Forty years ago this fall, Iron Maiden released their sixth album, Somewhere in Time, which became an instant classic thanks to the singles “Wasted Years” and “Stranger in a Strange Land.” About a year had passed since they’d concluded their gargantuan
World Slavery Tour, which had made them metal superstars, so they worked hard to find ways of making a run of shows they dubbed Somewhere on Tour even more over-the-top.
An excerpt from Maiden drummer Nicko McBrain’s newly released book, Hello Boys and Girls!, highlights some of the right and wrong turns they made while making the album and on tour. Elsewhere in the book, he also tells his life story, both before joining Maiden in 1982, his time in the group, and after he decided to step away from touring with the band in 2024 due to the aftereffects of a stroke a year earlier.
Diehard Maiden fans will instantly recognize McBrain’s voice when they read the book, especially since “Hello boys and girls,” was his catchphrase. He refers affectionately to bassist/bandleader Steve Harris as “‘Arry” and guitarist Adrian Smith as “H” and shares anecdotes about singer Bruce Dickinson and guitarist Dave Murray. (His use of ‘kin’ should make sense if you read it out loud.)
Here’s what he wrote in the book about the period surrounding Somewhere in Time, beginning with the initial writing sessions for the album, which took place in the Bahamas.
Bruce clearly thought the band needed to go in a different direction and turned up to Nassau with a bunch of acoustic songs. ‘Arry thought he’d lost the plot, and rather than getting us all in and saying, “What do you boys think?,” he rejected them on the spot.
I could tell that Bruce was a bit miffed about that, but it was ‘Arry’s band and he called the shots. I never heard Bruce’s efforts, but ‘Arry said they were quite Jethro Tull, and while I’ve got nothing against Jethro Tull (we’d actually covered their song “Cross-Eyed Mary”), they’re definitely not very Maiden.
Luckily, H stepped up to the plate with three great tracks, including “Wasted Years” (about homesickness, funnily enough) and “Stranger in a Strange Land” (about a sailor who went missing on an Arctic expedition and was discovered in the ice years later), which were both released as singles.
As for ‘Arry, his influences on that album included British film (The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner) and ancient history (“Alexander the Great”). But despite a lot of references to time on the record, we didn’t mean it to be a concept album, as some have suggested. Perhaps the time thing was subconscious, given that the World Slavery Tour had seemed never-ending.
From Nassau, we decamped to the Wisseloord Studios in Holland to record the guitars and vocals, before moving on to Electric Lady Studios in New York for the mixing. H and Davey used guitar synthesisers for the first time on that album, and you can hear the effects from the opening note of the first song, ‘Arry’s “Caught Somewhere in Time.” But while Maiden using synths might sound risky in hindsight, that’s just the way the wind was blowing in rock music in the mid-Eighties. The march of technology stands still for no man.
A few people felt betrayed, like when Bob Dylan went electric, although one fan in Poland must have been over the moon. When we were over there a couple of years earlier, this kid had said to Bruce, “I want to play heavy metal with synthesisers,” and Bruce had snapped back, “You can’t play heavy metal with synthesisers” (we’d occasionally remind Bruce about that and the clip pops up in the recent Maiden documentary Iron Maiden: Burning Ambition – now available to rent, boys and girls!). But Somewhere in Time obviously hit the mark with most of our fans because it did even better business than Powerslave.
“Wasted Years” was the first single, and we had a lot of fun performing it on German TV. We thought we were going to be playing it live, but when we were getting ready to go on, the director told us we’d actually be miming. As a kind of protest, we switched instruments midway through, so that ‘Arry was on the drums, Bruce was playing the bass, and I was singing, even though I didn’t know the words. The director went spare at us, not that we cared.
Rod was recently asked if he had any regrets about the length of the World Slavery Tour, to which he replied, “Going ’round the world twice was probably not the best idea I ever had. So Somewhere on Tour was only 157 shows.” Only 157!
Having said that, by the time of the first gig in Belgrade, I was raring to go, not least because I’d just had my first custom drum set made by Sonor: nine-ply maple shells, gun-metal matte finish, black chrome (proper black chrome, not chrome with a powder coating).
Sonor said to me, ‘Do you know how much that’s going to cost?’
‘You make it, I’ll pay for it,’ I said. I never did.
Bruce always calls that the “great inflatable tour” — because there were inflatables ‘kin’ everywhere. There was a spaceship that spat fire, and my favourite Eddie of all time, done up as a ray gun-toting cyborg. Loved it. There was another Eddie wearing a monocle, who’d appear underneath my riser when it was elevated during the set, and, of course, two giant Eddie hands.
‘Arry and Bruce would stand in the palm of each hand and be lifted, which looked pretty cool. But one night, a lamp got too close and burnt a hole in one of them, and it started deflating while ‘Arry was still on it. It got mended for the next gig, but one of the roadies also tied all the fingers back apart from the middle one, so that it looked like Eddie was giving the crowd the bird.
We had other Spinal Tap moments, like the time Bruce got stuck inside a Wicker Man Eddie (he was in there with a bunch of scantily clad women, so he didn’t mind too much), but our visuals became vital to the band’s identity, and fans expected them to get bigger with every tour. Which they did.
The skeleton, or backline, was always the same, including a horseshoe-shaped walkway behind the drum set and two “ego ramps,” as we called them, which Bruce would hare up and down. I asked him once, “Why do you spend so much time up there?,” and he replied, “To get away from the fuckin’ noise, Nick …”
We were known for using a lot of pyro until health and safety regulations changed the game. Suddenly, we’d have to get permission from the local fire chief, which cost more money. We always kept the flames for “The Number of the Beast,” though, which would be lovely during an open-air gig on a chilly spring or autumn evening: I’d be freezing my tits off and these huge flames would shoot up and make me glow all over, if only for a few seconds.
But these kinds of stage sets don’t come cheap — especially giant inflatable Eddie hands — and we’d also have about 25 permanent people on tour — backline guys, sound guys, light guys — plus local crew, meaning we could end up with as many as 60 at a show. They all needed to be paid, plus the permanent people would need their flights and hotels sorting, as well as per diems for meals and whatnot. It was crazy expensive, but once you go big as a rock band, you don’t go smaller unless you absolutely have to.
As far as I know, it wasn’t called the Somewhere on Tour as an in-joke — as in, “Where the hell are we today?” – but there was a lot of that going on. I’d sometimes forget what day it was or what city we were in, and while I don’t recall Bruce ever shouting out the wrong place — “Hello, Cleveland!” — I’m told it happened on an earlier tour and that the others couldn’t help laughing.
On a tour of that length, everything starts bleeding into one after a while. Even if we were playing somewhere we’d played before, I might not remember it. Sometimes, I’d swear blind that we were playing a venue for the first time, walk through the door and think, Oh, I remember this place now …
Excerpted from HELLO BOYS AND GIRLS by Nicko McBrain, copyright Nicko McBrain 2026. Reprinted with permission by HarperCollins.
Click here to read the full article.
