Iron Maiden

The group has sold over 130 million albums worldwide with minimal support from the radio or mainstream media. Its music has gone silver, gold, and platinum over 600 times. It has won Grammys, Brit Awards, and countless other accolades. Iron Maiden played over 2,500 live shows, which are still regarded as some of the best out there.

Iron Maiden’s hard-hitting sound practically defined the genre of heavy metal and inspired bands like KISS, Metallica, and Avenged Sevenfold. Combine that with the band’s intelligent lyrics on topics like history, mythology, war, society, and literature, and it’s easy to understand why its appeal hasn’t faded.

Iron Maiden formed on Christmas Day of 1975. Bassist Steve Harris put together a short-lived original lineup, with only Harris and guitarist Dave Murray remaining in the band to the present day. By 1978, the rockers found vocalist Paul Di’Anno, whose raspy voice fit the group beautifully. Finding the right people occupied the group throughout the rest of the ’70s, and was a challenge for much of the band’s career, but it was by no means stagnant during this time.

Iron Maiden’s self-titled debut album dropped in 1980. It landed at number four on the UK Albums Chart and was lauded by journalists around the world. Iron Maiden included fan favorites like “Transylvania,” “Phantom of the Opera,” and “Running Free.” The group’s headline tour of the UK gained it devoted fans, as did its stints opening for Judas Priest and Kiss on tours. Its show at the Reading Festival in the UK 1980 drew 40,000 fans.

The band released Killers, its second studio album, in 1981. With better production and songs like “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” this album inspired decades of speed metal to come. Iron Maiden’s success launched a world tour that took it to the United States for the first time.

1981 saw the dismissal of Paul Di’Anno due to drug use and his replacement by Bruce Dickinson, who remains the lead singer today. Over the next ten years, the band’s eight subsequent albums like The Number of the Beast (1982), Piece of Mind (1983), and Seventh Son of a Seventh Son (1988) are living testaments to the prolific creativity and work ethic of the group.

By the end of the ’80s, Iron Maiden was arguably the best metal band in history. Its live shows had progressed to unprecedented grandeur, with a 100,000-watt sound system and highly-innovative light shows. It toured with groups like Anthrax and headlined events like Roskilde Festival in Denmark.

Bruce Dickinson departed from the band on August 28, 1993, playing a final farewell concert to mark the occasion. It wasn’t until the turn of the millennium that he rejoined. The band’s next album, Brave New World, was a return-to-form with progressive elements and complex melodic work. Brave New World charted around the world and re-established Iron Maiden’s place at the top of the metal world.

The band continued releasing cutting-edge albums in the 2000s and 2010s, from 2002’s Rock in Rio to Senjutsu in 2021. The intervening decades have seen the band tour the globe extensively and take its infamous live shows to even greater heights. From stadiums to outdoor festivals and beyond, Iron Maiden is uniquely able to captivate tens of millions of fans, elevating its art to new levels while pushing the boundaries of what metal is and can be.

Catch the band in concert — it’s an experience you’ll never forget.

Some people might try to tell you that in 2003 the entire country was listening to The Strokes, Dizzee Rascal, The White Stripes or something other “cool” act. You can tell them to their face that they’re either highly mistaken or filthy liars. 2003 was the year that the Jack Black classic rock comedy School Of Rock was released and, by some possibly divine act of harmony, it was also the year that absolutely everyone in the country fell in love with The Darkness. With the film and the band’s debut album working in tandem with each other, 2003 was the year of the riff, and a good year it was too.

The band began four years before all that, beginning in 1999 when struggling guitarist Dan Hawkins met bass player Frankie Poullain. The duo promptly moved in together and started looking for other instrumentalists to form a band with. They found a drummer in Dan’s old school friend Ed Graham, but a singer wouldn’t be found until millennium eve, when Dan watched, stunned, as some clown at a karaoke contest completely aced Bohemian Rhapsody. He nailed every tricky octave leap and star-jumped like a maniac when the riff kicked in, all without missing a note. Said clown was Dan’s older brother, Justin Hawkins, who was immediately recruited as the bands singer and rhythm guitarist.

By 2000, the band was set, and they started performing live everywhere that would have them. Their astonishing live sets in pubs and small clubs around the country gained them a devoted following and buckets of hype. This hype was mainly centred on how Justin Hawkins performed like the bastard child of Freddie Mercury and Angus Young captivating an entire stadium, whilst the band was actually playing grotty pubs in Kentish Town. The following they built up was so large that in 2002 they became the first unsigned band to ever headline London’s legendary Astoria club in Charing Cross.

Clearly, they were not going to be unsigned for long, and by 2003 the band had signed to Atlantic Records. Now, at this point they had a large amount of hype behind them, but nobody was prepared for quite how huge they were poised to get. The album was released in July and within a year had sold 1.5 million copies, their big single “I Believe In A Thing Called Love” was released in September and peaked at number 2 as did their Christmas single “Christmas Time (Don’t Let The Bells End) and things only got more insane come 2004.

2004 saw them support Metallica on tour, win three BRIT Awards for Best British Album, Best British Group and Best Rock Group, and then capped off their debut album campaign by headlining the Reading and Leeds festivals. To put that in context, that puts them in the same category as the likes of Guns ‘N’ Roses, The Cure and Foo Fighters. Put simply, they were a big deal. The downside of all this is that it was all downhill from here on out. The cracks were showing as Justin Hawkins’ party lifestyle started to get as much press as the band’s music, but it seemed under control. For now.

The bands commercial pull had deteriorated as well due to over-exposure. The backlash had begun in earnest and releasing an album in 2005, the year after they’d been absolutely everywhere, was a bad move. Although it eventually went platinum, the bands second album “One Way Ticket To Hell… And Back”, missed the top ten entirely, where their debut had gone straight in at number two. The resulting tour saw a tired, out of it band performing to dwindling audiences and constant tabloid attention concerning Justin, who in 2006 admitted to spending £150’000 on cocaine in three years after the success of “…Thing Called Love”.

Everything had to stop, Justin was sent to rehab for his own health, and while he was in he decided to leave the band to stay away from old habits. Without their totem and frontman, the band called it a day soon afterwards. The band members went quietly into other projects for the next five years, but in 2011, the band reunited to play second on the bill at that year’s Download Festival. Since then, the band have been on top form, with their third album “Hot Cakes” hurtling into the top five of the album charts, and some of the best live shows of their entire career. Clearly they’re a band on their second wind, and it would be a crying shame to miss out. Highly recommended.

Brothers, Ryan and Joel O’Keeffe, came together to form a band in 2003 and recruited David Roads and Adam Jacobson. They worked at the Hotel Warrnambool and would bring their instruments to work so that after their shifts they could jam out song ideas. They went on to win a competition, called Push-On in Melbourne. It was their self-funded eight track EP entitled “Ready to Rock” that appeared in July 2004, that fell into the hands of Capitol Records whom they signed a five album record deal with.

It was a journey to the US for the band to work on their debut studio album, “Runnin’ Wild” with Bob Marlette who had produced albums with Ozzy Osbourne and Alice Cooper. The album was released in Australia on June 23rd 2007, and they released three singles from the album; “Runnin’ Wild”, “Too Much Too Young Too Fast” which featured on Guitar Hero; World Tour and “Diamond in the Rough”. The album made it to the top 30 of the ARIA Albums Chart in Australia, and even managed to chart in Austria, Switzerland and France. Nearing the end of 2007, they supported Kid Rock and Korn and at the start of 2008, they moved permanently to the US. Their album by this point had charted on the UK Albums Chart, and on the Billboard 200.

At the beginning of 2009, Airbourne headed back into the studio to record their sophomore album “No Guts. No Glory”. It was later released on March 8th 2010. The song “Born to Kill” was played on BBC Radio 1’s Rock Show. It reached the top 20 on the ARIA Albums Chart, and also in five other countries. They were fortunate enough to support Iron Maiden on their Final Frontier World Tour from July 20th to August 1st 2011. The band announced in November 2011 that they had been working on a new album. That album would be called “Black Dog Barking” and would go on to reach to top forty of ten countries.