Читать книгу Iron Maiden in the Studio - Jake Brown - Страница 9
Оглавление‘Maiden was Steve’s baby’
Paul Di’Anno
Heading into their second LP Iron Maiden were in the right place at the right time to lead the second British wave of metal. The band laid down Killers between November 1980 and January 1981 at Battery Studios in London with producer Martin Birch, whose credits included a virtual who’s who of 1970s rock stars, from the Faces to Deep Purple and from Blue Oyster Cult to Black Sabbath.
Amusingly, Birch later quipped to VH1’s Classic Albums that ‘I read they were going to go into the studio and do an album, and I was a bit peeved because I wondered, “Well, why they haven’t asked me?” because I was interested in doing it.’ To which Steve Harris responded in the same show that, ‘We didn’t approach him because we thought he was unapproachable at that point. He was this big star producer and we thought he wouldn’t be interested in this small band.’
Once the band and producer were on the same page, Killers would mark the first stage in what would be a long collaboration. In an interview with Best magazine the producer said of the prospect of working with Maiden that ‘I personally wanted to produce them because it was a way out of the Purple family. There are, in fact, many differences. Musically, a band like Iron Maiden is typical of the second generation of hard rock and stands out from the first one because the band is more consistent, more compact.’ In the same conversation Birch recalled his impressions of working with the band. ‘At first, I could judge them objectively and I think that they are very different from the hard rockers of the early 1970s … The first time I saw them at work I was surprised, and seduced by their energy and their attitude. I have rarely seen bands with so much energy.
In this way, they reminded me a bit of the early Purple. But their attitude towards rock is very different and so is their concept of it. It was said that they were a second Deep Purple but I don’t agree with this. Obviously Steve Harris was a Purple fan but he’s mostly influenced by bands like Jethro Tull, UFO or even Genesis. Nothing to do with Deep Purple. Of course, in both cases we have a very melodic hard rock and not just speeded-up noise like with some other bands in heavy metal.’
Though the group was working with such a storied UK producer – known affectionately among the bands he has produced as ‘The Headmaster’ – Harris told IronMaiden.com that creating the record began and ended as a team effort. ‘I appreciate that someone from outside of the band can see different things [but] there has to be some form of internal control. If I heard something that I felt was vital to Iron Maiden, I would be after that guy. But even then it would still have to be a co-production affair because I’ve always insisted upon that right from when we started working with Martin Birch on Killers.’
Birch, for his part, was easily agreeable to this arrangement, quite simply because – as he recalled to Best – from the outset of entering the studio it was ‘obvious that he’s the boss, even if he denies it himself. Iron Maiden – that’s him. Moreover, the situation of the band made that, for a long time, all the songwriting was down to him.’
But while Harris received credit as the band’s principal songwriter, he was consistently generous in giving credit to his bandmates for their contributions. Of guitarist Dave Murray and the composition ‘Twilight Zone’, for example, he said, ‘This was a single in England that wasn’t on the British album. We put it on as an extra track over here [the US]. Dave came up with the riff for this one. I wrote the melody line and the lyrics. But the main riff was Dave’s.’
Harris also seemed to be the first to appreciate the writing of new guitarist Adrian Smith, who had replaced Dennis Stratton, and singled out ‘Wrathchild’ as an instance where the guitarist had contributed to improving the song. ‘“Wrathchild” was originally recorded on an album called Metal for Muthas, along with “Sanctuary”,’ he told Ironmaidencommentary.com. ‘That was before we had a record contract. The version on this record is pretty different. A lot of people asked us why we didn’t put it on the first album but we felt, because it was on Metal for Muthas, we didn’t want to put it on the first album. By the time we did Killers we weren’t happy with that version so we wanted to record it properly. The guitar frills around the vocals were from Adrian. Originally they weren’t there but, when Adrian joined the band, he decided to put them in.’
Addressing the pressures of his role as songwriter-in-chief at that point in the band’s fledgling career, Harris readily volunteered to rock journalist Johnny B that ‘any type of songwriting is never particularly easy. Just coming up with new ideas and new material and everything is always quite a lot of pressure.’
As he went about writing the album, Steve shared in the same conversation that ‘I try and grab inspiration from wherever I can … Thank you very much. I grab it with both hands. Obviously you do get ideas at funny times and you just have to write them down. Sometimes it can be weird as you can put down an idea and then, when you look back at it a few weeks later, you think it is not as good as you thought it was, or other ideas then seem better than you originally thought they were. Usually, however, when you have got a strong one, you have a gut feeling on it but it is always a worry as to whether it is as good as you think. I think it is the biggest pressure of all as it is a personal thing.’
As production on the album got underway, a key element involved rearranging older Maiden songs that hadn’t made it on to the debut LP. This allowed Harris and company the opportunity to improve both the writing and sonics of these cuts. In conversation with Ironmaidencommentary.com, the chief songwriter singled out ‘Innocent Exile’ as ‘one of the very first Iron Maiden songs. It was an old stage favourite but we haven’t played it in a while. That opening bass riff was originally played on the guitar. It was written on the bass for the guitar. The bass was originally playing crashing chords behind it. Then we switched it around.’
Harris also cited ‘Purgatory’ as ‘quite an old song’ that the band had reworked in a slightly different form. ‘It was originally called “Floating”. Then we changed the lyrics and a couple of bits in the middle section.’
Of the title track, ‘Killers’, Harris recalled that ‘Paul [Di’Anno] wrote the lyrics to that one. It felt really natural for him to scream at the start of the song.’ In the case of ‘Drifter’, Harris highlighted the stylistic diversity of the band members’ influences as they blended in collaboration. ‘The different parts in this song really flowed together … The slow section in there is one of Dave’s blues things … It wasn’t a song that was done in separate sections. On this one I pretty much knew what I wanted.’
Another musical signature of the band was introduced on Killers – their now legendary instrumental. This, All Music Guide explained, began with producer Martin Birch ‘beefing up the band’s studio presence and lending their instrumental attack a newfound clarity that throws their considerable skills into sharp relief’. Offering ‘Genghis Khan’ as an example, Steve Harris told Ironmaidencommentary.com that the band’s decision to record the song as an instrumental initially ‘freaked out’ Birch. ‘It was sort of a change at right angles. We really liked that element of surprise. This was another song where there could have been a vocal melody on top but it felt good as an instrumental. A vocal would have cluttered it up. Originally it was written to depict the feeling and sound of Genghis Khan’s army going into battle.’
Harris also highlighted ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’ as another example of an album track that wound up as ‘a bit of an experiment’. ‘I’d never played harmonics on the bass much before that. But, with the mood of the intro, it felt really natural to play those harmonics. We wanted to create a mood, and then come in and hit people across the head with it. The vocal melody is pretty much the same as the riff. That’s to give them both more power.’
As the album began taking shape, Harris – who had expressed some dissatisfaction with the production on the band’s debut – told Ironmaidencommentary.com that, while ‘the first album really sounded like a first album, with Killers we started to sound more like Maiden. It was the first album where we felt some satisfaction as far as the sound of the album.’
For his part, producer Birch explained to Best magazine of his more successful production style that ‘I don’t consider myself a super-technician – what I do is, to me, pretty simple.’
On its release in the UK in February 1981 Killers reached No. 12 on the Top 20 Album Chart. From the band’s point of view, Steve Harris selected the title cut and “Murders in the Rue Morgue” as ‘two songs [that] stand out because they are great live favourites.’ Four months later, in June, the album was released in the US, reaching No. 68 – a big improvement on its predecessor’s peak of No. 124. Billboard hailed the album as ‘clearly the work of a top-notch ensemble’ and boldly stated that ‘the teaming of new guitarist Adrian Smith with Dave Murray [formed] the most formidable twin-guitar attack in heavy metal’.
