Iron Maiden
Pull a thread
Run to the Hills: How Iron Maiden Wrote the Old West Without Ever Seeing It
Steve Harris learned the frontier from paperback westerns, then flipped the camera on the people those books rooted for. Forty-four years later the song is still the loudest history lesson in metal.
Four Englishmen and a pile of Louis L’Amour novels
In early 1982, Iron Maiden had a new singer, a British tour already booked, and no album. What they did have was a bass player who read a lot of cowboy books.
The Two Songs Nicko McBrain Would Come Back For Are Both Adrian Smith's
Iron Maiden’s drummer says he’d record again, but only for “something more simple.” The two tracks he names are from Somewhere in Time*, released 29 September 1986, and both were written by the guy covering for a bandmate who had nothing left.*
The quote, and what everybody stopped reading after
In September 2026, Metal Hammer’s Matt Mills asked Nicko McBrain whether he’d ever record with Iron Maiden again. The answer ran in the magazine’s own site on 13 September, and the headline half of it travelled everywhere: “If Iron Maiden went into the studio, I’d be delighted to get back on with them. But it’d have to be something more simple really.”
Two Blank Credit Lines: Why Bruce Dickinson Wrote Nothing on Somewhere in Time
Iron Maiden’s sixth album turned 40 on 29 September 2026. The singer’s name appears on none of its eight songs, and the reason has nothing to do with the reason his name was missing four years earlier.
The album with a hole where the singer should be
Open the sleeve of Somewhere in Time and count the writing credits. Steve Harris takes four: “Caught Somewhere in Time”, “Heaven Can Wait”, “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner” and “Alexander the Great”. Adrian Smith takes three, including the one everybody knows. Dave Murray and Harris share “Deja-Vu”. Bruce Dickinson takes none. That is the whole album: eight songs, and the man singing every word on it wrote none of them.
Peace Sells... But Who's Buying? at 40: Megadeth's Farewell, Mustaine's Memoir, and the Family Tree Behind His "New Big Four"
Four clocks struck in the same ten days of September 2026. Put them side by side and the story of Bay Area thrash turns out to be one family, still arguing at the same table.
The week the calendar lined up
Start with the dates, because nobody planned them and they still fit.
On September 8, Dave Mustaine published In My Darkest Hour: A Memoir, written with Joe Layden and centred on his 2019 throat cancer diagnosis and the making of The Sick, The Dying… and the Dead! (megadeth.com, Rolling Stone).
Steve Harris built a stage at Knebworth for the Iron Maiden history his own 50th-anniversary tour leaves out
On 10 July, Iron Maiden’s founder stood sidestage watching Blaze Bayley sing songs the two of them wrote together — songs the band’s 50-year setlist has no slot for. He booked the show himself.
Here’s the version of this story that went around in July: Steve Harris turned up to watch his old singer. Nice gesture. Classy guy. Moving on.
That’s not the story. The story is what Harris put on that stage, and what it says about the band’s own 50-year accounting of itself.
Queen has never made an album with Adam Lambert — and that's why he's still there
Roger Taylor says a return to the stage is “more down to Brian.” Fifteen years in, the thing that keeps Adam Lambert safe is the record Queen never finished.
Asked in June 2026 whether Queen would play live again, Roger Taylor did not say the band was tired. He said something stranger, and more useful:
“Well, it is a big machine to gear up, if you know what I mean.”
Sepultura's Rock in Rio setlist is Derrick Green-only — and the discography says that's the correct call
On September 5 Sepultura open the Palco Mundo at Rock in Rio with no “Roots Bloody Roots,” no “Arise,” no “Ratamahatta.” Nothing from the founding era. Look at what the band recorded and the omission stops looking like a snub.
What was announced, two days before the show
On September 3, 2026, Sepultura let it out: the Rock in Rio set would be drawn exclusively from material recorded with Derrick Green, from Against (1998) through The Cloud of Unknowing, the four-track EP released on April 24, 2026. The three songs everyone in that field knows by heart, the ones from the Max Cavalera years, are not on the list (Rolling Stone Brasil). The band opens the day on the main stage (Wikimetal).
Fear of the Dark: How Iron Maiden's Audience Rewrote the Song
The most famous vocal hook in “Fear of the Dark” isn’t on the album. A crowd wrote it, and one crowd in particular, 250,000 strong in Rio, made it permanent.
Play the studio version. Something’s missing.
Put on the studio cut of “Fear of the Dark”, title track and closer of Iron Maiden’s ninth album, released May 11, 1992. Great song: moody intro, a gallop in the middle, that circling guitar melody. But if you’ve only ever heard it live, or watched any concert footage from the last three decades, you’ll notice a hole where something should be.