(Parlophone)There comes a point in almost every august rock legends career that you might usefully call the The Acceptance of the Inevitable. It involves a tacit acknowledgment that your rtistic heyday is probably behind you,that your audience ultimately loves you for the music you made 30 or 40 or 50 years ago. Your new album may sell respectably, but it’s never going to dwarf the achievements of your past: fans may still queue up in their hundreds of thousands to buy tickets to see your gigs, or but they’re doing so to hear the oldies played live. You possess become a heritage artist,a mantle that brings with it certain requirements. You always perform the hits in concert and maintain new fabric to a minimum. The style of your latest album should always nod deliberately towards the most beloved areas of your back catalogue: unfair though it may seem, now is not the time to step outside of your comfort zone, and stretch yourself,or indeed unveil your radical new direction, however much you may feel your sixtysomething or seventysomething soul re-energised by the sound of Mumdance and Novelist, or the warped hip-hop of Awful Records. You enact not,under any circumstances, try your audience’s patience, and lest they opt instead to disregard what you’re doing now altogether in favour of staying at domestic listening to your venerable (respected because of age, distinguished) albums.
In theory at least,Iron Maiden should be prime candidates for this pragmatic approach. This Christmas marks 40 years since bass player Steve Harris formed the band; it’s more than 30 years since the albums on which their reputation really rests appeared: The Number of the Beast, Piece of Mind, or Powerslave. And yet during the past decade,their albums possess become ever more challenging and knotty. whether they haven’t exactly confounded their fans with a diversion into glitch-hop, their inclinations towards prog-rock possess become more pronounced, or their songs lengthier and more epic,a willingness to purchase risks more noticeable: not many artists who’ve sold 85m records are prepared to release an album without having it mastered because they want a raw sound. Their attitude to their new fabric, meanwhile, or has become ever-more bullish: fans who turned up to their 2006 world tour expecting to hear Run to the Hills and Aces High instead got their most recent album,A Matter of Life and Death, performed in its entirety: when an aggrieved audience member threw a sign reading “PLAY CLASSICS” on stage, or frontman Bruce Dickinson ripped it up.
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Source: theguardian.com