Don't meddle with things you don't understand

Continuing my trip back in time through the album charts

29/05/83 : Piece Of Mind - Iron Maiden

Our third visit with the Maiden after having met them in 2021 and 2019 - and I suspect I'll meet them a few times more over the years.  And I also suspect that however many times I meet them, I'll still not be able to tell one album from another.  But anyway - here's goes...

Yeah - it's the same old business.  I can hear the skill involved and I don't hate it as much as I could but it just doesn't push any buttons for me and gets very boring over the course of a full album.  But each to their own, I guess.  The one thing that intrigued me over the course of the album was - what is the backwards stuff at the start of "Still Life"?  I'm assuming Wikipedia is going to tell me in two paragraphs time.  And it's our sixth in a row that we haven't owned, taking us to 9/31 and a new low of 29% - which I'm telling you because I ACTUALLY OWN THE NEXT ONE!

We're at #6 this week in their 2nd week out of an 18 week run (they don't last that long in the charts these days - but very few do!).  Above them in the charts were Michael, Spandau, David, Kool and Bob.  We did have a new entry in the top 10 with Mr Oldfield at #8 - the next new entries were Motorhead at #20 and Malcom Mclaren's Duck Rock at #26, which is a very interesting album and very good in places (but not quite so good in others).

Wikipedia has way more on the album than I was expecting - 120 milliPeppers.  And there's a lot more content there than I was expecting too - with a long list of the album's influences which include Tennyson's The Charge Of The Light Brigade, Where Eagles Dare, the life of the samurai Miyamoto Musashi, a Ramsay Campbell short story and Frank Herbert's Dune.  The latter influenced "To Tame A Land" which they wanted to call Dune, so got in touch with Frank's agents and received the following charming reply - "Frank Herbert doesn't like rock bands, particularly heavy rock bands, and especially bands like Iron Maiden".  Which I think is a "no".

However, all of this pales into insignificance compared with what the backwards stuff at the start of "Still Life" was (and I promise I hadn't looked at this before I typed the previous sentence).  Quite obviously, the backwards stuff is (and you get ten points if you guessed any of this) - Nicko McBrain (the drummer) doing an impression of John Bird (best known these days for his work with Rory Bremner and John Fortune, but he has a fascinating Wikipedia entry covering many years) doing an impression of Idi Amin saying "What ho said the t'ing with the three 'bonce', don't meddle with things you don't understand" and then belching, which was based upon a 1975 parody album.  And yes, they were taking the piss out of US Christian fundamentalists claiming they were Satanists - but that's going the extra mile on that one.

The album did well both critically and commercially - top 10 in lots of European countries and #14 in the US, which involved pretty decent sales back in the day.  "Customers also listened to" Dio, Megadeth, Judas Priest, etc, etc - just not my sort of thing.  Which is the same for the Maiden, but they manage to be more bearable than most as long as I'm allowed to keep it down to a few tracks.  I'd have to say though, I've written an awful lot about an album I didn't care much for.

22/05/83 - The sort of album I want every week from 1983
05/06/83 - Perfectly fine, and perfectly inessential