Author: u0zp4y

In honour of the fast-rising Welsh rockers’ brand new studio album God Shaped Hole, which was released last week and earned a commendable 8/10 review from Classic Rock magazine, we’ve teamed up with Those Damn Crows for this world exclusive bundle that you won’t find anywhere else.

The bundle features four limited-edition gifts: a hand-signed lyric sheet for recent single Dreaming, a framable art print, an exclusive t-shirt you can’t get on merch stalls and a special Classic Rock magazine variant with the Those Damn Crows boys on the cover.

Order your Those Damn Crows x Classic Rock bundle here

Writing for Classic Rock, John Aizlewood described God Shaped Hole as “a distillation of all that has gone before in Those Damn Crows’ world; the unashamedly American undertow to Dreaming and Turn It Around suggest they now feel ready to cast their net into international waters. It’s difficult to imagine there’ll be too much resistance. They’re on the right track.”

Merlin moved into his role as Executive Editor of Louder in early 2022, following over ten years working at Metal Hammer. While there, he served as Online Editor and Deputy Editor, before being promoted to Editor in 2016. Before joining Metal Hammer, Merlin worked as Associate Editor at Terrorizer Magazine and has previously written for the likes of Classic Rock, Rock Sound, eFestivals and others. Across his career he has interviewed legends including Ozzy Osbourne, Lemmy, Metallica, Iron Maiden (including getting a trip on Ed Force One courtesy of Bruce Dickinson), Guns N’ Roses, KISS, Slipknot, System Of A Down and Meat Loaf. He has also presented and produced the Metal Hammer Podcast, presented the Metal Hammer Radio Show and is probably responsible for 90% of all nu metal-related content making it onto the site. 

A recent bust up between longtime REO Speedwagon singer Kevin Cronin and the band’s founding bassist (and sole remaining original member) Bruce Hall has effectively marked the end of the hard rock veterans as a touring band. But hard times weren’t a new thing in the Speedwagon story, as Classic Rock discovered when we spoke to the pair around the release of their fifteenth studio album, Find Your Own Way Home, in 2007.

With record sales topping 40 million, for a brief period in the early 1980s REO Speedwagon were the most popular band in America. And the most reviled.

The Doctor Frankensteins of the contemporary ‘power ballad’, a saccharine mix of gooey love-song fluff and overwrought hard rock guitars, REO shot to the top of the charts with undying monster hits like Keep On Loving You and Can’t Fight This Feeling and paved the way for the endless stream of girl-baiting, chart-smashing soft hits from the glam metal brigade five years later. Suffice to say that were it not for REO, we might never have had bands like Firehouse, Extreme, Slaughter or White Lion. Whether that’s be a blessing or a curse is entirely up to you, but REO’s pioneering work lingers on, even today. The sales they spurred in disposable lighters to wave at concerts alone would boggle the mind.

But there’s more to REO then the power ballad and the squeaky-clean, Midwestern nice-guy image. Underneath the tooth-dissolving sweetness of their poppier hits lies a never-say-die work ethic that has weathered 30 years of adversity. From their salad days in the early 1970s as a scrappy, Purple-powered hard rock band slogging from one Midwest bar to the next, to the enormo-domes and arenas of their Hi-Infidelity era, and back to trenches in their leanest years in the 1990s, REO Speedwagon have endured. No flash-in-the-pan musical trend, no jarring personnel shake-up, no amount of critical disdain can topple them. They are, at their core, an authentic, heads-down, no-frills rock’n’roll band, with just as many tales of woe and moments of blinding glory as any of the flashier 70s rock survivors. There was money to burn and addictions to feed, chart-topping singles and a slow, painful descent back to bar-band status; the perils of rock’n’roll decadence did not pass over the ’Wagon.

“It was 1978. We were headlining an outdoor show in Kansas City; it was at a baseball stadium. Ted Nugent and Fleetwood Mac were opening up for us,” says REO frontman Kevin Cronin. recalling how the band’s first hit, Riding The Storm Out, once took a prophetic turn, and taught the band a lesson in resolve that they continued to carry with them.

“It was raining all day, just miserable. By the time we went on it was really bad. There was thunder, lightning. The promoters were actually trying to talk us out of going on because it was too dangerous. But we went on. I figured, well, we could get the plug pulled on us at any time, so let’s play Riding The Storm Out first. So we went out, played it, and somewhere during the song all the lights go out. There’s 40,000 people that have been rocking out all day, in various stated of inebriation, and the lights go out. The scoreboard was still working, and they put up a warning on it for everyone to get down from the stands because a tornado had just touched down two miles from the stadium.

“So we’re standing on the side of the stage trying to figure out what to do. The managers and the promoters just want to call it a night, but there’s 40,000 people out there who’ve just been told that a tornado has touched down two miles away, and they’re still screaming ‘REO! REO!’ They weren’t going anywhere.

“The only power I had was a flashlight, and I held it over my head so the audience could see me. They went fuckin’ bananas; they knew we weren’t gonna leave ’em. A band with a song called Riding The Storm Out doesn’t wimp out, we do the gig. They finally got the power back up, and we played. And nobody left.”

Riding The Storm Out was the standout track on 1977’s You Get What You Play For, a successful live album that saved REO from losing their long-standing contract with Epic Records. Although the band from Champaign, Illinois had a stranglehold on the Midwest almost since their inception in 1967, they had yet to make any breakthroughs in the rest of the country. Their oddly titled 1978 album You Can Tune A Piano But You Can’t Tuna Fish spawned their first Top 40 hit in the shape of Roll With The Changes, and the band began to pick up steam. At this point REO were still considered a hard rock band, but singer Kevin Cronin, whose background was as a folk singer, was about to usher in some new musical ideas.

“When I wrote Keep On Loving You I had no idea,” Cronin laughs. “I came into the studio and played that song on the piano, and if you could see the look on my band’s face. They looked at me like I was out of my mind. I mean, originally that song had more to do with Mandy by Barry Manilow than it did with Deep Purple, that’s for sure. But I just said to our guitarist, Gary Richrath: ‘Just plug in, turn it up, and see what happens.’ And that was the breaking point, right there: my little ballad, the power of Gary’s guitar, and the drums come in on the chorus. There it was. That record went to No.1 so fast it made our heads spin.”

Keep On Loving You was one of six hit singles on 1980’s Hi-Infidelity album. Although its immediate follow-up, 1982’s flawed Good Trouble, didn’t perform as well as the band expected, 1985’s Wheels Are Turning shot them back to the top of the charts with the No.1 single Can’t Fight This Feeling. For almost half a decade, REO Speedwagon were monsters of rock, with all the money and fame they could handle.

“It’s pretty intoxicating,” Cronin remembers. “You start to think you can do anything you want to do. So suddenly it becomes all about self-discipline. It’s really easy not to buy that bag of cocaine when you can’t afford it. But when you can and it won’t even make a dent in your finances, you’re like: ‘Sure, I’ll take that. Hell, I’ll take two!’ That was a dangerous combination: youth and too much money.”

REO Speedwagon got so big so fast that they even had their own plane, the legendary Flying Tuna. “We were so crazy back then. We’d stay up all night at hotels, drinking, partying, chasing girls – and our pilot was right there with us. The next morning when we were all recovering, he was flying the plane! I’ll never forget, we’d come in for a landing, the plane would bank, and you’d hear Heineken bottles rolling around in the cockpit.”

Such Zeppelin-like scenarios are a striking contrast to the unblemished public face REO displayed in countless television and radio appearances at the height of their success. Cronin chalks it up to knowing when to put the bottle down, but admits that “the reality of life on the road with REO was greatly at odds with the image we portrayed.”

As the 1980s wore on, REO’s bright star began to fade, and dissension within the band set in. A major turning point in the band’s career occurred in 1988, when long-time guitarist Gary Richrath – considered by many to be the heart of REO Speedwagon – quit. Whether he did so of his own accord or was asked to leave is still open to debate, but the end result left the band as close as it ever was to dissolving (Richrath passed away in 2015(.

“It was the 80s. Some of us made it through, and some of us didn’t. I’ll leave it that,” REO’s long-time bass player Bruce Hall says. “But that was definitely one of those points where we questioned whether we should keep doing this or not.”

Cronin agrees. “After Gary left, I wasn’t sure if the band was even going to go on. I was really thinking of calling it a day. I remember one day our manager said to me: “We should probably not be paying for the storage for all the REO equipment. We should just sell all that stuff and give up the warehouse.” That reality hit me like a left cross. I wasn’t ready to let go of it yet. The spirit of REO is that we keep playing, through rain, through tornadoes – we don’t give up.”

The band started again from square one. They brought in a new guitarist, Dave Amato, and in 1990 released the album The Earth, A Small Man, His Dog, And A Chicken, then proceeded to play anywhere they could get a gig. Anywhere at all – even soccer stadiums in Columbia, opening for Milli Vanilli.

“It wasn’t Milli Vanilli, it was the ‘real’ Milli Vanilli,” Cronin corrects. “This was after the scandal, after they had their Grammy taken away. So now, it was 1992. When I heard we were booked in Columbia, I thought there were going to be machine-gun nests everywhere. I was like: ‘Are you fuckin’ kidding me?’

“Anyway, that tour was a high point for us in those days,” he laughs. “We were playing some shit gigs. For a band that had played Madison Square Garden 10 years before, playing bars in New Jersey and country fairs was a real wake-up call.”

This Spinal Tap-ish turn of events resulted in a heap of nasty press at the time from hipper-than-thou critics, but Cronin was undaunted. “I never felt vengeful about anything bad people wrote about us, although it did hurt my feelings sometimes,” he says. “Now it’s just like the old adage: I don’t care what you say as long as you spell my name right.”

In 1996, after their then-label, Priority, went bankrupt, REO self-released the politically charged Building The Bridges. It failed to do much business, so the band concentrated on releasing greatest hits packages, a shrewd move that eventually built their core audience back up. They’ve been touring seasonally ever since, and with the release of their new album Everyone Loves A Happy Ending the band are ready to become full-time rock stars again.

Bassist Bruce Hall is philosophical about it all. “We’re musicians, so what else are we gonna do? We’re just gonna keep playing. If you get to strap on your guitar and play some songs, and people are willing to pay you for it, then you’re a lucky guy.”

Originally published in Classic Rock magazine issue 107, May 2007

Classic Rock contributor since 2003. Twenty Five years in music industry (40 if you count teenage xerox fanzines). Bylines for Metal Hammer, Decibel. AOR, Hitlist, Carbon 14, The Noise, Boston Phoenix, and spurious publications of increasing obscurity. Award-winning television producer, radio host, and podcaster. Voted “Best Rock Critic” in Boston twice. Last time was 2002, but still. Has been in over four music videos. True story. 

Fontaines D.C. and Lankum are teaming up for a special one-off homecoming show in Dublin.

The two Irish acts are the first to be announced for Lovely Days Live at the Home of Guinness, which Guinness is billing as “an unforgettable 3-day music, food and culture experience”, featuring “Ireland’s hottest musical talent alongside global sensations”.

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The Grian Chatten-approved Cardinals are among Louder‘s tips for the 10 best new Irish artists you should be listening to right now.

A music writer since 1993, formerly Editor of Kerrang! and Planet Rock magazine (RIP), Paul Brannigan is a Contributing Editor to Louder. Having previously written books on Lemmy, Dave Grohl (the Sunday Times best-seller This Is A Call) and Metallica (Birth School Metallica Death, co-authored with Ian Winwood), his Eddie Van Halen biography (Eruption in the UK, Unchained in the US) emerged in 2021. He has written for Rolling Stone, Mojo and Q, hung out with Fugazi at Dischord House, flown on Ozzy Osbourne’s private jet, played Angus Young’s Gibson SG, and interviewed everyone from Aerosmith and Beastie Boys to Young Gods and ZZ Top. Born in the North of Ireland, Brannigan lives in North London and supports The Arsenal.

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As of 2025, Iron Maiden have officially been a band for half a century. And what a half-century it’s been. From their early years helping to popularise the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal to becoming all-round breakout stars of metal in the 80s with a string of genre defining albums including Number Of The Beast, Powerslave and Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son, Maiden set the template for what it meant to be a truly massive metal band.

There have triumphs and trials aplenty, but with the band officially commemorating their 50th birthday in 2025 with the massive Run For Your Lives tour, we’ve assembled the 50 greatest moments that have defined Iron Maiden.

1. The birth of Iron Maiden

Steve Harris can’t recall when he had the idea for the band that would become Iron Maiden, but he remembers coming up with the moniker over Christmas 1975. “Even my mum thought it was a great name,” he told Hammer’s sister magazine, Classic Rock. They played their first gig on May 1, 1976 at St. Nicholas Church Hall in Poplar, East London. According to original guitarist Terry Rance: “Half the audience were nuns.”

2. Eddie makes his debut

Maiden’s earliest attempt at high-tech stage presentation, 1978-style, was a Kabuki-type mask suspended above the drums, with a fish tank water pump connected to its mouth. During the final song, this proto-Eddie ghoul discharged fake blood all over drummer Doug Sampson. He wasn’t happy. Everyone else was.

3. Di’Anno gets nicked before his first show

Ever had a bad first day on the job? Spare a thought for roguish singer Paul Di’Anno, who was arrested shortly before his very first Iron Maiden gig when police discovered a knife in his bag – a tool of his trade reconditioning oil drums.

“They did me for having an offensive weapon,” he told Metal Hammer in 2024. “Steve ended up singing most of the gig. I made it back in time for the last song.”

4. The gig that made Maiden

Maiden had worked up a buzz on the London pub circuit, but it was a show on May 8, 1979 at the Music Machine in Camden, sandwiched between Angel Witch and headliners Samson, that announced their impending greatness.

“I thought, ‘There’s something going on with this band, I think they’re going to be big,’” said Samson’s singer, one Bruce Dickinson. He wasn’t wrong.

5. Taking on Top Of The Pops… And winning

Iron Maiden were invited to perform their debut single, Running Free, on legendary TV show Top Of The Pops in 1980. There was just one condition: they had to mime. Naturally, Steve Harris was having none of it.

“I thought, ‘Bollocks to them, what have they ever done for me?” the bassist told Classic Rock. Maiden’s stubbornness won out. The BBC backed down and the band turned in a classic performance – live, of course

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6. Exit Di’Anno, Enter Dickinson

Paul Di’Anno was a key part of Maiden’s success, but his card was marked by his penchant for partying. The band had already lined up Samson singer Bruce Dickinson as his replacement before they’d fired Paul, trying him out in secret. An audition tape, featuring Bruce singing Killers, Twilight Zone and Wrathchild, is on the internet. The words ‘no’ and ‘brainer’ spring to mind.

7. The curse of the beast

The recording of The Number Of The Beast album was reputedly cursed. Studio lights would randomly flicker on and off, and, when producer Martin Birch’s Range Rover allegedly collided with a minibus full of nuns as he was driving home on a dark and stormy Sunday evening, the mechanic’s bill came to £666.

“Martin was so freaked out that he insisted the garage charge him £667,” recalls Steve Harris.

8. Aces Pie

In 1982, anarchic Saturday morning kids’ TV show TISWAS interviewed “some heavy metallic persons” – namely Steve, Bruce and drummer Clive Burr, seated among an audience of fidgety children.

It was all very earnest, until a man dressed as then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (“another iron maiden”) whipped out some custard pies and began pelting the band with them. Because why not?

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9. Mission From ‘Arry

At a gig in Allentown, Pennsylvania in 1983, a heated onstage argument between Steve Harris and Nicko McBrain spilled backstage.

Luckily, Bruce sneakily recorded the expletive-laden ding-dong on his Walkman, prompting an irate Nicko to chase him down a corridor when he clocked it. Released as Mission From ’Arry, a B-side on 1984’s 2 Minutes To Midnight single, the squabble was pure comedy gold.

10. Maiden become a wedding band

Newlyweds Piotr Żmudziński and Dorota Nawrocka must have wondered what the hell was happening when Iron Maiden took to the stage at their wedding reception on August 11, 1984. The band had just played a show at Hala Arena in the Polish city of Poznań and, thirsty for a drink, had headed into town… accidentally rocking up at the club where the happy couple were celebrating their nuptials.

“We were asked if we would like to have a jam,” Nicko remembered. “We thought to ourselves, ‘Why not?’” The wedding band drummer was worried about his kit getting trashed, but Piotr and Dorota couldn’t have been happier about the situation.

“For many years, after we told someone that Iron Maiden played at our wedding, people were sarcastically answering that at their wedding there were The Beatles or Pink Floyd,” Piotr later recalled.

11. The cheese shop incident

The World Slavery tour was an epic, 11-month slog, but the band were starting to unravel just a handful of dates in. At a gig in Arma Di Taggia, Italy, on August 22, 1984, Bruce decided to change the lyrics to 22 Acacia Avenue.

Grubby lyrics about visiting a prostitute were transformed into a song about… a cheese shop?! “If you’re waiting for a long time / For the rest to buy their cheese,” sings Bruce, piling on the cheddar and Stilton-based puns. Terrible, but you gouda laugh.

12. Rock In Rio

On January 11, 1985, the World Slavery tour took a detour to Brazil, when Maiden appeared at the gigantic Rock In Rio festival, second on the bill to Queen.

An eventful set saw a furious Bruce accidentally splitting his head open on a guitar in front of 350,000 people (and a TV audience in the millions). Blood poured down his face. Metal had landed in South America, and Maiden’s hero status on the continent was sealed.

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13. The Lucozade Advert

It’s 1985. Mum’s watching Coronation Street. Yawn. Suddenly, during the ad break, Phantom Of The Opera comes blaring out the telly as 80s Olympic hero Daley Thompson glugs a bottle of syrupy glucose drink Lucozade and legs it in slo-mo around a running track to the sound of the 1980 Maiden classic.

Several million viewers are unexpectedly electrified, and a new audience cops an earful of those irresistible triplets.

14. “Scream for me, Long Beach!”

1985’s monumental Live After Death album is home to one of the most iconic stage cries in history. “Scream for me, Long Beach!” yells Bruce at several points, a reference to Long Beach Arena, where the album was partly recorded.

This clarion call instantly went down in Maiden history – today, no Iron Maiden show is complete without the singer exhorting: “Scream for me, [insert place name here].”

15. Trolling German TV viewers

Maiden’s ‘no miming!’ edict (see entry No.5) had clearly fallen by the wayside when they appeared on German TV show P.I.T. in 1986 to perform their new single, Wasted Years.

As the music played, the (possibly ‘refreshed’) bandmembers started swapping instruments, with Steve Harris and Nicko McBrain deciding they both wanted a go at ‘singing’. Chaos? Ja!

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16. Somewhere In Time’s artwork

Choosing the best Maiden cover is like a parent trying to pick their favourite child. But when it comes to pure nerd-bait, the winner has to be Derek Riggs’s phenomenal Eddie-as-futuristic-bounty-hunter artwork for 1986’s Somewhere In Time. It’s packed with Easter Eggs and in-jokes. We’ve counted 32. Any advance on that?

17. Nicko on the Sooty Show

It was the ultimate drum battle: the mighty Nicko McBrain versus an orange glove puppet. In 1988, the Maiden man appeared on kids’ TV staple The Sooty Show, where he went stick-to-stick with the titular bear.

“I lost – he’s pretty sharp,” said Nicko, who subsequently paid tribute to his nemesis by featuring Sooty on his drum kit at shows.

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18. Something completely different

“Monty Python is in your childhood DNA,” Bruce once declared. Indeed, we all know how much the band love Python (Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life, anyone?) and they were delighted when Python movie editor Julian Doyle recruited Python’s Graham Chapman for 1988’s Can I Play With Madness video. Suitably surreal, it saw Graham fall into a cave and meet Eddie in a freezer.

19. Monsters Of Rock ’88

Headlining a bill that included Kiss, David Lee Roth, Megadeth and Guns N’ Roses, Maiden drew around 107,000 people to the 1988 edition of the Monsters Of Rock festival. The record still stands, but the day will forever be remembered for the tragic deaths of two fans who were killed in the crush during GN’R’s set.

20. Bruce goes to paradise

Short-lived BBC drama The Paradise Club is largely forgotten… by everyone except Maiden fanatics. Bruce dominated one 1990 episode as a hot-headed rock singer embroiled in shady showbiz shenanigans (alongside a pouting, pre-Maiden Janick Gers), delivering such hilariously clunky gems of sanitised street philosophy as “Life’s crap then you die.”

21. Hitting No. 1

No Prayer For The Dying is no one’s favourite Maiden album, but it did contain Bring Your Daughter… To The Slaughter.

Originally a brilliantly schlocky Bruce Dickinson solo song, it was released as a single at the end of 1990 and promptly knocked poor old Cliff Richard’s Saviour’s Day off No.1. It’s still the only Maiden single to reach the top spot.

Metallica paid homage to Maiden with a cheeky, out-of-tune snippet of Run To The Hills on 1987’s $5.98 EP. Maiden returned the favour on their 1992 cover of Montrose’s 70s rock staple Space Station No.5.

As the song speeds up at the end, you can just about hear Bruce say, “It’s getting faster, lads! Hurry up! Here comes Metallica in the rear-view mirror!” For some reason, he then pretends he’s a horse racing announcer: “At the finish it’s Prick, followed by The Wanker…”

23. An early taste of the six-man line-up

Maiden’s six-man, triple-axe line-up got its first rehearsal seven years early, storming Donington ’92 in front of almost 80,000 fans. Two years after leaving the band, guitarist Adrian Smith rejoined his bandmates to give set closer Running Free a euphoric but poignant extra emotional punch.

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24. Bruce’s ‘final’ show

When Bruce left Iron Maiden in August 1993, he went out in the most OTT way possible – with a live show filmed at Pinewood Studios, featuring magician Simon Drake. It culminated in the latter impaling Bruce inside an actual Iron Maiden, before Eddie mounted the singer’s decapitated head on a spike. Of course, there was absolutely no way Bruce could come back after that. Cough.

25. The Blaze years

Let’s show a little love for Maiden’s most-underappreciated era. When diehard Maiden fan Blaze Bayley replaced Bruce Dickinson, he said joining the band was like being Dorothy in The Wizard Of Oz, prompting Bruce to sweetly send him a couple of yellow bricks (as in the Follow The Yellow Brick Road song from the movie).

Let’s not forget that Blaze helped keep the band going during the toughest time in their history – the fact he had some enormous shoes to fill was hardly his fault.

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Paul Travers has spent the best part of three decades writing about punk rock, heavy metal, and every associated sub-genre for the UK’s biggest rock magazines, including Kerrang! and Metal Hammer.