Is No Prayer For The Dying up there with your favourite Iron Maiden albums? If the answer is ‘yes’, you’re in a fairly select group. It would be a massive stretch to say the record, released in 1990, is as beloved as such nailed-on classics as The Number Of The Beast, Powerslave, Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son or A Matter Of Life And Death.
But if you are willing to go into bat for the metal legends’ eighth album then you’re in good company. One person who really loves it is Maiden bassist Steve Harris himself. Speaking to Metal Hammer as part of a feature on supposedly rubbish metal albums that are nowhere as bad as people say they are, ’Arry leaps to No Prayer For The Dying’s defence – and reveals the one thing he’d change about it that would have cast it in a completely different light.
“I think it’s a really strong album,” he says, pointing out that it came on the back of a run of increasingly ambitious albums and tours. “At the time, we had gotten so big, with all the grandiose shows, that we were trying to go back to basics a little bit.
“If I’m totally honest, I think it was slightly influenced by Bruce’s solo album, Tattooed Millionaire [also released in 1990], where he was trying to get a bit more basic,” continues Steve. “There are a couple of songs on there where he sings a bit rougher. I was thinking I could write something where he could sing with that gruff delivery as well.”
This commitment to stripping things back extended to recording the album in a converted barn in the grounds of Steve’s house. And the one change he would make if he could do it again? Well, it’s a pretty major one.
“We were trying to make it sound like a live album, which is why we got the Rolling Stones Mobile studio in to record live in the barn. We probably should have put audience noise on it, because it would have sounded more like a proper live album – we did that with the Tailgunner video, and it made a big difference.”
Ironically, one of the more derided songs on the album is its most epic-sounding: Cossack-metal anthem Mother Russia. “Mother Russia got really slagged off, but I listened to it recently and I thought, ‘This is really good,’” says Steve. “I was going for a [20th century Russian composer] Sergei Prokofiev kind of vibe, which I felt I got, but it got slagged off anyway.”
Not that Steve Harris is bothered by whether you like No Prayer For The Dying or not. “I don’t care about that kind of stuff,” he says. “I remember when Jethro Tull’s album A Passion Play got slagged off, [Tull mainman] Ian Anderson didn’t want to play the UK anymore,” he says. “If it were me, I would have embraced it. I would have gotten all the journalists into one room, and piled into them – not physically, but verbally. If someone says they don’t like something, that makes me embrace it even more. You’ve got to believe in what do, don’t you?”
You can check out the list of albums that are nowhere as bad as people say they are – also featuring Judas Priest, Metallica, Machine Head and more – in the brand new issue of Metal Hammer, onsale now.
(Image credit: Future)
