piece of Mind tour in 1983. Rejoice!
This one was hidden particularly deep in the vault.
As fans will know, Iron Maiden documented their 1982 The Number of the Beast tour with the Beast over Hammersmith recording, and of course the 1984-85 Powerslave tour was properly archived for posterity with the Live After Death album and video. But in between those two, the 1983 tour for their masterpiece album Piece of Mind was sadly and frustratingly overlooked, only making an official appearance as a radically abridged Dortmund festival set in the Early Days DVD.
Not even in the realm of bootlegs has the World Piece Tour of 1983 been completely satisifying, because there has only ever been audience recordings available, not a stereo soundboard recording taken from the mixing desk and giving a clear and proper impression of the band live on stage.
Until now.
Somehow, in 2024, someone, somewhere, unearthed a treasure: A soundboard recording of Iron Maiden live at the end of the Piece of Mind tour. Recorded off the soundboard at the Olympiahalle in Munich, Germany on 30 November 1983, this is (to my knowledge at least) the first soundboard bootleg ever available from this legendary album-and-tour cycle in Maiden history:
The concert is late in the tour, meaning that singer Bruce Dickinson is a little more worn-out than he was at the spellbinding beginning of the tour in England earlier in the year, but this is still a mind-blowing performance and recording, even featuring the extremely rare and extremely awesome Piece of Mind epic “To Tame a Land” in all its glory, and also a very rare Nicko McBrain drum solo. The setlist as recorded:
WHERE EAGLES DARE
SANCTUARY
WRATHCHILD
THE TROOPER
REVELATIONS
FLIGHT OF ICARUS
DIE WITH YOUR BOOTS ON
22 ACACIA AVENUE
THE NUMBER OF THE BEAST (fades in)
TO TAME A LAND
GUITAR SOLO
DRUM SOLO
HALLOWED BE THY NAME
IRON MAIDEN
RUN TO THE HILLS
DRIFTER (fades out)
This Munich show is now readily available on YouTube, and also as CD and vinyl reproductions under the title Brain Damage at the Olympiahalle. The Iron Maiden management team might be upset that a bootleg (something Steve Harris himself has always owned up to collecting) makes the rounds like this. But the sad fact is that Maiden have let the 40th anniversaries of most of their classic 1980s catalog pass by without any proper official special editions, and so fans are left to scramble for unofficial product to buy.
The 40th of their debut, Iron Maiden, was marked with the official release of a lame picture disc, the 40th of The Number of the Beast with the more interesting triple-vinyl The Number of the Beast over Hammersmith, but the 40th of Powerslave only got the ludicrous and terrible-sounding Zoetrope vinyl. Killers and Piece of Mind got no music reissues or expansions at all for their respective 40th.
Steve Harris’ old favorites Jethro Tull have celebrated every single album in their catalog up until the mid-1980s (so far) with elaborate CD/DVD sets of remixes, remasters, and rare and previously unreleased audio and video material. Maiden’s contemporaries Metallica have pretty much set the gold standard for reissues with their exhaustive CD/DVD/vinyl box sets for their first five albums (so far).
Iron Maiden don’t seem to care, even if fans would happily pay good money.
So we’ll enjoy this 1983 bootleg at least.
Maiden Revelations 
Livr
Man this is awesome.
Welcome back, Christer!
I am hoping for a 40th anniversary of LAD with a complete set from Hammersmith, and a 35th anniversary No Prayer with the Wembley Arena show as a bonus. I won’t be holding my breath. 😉
Last year could have seen a 25th anniversary Ed Hunter live album. I am assuming they recorded complete shows and not just the songs used as the b-sides for the BNW singles.
The Piece of Mind guitar tone, in addition to the Seventh Son of a Seventh Son guitar tone, is a tone I have been chasing my whole life, and have still not achieved. From interviews with the band in vintage magazines, I could gather that Martin Birch “put mics up everywhere” in the studio, and that he most likely used a combination of close mics and very sensitive room mics to get the sound on the album. The norm these days is to use only one or more close mics for a very direct, in-your-face kind of sound. Think “Live After Death” (especially the Hammersmith recording) or “A Real Live/Dead One” if you are wondering what that sounds like. One other aspect of close mic’ing a guitar amp is that the sound tends toward fizzy and thin. So, when I first heard “Where Eagles Dare” on this bootleg, I thought it sounded very roomy, possibly recorded with just a single mic in the room, but the more I listen to it, the more it does sound like a soundboard recording, except that I suspect that the mic’ing techniques used on their live rigs must have involved distant mic’ing, as that is the only explanation I can come up with to explain the somewhat distant sound of the instruments on the recording. I must say I am impressed by how they managed to replicate their studio sound, which is, to my knowledge, not easy at all. Listening to the guitars, I can hear the distinctive midrange and upper-mid bite that I love from the album.
Have to agree about the PoM guitar tone. It has grit and heft and real character.
To my ears, I get very close to that tone by rolling off a little bit of treble on the guitar itself. Really smooth leads and that honky, gnarly midrange.
My biggest hope would also be a comprehensive rerelease of Live After Death with the full Hammersmith set. It’s sooo much better than their performance in Long Beach.