Location: Graz (Austria), Stadthalle
Concert date: 30.05.2005
Attendance: 5000
Ticket price: 13.500,00 SIT (54,00 €)
At long last, the big day. The sky clouded over nicely, the rain freshened up the atmosphere and the muggy heat was nowhere to be found, so the trip suddenly became totally doable as far as the drive went, even though we only set off from the center of Ljubljana at 17:30.
Let’s jump straight into the hall. At 20:00 sharp, Dragonforce started warming up the crowd. Power metal merrymakers. So fast that you start wondering whether it can even get any faster. Proper drilled boys, the two guitarists probably sleep with their guitars under their pillows. A pure textbook demonstration of supersonic finger-weaving up and down the fretboard. The music is in the style of Scandinavian power metal jolly types like Nocturnal Rites, so basically a cliché. The sound was lousy, the double bass pedal was cutting through, the bass was way too cranked and you couldn’t make out the riffing clearly, just like most of the double third harmonies. Still, the singer somehow outshouted the sonic mess on stage, and if you really strained your ears, you could even follow the melody. The guys played solidly, tried hard and gave it their all. But there are just way too many of these power metal bands these days. And the music? Close your eyes and you can picture Snow White’s dwarfs marching into the mine with their picks and lanterns, …hi-ho, hi-ho. Basically, I was yawning, while the crowd was busily catching up with the band and giving them a decent round of applause. Dragonforce played for 45 minutes, and then the roadies, supposedly seasoned pros, needed 30 minutes to get the stage ready for the heavy metal legends.
21:15 and the taped intro The Ides Of March kicks in. Aaaaa, the first goosebumps started crawling. Crash and boom, lights on, and the whole thing tips over into Murders in a Rue Morgue and we’re already on the Iron Maiden record ‘Killers’ way back in 1981. Dreamy, obviously. Iron Maiden were on tour promoting their latest DVD, ‘The Early Years’, so the setlist was made up exclusively of songs from the first four studio albums. Strictly! So first up they played the venomous Another Life and Prowler! Everything spun along pretty fast and the opening run blasted the fans straight into seventh heaven. And then The Trooper, that Iron Maiden hit blew up not only the fans but everyone else in the place too. For the occasion Dickinson put on an English red coat uniform and raged wildly around the stage with a Great Britain flag. It would all have been cool, but the band obviously miscounts sometimes, skipping their sound checks so self-confidently. The sound of the first four songs was awful. All three guitars were crackling indistinctly, the drums and Steve Harris’s bass were noticeably too loud. Well, at least Dickinson got fixed right away (they pushed up the faders) right after the third verse of Murders in a Rue Morgue, and Dickinson’s vocals, as far as melody in the band’s stage sound goes, were actually what saved the situation through this first part of the show. During Remember Tomorrow the sound was finally sorted the way it should be. Remember Tomorrow was played surprisingly in the original studio beat and without the up-tempo the band likes to use live, where they play everything just a notch faster. And this time, in this half-ballad of a song, the main riff sounded downright doomy, it rolled along so heavy. Dickinson introduced Remember Tomorrow as a song that means a lot to him, because when he joined Iron Maiden, they auditioned him with exactly Remember Tomorrow. Things were getting hotter and hotter.
Suddenly we found ourselves in the middle of a crossfire of machine-gun fire coming from the sound clips of the film ‘Where Eagles Dare’. It was riddled by that one-of-a-kind drum roll, which morphed into the famous grandiose and majestic riff of Where Eagles Dare. Holy cow! I was losing it again! To think I’d get to experience this song live someday! Devastating and uncompromising to the extreme. Of course, there was no way to skip the obligatory Run To The Hills. Dickinson shone with his vocals, singing top-notch, without a flaw. He really got into it during Revelations, a ballad of course, which he wrote himself for Iron Maiden and which is still considered one of the most beautiful Iron Maiden ballads. The atmosphere was exceptional, but so we wouldn’t fly off too far in the other direction, Iron Maiden brought us nicely back down to earth with the naughty Wrathchild (apparently they played Charlotte The Harlot in Prague two days ago, and in Graz they swapped that song for Wrathchild, which in the eyes of a true Iron Maiden fan is undoubtedly an unfathomable shame). During Die With Your Boots On we got the first pyrotechnic effect and of course Dickinson finally screamed his famous catchphrase for the first time: ‘Scream for me Graz!!!’
The concert hit its definitive peak with the performance of Phantom Of The Opera. Dickinson took some time to catch his breath and said, among other things, the following: ‘This song is all about Iron Maiden. This bastard rocks! If you get this song, than you get Iron Maiden. If you don’t get this song, then well …fuck you!!!’ Phantom Of The Opera. The first real mini EP that Iron Maiden wrote 25 years ago. A true masterpiece, the real cue for all the distorted melodizing that flourished after 1980 and that Iron Maiden, as first violin of the New Wave Of Brtish Heavy Metal, set off. The sound here was phenomenal. Iron Maiden shone in all their glory. In exceptional stage perfection and tightness! No way it wasn’t clicking. The song took your breath away. Exceptional rolls on McBrain’s drums, Harris’s rattling bass guitar. Everything flew together like only in dreams. All the switches between calm and fast passages, Dave Murray’s soulful solo in the middle and then the atmospheric ending. In general, out of all three guitarists this time I’d single out Dave Murray, who spun most of the solos during the show. He was in a great mood and the fire in his fingers just wouldn’t die down. Hats off!
Then the curiosities just kept coming. The song The Number Of The Beast served up five scandalously dressed girls who came to keep Iron Maiden company on stage, decked out in red and black. With little horns, wiggling tails and (plastic) pitchforks in their hands, they faithfully served their big friend from hell and made mouths water for those few moments. During the song a rotating figure of a hairy horned devil with angry glinting eyes appeared on stage. So The Number Of The Beast was live fun like it hasn’t been in a long time. On top of that, Iron Maiden blasted a fair amount of pyrotechnics into the air. Old-school, of course, calling the eighties back to life. Still, a little ‘pyrotechnics class’ with Rammstein wouldn’t hurt them, and Iron Maiden could of course teach them guitar playing in return. And then one more mini EP to close. Of course, Hallowed Be Thy Name. Again, like with Phantom Of The Opera. Iron Maiden in a dream performance. No slip-ups, spot on. The ending was standard, I usually barely notice it anymore, Iron Maiden being Iron Maiden. Eddie, though, was made on a low budget this time. Behind Nick’s drums a pretty simple balloon inflated with Eddie’s head taken from the cover of Iron Maiden’s debut. The main set was thus wrapped up. Iron Maiden disappeared behind the curtain with the ease of old pros, off to a couple of liters of Radenska.
They opened the encore with Running Free, and before that Dickinson warned everyone present that Iron Maiden will release a new studio album next year and that some of the songs we get to hear tonight will probably never be played on an Iron Maiden setlist again. The Eddie figure, though, was seriously below average! He came stomping onto the stage during the legendary song Drifter. Yeah, that’s interesting. The whole encore was set up completely rock’n’roll style. Drifter and Sanctuary were written in the late seventies, and both have an interesting, calm passage laid over a basically rock’n’roll-based main motif, which deliberately breaks the fluidity of the song itself, which was a peculiar kind of experiment for those times, one Iron Maiden most likely picked up from U.F.O., who influenced the early Iron Maiden heavily (the song Iron Maiden, which was likewise written in the late seventies, is set up in a similar way). That’s why the encore was truly something special, since it was a perfect trip back to the very beginnings of the creation of the steel and ultimate repertoire of the iron maidens.
Anyway, the overall verdict on the concert is that for an immodest 13 bucks a piece, the people in the hall deserved normal sound across the whole show, given the band’s seasoned track record. There were only 6000 people in the hall, even though they could have fit twice as many, so the Austrian crowd really didn’t manage to create any special atmosphere or impression. And now, if we draw a parallel with a hypothetical Iron Maiden concert in Hala Tivoli, firstly it would be a full house and secondly, a ‘total smash’ that the Slovenes would definitely deliver. Something to think over once more for all the scaredy-cats in Slovenia (read: potential promoters) who yet again overlooked another tour by legends. Maybe the band’s all-too-obvious routine bothers a bit in places too. I can also take a swipe at the setlist, which, especially when it comes to the records ‘Piece Of Mind’ (1983) and ‘The Number Of The Beast’ (1982), left plenty of people who were expecting the songs Still Life, Invaders, Children Of The Damned, To Tame A Land, high and dry.
Well, however I turn it over, an Iron Maiden concert simply can’t disappoint. Apart from the early sound hiccups we had to put up with in Graz, an Iron Maiden concert is always an unrepeatable adventure that only legends can take you on, and this time was no different. And this concert was really something special. That true ‘eighties feel’ was there on stage (with the exception of Dickinson’s hairstyle). Having them play song after song from ‘Killers’ and the debut, ho, ho, ho, …. Nothing more to say. Iron Maiden remain giants you simply must not miss whenever they come to play in ‘our’ (Graz) backyard.
Setlist
The Ides Of March (taped intro)
01. Murders In The Rue Morgue
02. Another Life
03. Prowler
04. The Trooper
05. Remember Tomorrow
06. Where Eagles Dare
07. Run To The Hills
08. Revelations
09. Wrathchild
10. Die With Your Boots On
11. Phantom Of the Opera
12. The Number Of The Beast
13. Hallowed Be Thy Name
14. Iron Maiden
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15. Running Free
16. Drifter
17. Sanctuary
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