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.”

Then Mills asked what “more simple” meant, and this is where the aggregators stopped typing. McBrain named two songs: “Stranger in a Strange Land” and “Wasted Years.” And then: “That kind of song. I’d love to do something like that.”

Both songs are on the same album, both credited to Adrian Smith alone. And both exist because in 1986 somebody else in that band had run out of road.

A caveat before the fun part, because it matters: there is no new Iron Maiden album. McBrain’s sentence is conditional, if Maiden went into the studio. The last studio record is Senjutsu, from 2021, and nobody in the band has said anything since to suggest another one is in motion.

Where McBrain actually is

He hasn’t left the band, which is the first thing the pickups blurred.

McBrain suffered a transient ischaemic attack in January 2023, which left the left side of his body compromised, and he kept touring anyway. He stepped down from the road only in December 2024, at the end of the Future Past tour, playing those final shows, by his own account, with about 70 percent of the feeling in one hand and unable to execute certain fills. Simon Dawson plays live now. McBrain is still officially Iron Maiden’s drummer.

His own line about the morning it happened, from the Metal Hammer interview: “The miracle was that I had the stroke in the morning, rather than while I was under the twilight anaesthetic.” He says stroke. The clinical description in the reporting is a TIA. Both things are in that sentence and there’s no need to pick.

So when he’s asked whether he’d record again, it’s a man who never resigned asking for a different kind of chart.

1986: the album made in the hole Bruce Dickinson left

Somewhere in Time came out on 29 September 1986, produced by Martin Birch at Compass Point and Wisseloord. It turns 40 on 29 September 2026.

To get there Maiden had just finished the World Slavery Tour: 331 days, 187 shows. Bruce Dickinson came off it with nothing left. When writing started, he brought material in a completely different direction, acoustic, quieter, and the room didn’t go for it. Steve Harris on those demos: “There’s some good ideas, but they’re just not really right for us. It’s kinda very Jethro Tull-y kinda stuff, which I love.” Dickinson’s version of the same meeting: “Should we go a bit more chill-out, maybe a bit more acousticy? And everybody looked at me like I had two heads!”

Harris later described Dickinson as more burnt out than anyone. The result is the thing you can read straight off the sleeve: on an eight-track Iron Maiden album, the singer has no writing credit.

Somebody has to fill that. Smith wrote three of the eight: “Wasted Years,” “Stranger in a Strange Land,” and “Sea of Madness.”

Forty years later, Maiden’s drummer is asked to name the shape of a record he’d want to make, and he picks two songs. Both of them came out of the gap.

The synth that wrote the song with no synth on it

Somewhere in Time is the first Iron Maiden studio album built with guitar and bass synthesizers. That’s its whole reputation: the Derek Riggs sleeve and the neon future on it.

“Wasted Years” was born on one of those machines. Smith, telling the story to MusicRadar: “I got this Roland guitar synth out of the box from Japan, and when I switched it on it started making this crazy noise.” It gave him a song on the spot.

And then he nearly buried it. He thought the thing he’d just written sounded like the wrong band: “It sounded a little bit like U2… I wasn’t even going to play it to Steve.”

On the record that introduced synthesizers to Iron Maiden, “Wasted Years” is the only track that doesn’t have one on it. A synth handed him the idea and then got left off the tape.

So the song is: written by the guy filling in for the exhausted singer, born from a machine that isn’t on it, almost withheld because its author mistrusted it. It’s one of the two songs from that album Maiden never stopped playing live.

Why a drummer working with one good hand reaches for that one

Nobody has asked McBrain what he thinks of his own playing on Somewhere in Time, at least not anywhere I can find, and that is the interview I want.

But “something more simple” points somewhere specific once you know who wrote those two songs and why. Smith’s contributions to that album are what a guitarist writes when he’s covering ground the band needs covered, fast, and the material has to work on its own terms without anyone’s grand plan behind it. “Wasted Years” is the plainest thing on a deliberately loaded record, and it outlived most of what was loaded.

McBrain, forty years on, is in his own version of a constraint. He can’t do what he used to do with his left side. The Maiden he’s asking for is the one that already proved it works when somebody had to write around a limit. That’s a different thing from asking for less.

The DJ line before the track: Maiden’s most technological album, and the song that outlived the rest has no technology on it at all.

The thread to pull

One name in this story doesn’t get a sentence anywhere: Simon Dawson. McBrain’s quote implies he’d be behind the kit if a record happened, and Dawson has been playing these songs live since 2024. Nobody in Maiden’s camp has said what a studio session would look like with two drummers in the credit list, and nobody has asked.

The other thread runs backwards. If the songs Maiden’s drummer reaches for are the ones Adrian Smith wrote to fill a hole, what does that say about the rest of Smith’s stray catalogue, the songs written under pressure rather than as the plan? “2 Minutes to Midnight” was a Smith co-write. So was “Flight of Icarus.” We might be looking at a pattern, and this lab likes patterns.

Which Somewhere in Time track do you still go back to first? Tell us on Threads or X, @realrocklab. The answer I keep getting is never the one I expect.

Sources: Metal Hammer / Louder, 13 September 2026 · ironmaiden.com: Somewhere in Time · Louder: how Somewhere in Time rejuvenated metal’s biggest band · Guitar Player, 14 December 2024, citing MusicRadar · Wikipedia: Wasted Years · Wikipedia: Somewhere in Time