Matt Wardlaw of Ultimate Classic Rock recently conducted an interview with IRON MAIDEN bassist Steve Harris. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.
Ultimate Classic Rock: ["British Lion"]
is some of my favorite material that I've heard from you in recent
years. Everything feels very natural and it had to be fun, writing,
recording and playing this stuff.
Harris: Yeah, well there was no pressure at all. I absolutely love what I do in MAIDEN
and enjoy every minute of that too. This is enjoyable in a different
way in the sense that I suppose [because] the people that you're working
around have not had the [same] sort of success or limelight that I've
had, so there's just an earthiness to that and it felt really good.
Ultimate Classic Rock: Despite your concerns about people giving this album a chance, it seems like the overall reception has been pretty positive.
Harris:
It's been very positive for the most part. There's been a few people
that haven't been so kind to this thing, but it's just a matter of
opinion and that's fair enough. But I think these people initially
reacted when they very first heard the album when we had an online
playback and they were talking about stuff straight away without really
having the chance to have it sink in at all. I think some of those
people maybe have changed their mind and some of them won't. But it is
what it is. Hopefully people will like it but if they don't, well, then
they can give it to someone else.
Ultimate Classic Rock: It's been 30 years since [IRON MAIDEN's] "The Number Of The Beast", which was the start of a very important new era for your band. What are your thoughts looking back at that time period?
Harris:
Well, it was a scary time period as well, because we'd just changed
singers and at the time, it was a very traumatic period for us, worrying
about how people would take to the new singer, but take to him they
did, in a big way, so we didn't need to be worried! [laughs] But
before the album came out, it was very worrying. We knew we had a really
strong album and we knew we had a really great singer in Bruce [Dickinson], but you just never know how people are going to react. Lucky enough, everyone liked him and obviously it went on from there.
Ultimate Classic Rock:
It's incredible to read that you were working from scratch on that
album and had very little material prepared prior to recording. And yet
the album completely hit the mark. How did that change your approach to
future recording? Was going in cold a good thing?
Harris:
Totally, yeah. We didn't have any material. We'd used everything up that
we had from the periods before that, [from] before we were signed and
the first two albums. The second album, "Killers", there's only
three or four totally new songs, the rest of all of the stuff was all
from early periods, so the pressure really was on big time. Not only did
we have a new singer, but we also had to come up with the goods to come
out with a really strong album with completely new material. The weird
thing is that all of that material was written in a two- or three-week
period, because that's all of the time we had. So that put us under so
much pressure, but that dictated the way we've recorded everything
since. We thought, "Well, that's the way we work well, under pressure,
obviously," so that's what we've done ever since. We've just allowed
ourselves a specific time of period to write and that's what we do. So
we don't ever write on the road, we just write right there [in the
moment] and it's worked well for us ever since.
Read the entire interview from Ultimate Classic Rock.
