(#364: 23 April 1988,
1 week)
Track listing: Moonchild/Infinite
Dreams/Can I Play With Madness/The Evil That Men Do/Seventh Son Of A Seventh
Son/The Prophecy/The Clairvoyant/Only The Good Die Young
Hip music writers did their damnedest to “rehabilitate” rock
music in 1988 but Iron Maiden was a theoretical bridge too far for them. What
could have been less “hip” in 1988 than a forty-one-minute prog-metal song
cycle loosely based on the writings of Aleister Crowley and Orson Scott Card?
Even sympathetic ears recoiled in horror at the presence of synthesisers and
damned the project as “too European.” Others cried sellout.
Actually Seventh Son
was Iron Maiden’s biggest album in six years because it was also their most
focused album since The Number Of The Beast. Besides which, I’m always sympathetic to any musicians who
paraphrase Vivian Stanshall (“Moonchild”’s “And the mandrake screamed”), while “Can
I Play With Madness” and “The Evil That Men Do” saw the band finally attend to
putting together something called a pop song.
It isn’t my universe at all, but holds together pretty
coherently and is performed with casual expertise (same line-up as Beast but with Nicko McBrain at the
drums). The epic setpieces. “Moonchild” and the title song, proceed patiently
through many styles and approaches (the Jean-Claude Vannier-esque choral
interlude in “Seventh Son” is entrancing, and the same song demonstrates an
equally instinctive understanding of loud and soft contrasts as anything Steve
Albini was recording at the time) and I wonder how lauded these pieces would
have been had, say, Saint Vitus or Blind Idiot God put them out on SST (Maiden’s
“Moonchild” knocks Fields of the Nephilim’s “Moonchild” into the cockiest of
hats). “Infinite Dreams” in a different setting with a different singer would
be a deep soul classic. And as for the dreaded synthesisers, these seem to be
mainly one-note string synthesiser lines played as an adjacent to, rather than
being the centre of, these songs; it is hardly Rick Wakeman time.
Bruce Dickinson brings all the record’s diverging strands –
fortune telling, spirit mediums, second sight, apocalypse, saviourhood,
resurrection - together with a mournful-cum-outraged delivery which puts him
squarely in the tradition of Arthur Brown (as the flaming colander atop Eddie’s
head on the cover makes explicit) and it’s sad that this piece should coincide
with the news of his recently diagnosed (but apparently, and happily, successfully
treated) tongue cancer – get well soon, Bruce! As would be expected with Maiden
at their best, this music is finally all very silly – and really how sillier is
it than, say, So Far, So Good…So What?
or …And Justice For All (both in
themselves very fine albums)? - but done
with the gravest of seriousness. I don’t remember it being reviewed at all in Melody Maker or NME, but it has lasted a good deal better than some of the things
that were reviewed in either.
