Give me the sense to wonder to wonder if I'm free

Continuing my trip back through the 1988 album charts.

24/04/88 : Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son - Iron Maiden


Our seventh visit with the Maiden (drawing them amusingly level with like-minded spirits Kylie Minogue and Taylor Swift) and I have at least heard of this album, which gives me some hope I'm going to find it bearable. But not too much hope, obviously.

Well, well well. I actually LIKED "Can I Play With Madness?" and "The Evil That Men Do" wasn't far away from those dizzy heights, but I actually didn't mind most of it (although almost ten minutes of the title track was a bit too much). It all takes itself very seriously, but I can't quite decide if that's a good thing or a bad thing - if you're not going to take your "art" seriously, then why should you expect others to do so? Let's be clear, I'm never going to listen to this again - but if forced to chose between this and Bros, then the Maiden are going to win every time. 

We're at #5 in the charts this week on their second week of a twelve week run, with it having peaked at #1 in its debut week (they've had five #1 albums over the years). The rest of the top five were Erasure (a new entry), Now! 11, Fleetwood Mac and an OMD best-of, with the next highest new entry being The Jesus And Mary Chain (#9) - we might possibly get to meet them in '87 but it's gonna be touch and go.

Wikipedia has a reasonable amount on the album (165 milliPeppers) which tells us that it's (obviously) their seventh album and is a concept album inspired by the novel Seventh Son by Orson Scott Card. There's not a lot else of interest in there but it does tell us the supporting tour had over 100 dates and the request that went to Derek Riggs for the cover art was "simply something surreal and bloody weird". Critically, there were some complaints they'd gone a bit prog, but most people loved it with Kerrang giving it 5/5 and claiming it "will eventually be hailed alongside such past milestones as Tommy, Tubular Bells and [The] Dark Side of the Moon" - which feels a bit optimistic, but I guess there's still time. Commercially, it did well making the top ten in quite a few countries and obviously going down well in Scandinavia, getting to #1 in fun-loving Finland - it also got to #12 in the US. 

discogs.com tells us this is a relatively expensive album because you're going to have to spend SIX QUID to get a decent copy so you might as well go for the Japanese limited edition - it's only £583.56, after all! I won't be doing that but this was, however, a surprisingly enjoyable experience.

17/04/88 - An enjoyable memory jog
01/05/88 - Pretty decent

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