Iron Maiden
Malahide Castle, Dublin
★★★★★
Iron Maiden’s Run for Your Lives tour begins with a projection of a dingy east London backstreet with boarded-up pubs and a sign to Upton Park, former home of West Ham United.
That’s the part of the city where Iron Maiden formed, almost 50 years ago. Many of their fans – and even some of those fans’ parents – wouldn’t have been around then.
The band are undimmed by the passing years. Iron Maiden could do a Metallica and create two set lists, to perform on separate nights. They’re the only two bands in heavy metal with back catalogues that good.
Instead Iron Maiden stick to a greatest-hits package – by which we mean the greatest of greatest hits, the first XI, the gold standard, the best of the best.
Alanis Morissette at Dublin’s Malahide Castle: Set list, ticket information, how to get there and more
Iron Maiden in Dublin: All killer(s) no filler in a near perfect set list that hits the high notes every time
Alanis Morissette: We thought that whole era of ‘size zero’ was done. We dropped the ball
Music and artificial intelligence: ‘AI isn’t just a new sound. It’s a new infrastructure baked into our products and services’
At Malahide Castle on Wednesday they perform songs from the incredible streak that began with their self-titled debut album, in 1980, and ended with Fear of the Dark, in 1992, after which Bruce Dickinson, their singer, left the band for six years.
The odd quibble aside, Iron Maiden fans couldn’t ask for a better set list. It’s all killer(s) and no filler – pun fully intended, as the first three songs of the night, Murders in the Rue Morgue, Wrathchild and Killers, are all from the band’s 1981 album, Killers.
Dickinson should donate his vocal cords to science. How he keeps hitting the higher register song after song, tour after tour, is a wonder. He is 66 yet seems half the age as he bounds around the stage.
He remains the greatest showman, whether wearing a luchador mask during the ancient Egypt-themed Rime of the Ancient Mariner or singing the incomparable Hallowed Be Thy Name while locked in a cage.
During The Trooper, a song about the Crimean War, Dickinson swaps the Union Jack that he waves as if he’s leading the Charge of the Light Brigade for an Irish Tricolour.
Maybe he’s trying to be ... what’s the word commonly used for this type of gesture: inclusive? Or perhaps he knows that the first Victoria Cross medals were won during the Crimean War by Irishmen. But we digress.
Dickinson welcomes the band’s new drummer, Simon Dawson, who began playing live with Iron Maiden only last month. He replaced the affable Nicko McBrain, who retired from touring last year, at the age of 73.
The real star of the tour is the digital display that accompanies every song. It is, in effect, a seventh member – and a suitable backdrop for the band’s epic takes on history, myth and literature.
On Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a 13½-minute epic based on the Samuel Taylor Coleridge poem, a full-rigged ship pitches through mountainous seas, freezing waters and sunsets coloured red and blue. It’s hard to take your eyes off the big screen as it conveys the majesty and horror of being at sea in a doomed ship.
Iron Maiden can’t go on forever, but here they are, still rocking against the dying of the light.
