815. Iron Maiden / Maiden England. 1989. 5/5

The live album can be a wonderful thing. It can also be a bore-fest. It's a fine line to tread. The ability to capture the magnificence of the live gig without inhibiting the enjoyment of the setting. There will always be mistakes, and with so few gigs actually recorded in order to put out a live album (sometimes just the one!) it means the band has to be aware of this while playing that night, for fear of having any slip immortalised forever on vinyl (cassette, CD, etc). Even more important, it has to show that the band can transfer live what it has taken weeks or months to do in the studio.

In 1985, Iron Maiden released what is arguably one of the finest live albums of all time, Live After Death. Packed full of brilliant songs, including magnificent versions of songs from their then new release Powerslave, it captured the band at their zenith, and even today is a highlight in music. In 1989 when it was announced that this album, Maiden England, was being released (albeit only in a package with the live video) it had to be a daunting occasion. Could the band reproduce the brilliance that was that previous live album? Would the set list, comprising many songs from the album of the tour, Seventh Son of a Seventh Son, hold up a candle to the flame of the previous release? The answer of course is that while no one would ever consider this to be as intrinsically wonderful as Live After Death, it is still a top shelf live album that again proved Iron Maiden's status as one of the biggest and best bands in the world.
The first terrific part of this album is that only three songs from the thirteen here are repeated from Live After Death - "Die With Your Boots On", "The Number of the Beast" and "Iron Maiden". They are still great songs, and they still sound great here. But it is also much better to have a whole swag of other songs that we do not already have copies of. The songs that have come from the latest album sound as good - if not better - than they do on the studio album. When I first bought the album, I could never have imagined that songs such as "Moonchild", "The Evil That Men Do", the brilliant "Infinite Dreams", "The Clairvoyant" and the magnificent "Seventh Son of a Seventh Son" would sound as good live as they did on the album. But to be honest, I think every single one of them was enhanced on this live album. Most especially "Infinite Dreams" and "Seventh Son of a Seventh Son". Just fantastic. The keyboards and synth, which became prevalent on the last two studio albums and therefore required it in the live setting as well, comes through wonderfully, and doesn't detract from the rest of the band, something which had been a small and insignificant concern in regards to 'selling out' a couple of years earlier. This is also true of the two songs that came from Somewhere in Time, "Wasted Years" and "Heaven Can Wait", which had by this time become a marvellous live song in incorporating the crowd. The three other songs here lose nothing on all of the previous tracks. They are quite conceivably the most surprising but best tracks on the album. "The Prisoner" cranks up the album with its great sing-along lyrics and brilliant guitar solo break, "Still Life", with its moody and seductive beginning exploding into the heart of the song sounds divine, while "Killers' is fast and menacing.

The CD of this gig does not have the whole performance on it, as songs had to be left off due to the time restraints that a single CD can hold. This was rectified on the re-release many years later on the two-CD version Maiden England '88. Despite this, this album contains so many highlights it is impossible not to love. Played back-to-back with Live After Death and you have an absolutely barnstorming collection of the greatest that Iron Maiden had to offer during the 1980's, and is perhaps the perfect way to sign off from a decade in which they dominated the heavy metal landscape, and helped to change it forever.

Rating:  You walk through the subway, his eyes burn a hole in your back.  5/5