Location: Trieste / Piazza dell’Unita d’Italia / Italy
Date: Tuesday, 07/17/2018
If Iron Maiden come anywhere near, we go to Iron Maiden. It’s become a mantra you just can’t resist, no matter how many shows you’ve already seen from one of the biggest bands on the planet. For metalheads, Iron Maiden are what religion was for Marx. Opium. Once you’re hooked, there’s no going back. So this pilgrimage to Trieste was mandatory once again. The weather played a few tricks when we rolled into Trieste in the afternoon, but the sky cleared up fast, and after three opening acts, Iron Maiden met a crowd of ten thousand under a sun-soaked sky without a single cloud.
To start off, as we’ve gotten used to over the last ten years, a bit of the usual Maiden nepotism. The first support act to take the stage, just like two years ago at the same venue, was Britain’s The Raven Age. Who, you ask, and the question is totally fair, since they’re just one more in the flood of modern metal bands that nobody would sniff at, apart from the genre’s biggest diehards, if Steve Harris’s son George weren’t the one shredding on those six strings. The Raven Age swapped singers right before the tour, with Matt James replacing Michael Burrough, and put out the single Surrogate, which confirmed they’re firmly anchored in modern metal close to newer In Flames, meaning music full of open-chord riffs, annoying melodies, breakdowns and whiny vocals that tore up your ears. It’s nice that dad Harris is helping his son along his musical path, and it’s commendable that George isn’t following in his father’s footsteps, since with his band Steve has pretty much said everything there is to say in heavy metal. But it’s also sad that a relatively untalented band gets, thanks to family ties, the kind of opportunity many better bands would kill for. Luckily, The Raven Age will probably be doomed to just playing shows in front of Iron Maiden.
Things took a slight turn for the better, but not by much, with Rhapsody of Fire, who as locals got a warm reception from the Italian crowd, but with the very first song, Distant Sky from the latest studio record Into the Legend, made it perfectly clear what we were in for. We got about forty minutes of total overkill in every department. The “cinematic Hollywood” metal the Italians served up had exactly what you’d expect from it, except that Rhapsody of Fire take an already generous symphonic blaze, full of guitar arpeggios, fairy-tale Snow-White-and-the-seven-dwarfs keyboards and operatic power metal vocals, and toss on a log or two or three more. Unless you’re a die-hard symphonic power metal fan, it all comes off pretty comical, and it doesn’t help that the two most visible members, vocalist Fabio Lione and drummer Alex Holzwarth, left the band two years ago. On drums you don’t even notice, but the young vocalist Giacomo Voli can’t exactly brag about overwhelming charisma. Still, Rhapsody of Fire closed with the classic Emerald Sword and took us way back to the cult Symphony of Enchanted Lands, when their symphonic metal, bombast and all, still kind of worked.
The tension before the reunion with the giants of heavy metal was building fast, but first up was the last support act, Tremonti, which guitarist Mark Tremonti of alternative rock heavyweights Creed and Alter Bridge founded seven years ago as just a solo project. After the first album, the project grew into a full-blooded band, which released its fourth album, A Dying Machine, a little over a month ago, and that record landed them on stages with Iron Maiden. Precisely because of that, the American four-piece flew by pretty much unnoticed this time. The guys delivered their modern mix of alternative metal, hard rock and grunge very decently, confidently and with plenty of energy on stage, and the melodies stick in your ear quickly, but this time they ran into ears hungry for Iron Maiden, not Tremonti. Maybe the Americans will have better luck at Metaldays, where they play on Wednesday, July 25.
The sun was slowly setting over Trieste, and the city’s biggest square exploded when the UFO classic Doctor Doctor blasted from the speakers, immediately followed by the piercing voice of the World War II bulldog, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, clearly announcing the anthem to the aerial heroes of the Battle of Britain and one of the Maidens’ most punchy and recognizable songs, Aces High. The crowd roared as the legendary sextet ran onstage, with Dickinson wearing a pilot’s cap on his head, leaping high in front of the front monitors, completely in his element, and with the first verses he made it clear he hadn’t been in such great vocal form in a long time. Within the first seconds of the Trieste show, Iron Maiden delivered a truly epic sight, as a gigantic Supermarine Spitfire with a spinning propeller rose above Nicko’s flak battery over the band! After a long time, the Iron Maidens prepared some unexpected and wonderful surprises with the song selection this time, the first right at the start, as they stayed in World War II waters with Where Eagles Dare. Iron Maiden hadn’t played the song, inspired by the novel of the same name that became the 1977 classic with Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood, since the Eddie Rips Up The World tour in 2005. Even so, from Nicko’s cult opening drum roll, with which the band first introduced itself to Maiden fans way back in 1983, the band sounded flawless, yet organic and downright magical, and this was only the beginning of the second Trieste date with the Brits. The rocking and slightly overplayed 2 Minutes to Midnight got the Italian crowd, hungry for the biggest hits, on their feet, and another surprise came with the nine-minute masterpiece The Clansman, one of the few shining moments of the album Virtual XI, and it was goosebump-inducing when the “Freedom!” chorus echoed from ten thousand mouths. The performance of gentlemen who are carrying six decades each (except Bruce, who hits sixty in a good two weeks), with the oldest, Nicko McBrain, already at 66, is, to put it mildly, astonishing. You rarely see so much dynamism and movement onstage from any band, and on top of that comes the brilliant performance of every single one of the Maidens. The result can only be a spectacle like only Iron Maiden can deliver, one that feeds the eyes and ears as well as the soul and heart.
During The Trooper came Bruce’s classic waving of the Union Jack (this time with the Italian tricolor too), and Eddie’s visit and the sword duel with Dickinson were not missing either. Dickinson’s occult gem Revelations echoed beautifully into the Trieste sky, with a dazzling vocal performance and an exchange of eerie guitar melodies between the Smith/Murray/Gers trio. In a similar vein came an incredible nine minutes of For the Greater Good of God, and once again the breathtaking performance of the crew on stage gave you goosebumps with its mighty critique of wars waged in the name of religion. The return to Brave New World with The Wicker Man was short but sweet (and it inadvertently reminded me of one of Nicolas Cage’s most over-the-top and therefore cult movie performances in the remake of The Wicker Man, and the gut-busting scene with “Oh, no! Not the bees! Not the bees! Aaaaaahhhhh! Oh, they’re in my eye! My eyes!”). Without a doubt the most epic, mystical and ethereal moment of the Trieste show was the overlooked ten-minute epic Sign of the Cross from the excellent and unjustly criticized The X Factor. Bruce, dressed in a black hooded robe and an ominous, green-glowing lantern, once again stole the spotlight with a megalomaniacal vocal performance, complemented by a dazzling instrumental delivery, and it was truly incredible to watch Harris’s bass rattle, as at 62 he spent almost the entire show with one foot propped high on the monitor, firing away with his bass. Let’s not even get started on Gers’s acrobatics. One of the most spectacular moments, without a doubt, was Flight of Icarus, played for the first time since 1986 (!), which despite its brevity of barely four minutes has everything the big epics have, and live it was upgraded by a gigantic Icarus structure flapping its wings and Dickinson strolling around the stage like a little kid with a double flamethrower. Unforgettable! Iron Maiden then took the main part of the set home, steady and with roaring crowd support, with the hits Fear of the Dark, The Number of the Beast and Iron Maiden. After deafening “Ole, ole, ole, Maiden, Maiden!” chants the band returns to the stage with the gorgeous The Evil That Men Do, the masterfully performed anthem of a condemned prisoner, Hallowed Be Thy Name, and a visibly in-great-spirits Iron Maiden say goodbye to the Trieste crowd with the slightly overplayed but still punchy Run to the Hills.
What to say in closing? If you have the chance to catch Iron Maiden on this tour, take it, because the guys are in the form of their lives, and of all the Iron Maiden shows I’ve managed to catch, this one, even after my hot head cooled down, is by far the best, and by a long shot. If on previous tours we grumbled about relatively short shows, this time the guys really made up for it. They played three songs that come close to ten minutes, and in between tossed in a few goodies after a long time that made even the biggest fans happy and satisfied. And as proof that the mood in the band is high too, which results in such a great performance as the one we witnessed, one last anecdote. As they were leaving the stage two years ago, Dickinson yanked Nicko’s pants down and infamously exposed his butt cheeks. This time, during the final bows to the crowd, Nicko tried to get Bruce back, tit for tat, but didn’t manage it. A concert of superlatives that once again proved Iron Maiden are simply the biggest of the big.
author: Rok Klemše
photos: Nina Grad
Iron Maiden setlist:
1. Aces High
2. Where Eagles Dare
3. 2 Minutes to Midnight
4. The Clansman
5. The Trooper
6. Revelations
7. For the Greater Good of God
8. The Wicker Man
9. Sign of the Cross
10. Flight of Icarus
11. Fear of the Dark
12. The Number of the Beast
13. Iron Maiden
— encore —
14. The Evil That Men Do
15. Hallowed Be Thy Name
16. Run to the Hills
