Name acts didn’t put out singles in January. Whether this wisdom was cause or effect of the month’s traditionally low record sales I’m not sure. But the start of the year was a time for rewarding the stoicism of singles that had hung around unfestively through December and hit the top as the tinsel tide receded. Either that, or it was a moment for complete flukes. What Iron Maiden realised was that flukes could be engineered: a canny Christmas Eve release date and a well-informed fanbase could almost guarantee a number one. Within a few years – helped by first-week discounting, alternate CDs, and all the other tricks in the 90s chart-manipulator’s bag – this would become the norm every week of every month. In 1991, it was still a delightful shock.
Or at least that’s how I remember it. Looking at the list of Maiden hits, though, it seems obvious that their audience had firmed up while the rest of pop weakened – this was their sixth top ten single in three years, well-marketed for sure but not really a freak occurrence. Of course it suited the band to play to the gallery a bit – framing this triumph not as a just reward after a string of hits, but as a cheeky goblin raid on pop propriety. Fittingly the song is the band at their most pantomime, from that comic ellipsis on down. Bruce Dickinson hams his verses up with hoarse, cackling relish before launching into that villainous flourish of a chorus, and the rest of the group attack the song with similar gusto. If anything, they’re enjoying themselves a little too much, with all the soloing and menacing build-ups stretching the track a tiny bit thin.
But perhaps I’m only judging this from a pop perspective. I have no ear for metal at all – of the major styles of pop music it’s the one I feel least affinity with. This isn’t dislike exactly – I like a bunch of metal tracks, though perhaps not often for their metallic elements. But I’ve never learned to discriminate, to get a handle on what makes one solo good and another bad, puts one group in the pantheon and another in the bargain bin, or marks the viciously contested boundaries between metal and everything else. So I’m at a loss to assess “Bring Your Daughter” on any terms other than an aggressive, theatrical rock track with a joyful heart beating beneath its Freddy gloves and zombified flesh. And as one of those, it works really rather well.
Score: 6
[Logged in users can award their own score]
Hello from India, by the way, where I’m posting this from my conference hotel room! Preparations for said conference took much longer than I’d hoped and account for the lengthy gap between Cliff and this.
I reckon this is worth at least a 7, awesome piece of pantomime.
Half the kids in my primary school seemingly had a big Iron Maiden patch on the back of their jacket. I was aware of them as a visual/branding thing WAY before I heard any of their music, and as a 10-year old boy that sort of insane gothic fantastical imagery naturally appeals. So yeah they probably reached critical mass around this time, but they had a few months left before becoming cringeworthingly unfashionable – Smells Like Teen Spirit being, what, six months away?
The Maiden documentary (shown on BBC4 the other week) was massively enjoyable to watch. It followed them on a world tour with Bruce flying the plane (hurrah) and they all looked like they were still enjoying themselves hugely.
#3 they were huge at my school when I was 10-12 too though – whenever POWERSLAVE was – so I don’t think their core audience really changed, and yeah I knew about them long before I heard the music. I still EXPECT the music to be a lot fiercer than it actual is to be honest, because the kids who liked it were also the kids who had seen horror films, and I knew horror films were scary ergo Maiden must be scary too.
re unfashionable – this was post Iffy Boatrace so Bruce D was a bit of a comic figure in the non-metal press by now anyway. Did Kerrang etc give up on them post-grunge?
Cringeworthingly is actually the name of Lord* Iffy Boatrace’s butler
*(call him by his title)
Iron Maiden were a welcome occasional presence in eighties charts, coming up with a monolithic slab of graphic novel narrative punctuated with a racin’ supa-electrified loud guitar break a few times every year. Every time they seemed to chart higher, only to quickly drop out of the charts after a fortnight.
I’m no fan, but it does strike me that ‘Bring Your Daughter’ is a lot weaker than most of their previous hits. There was always an aspect of play-acting to their singles, but this is the first one that seems primarily to work as a joke to me. And once you start playing that game, it does have to be said that Alice Cooper was doing that sort of comedy-horror narrative with much better tunes eighteen years earlier.
So I’m pleased that the Maiden had their fortnight at the top, but I wish that it could have been with something that showed them at their best – ‘Run To The Hills’, ‘Aces High’ or ‘Can I Play With Madness?’, say.
Totally agree with Billy @7. The real shame is that this is their number one and not the tracks he mentioned – particularly Run To The Hills. It’s a fairly weak Maiden track. I don’t think I can go higher than 5. It might even be a 4 if I listen to it a couple of more times.
Two other things: the linked piece on QOTSA’s Lost Art Of Keeping A Secret – yep, that song is one of my favourites; indeed, I would say it’s still the best thing that QOTSA have ever done (closely followed by Make It Wit Chu – which also is less metal and more something else). I wonder if Tom still has the same view on it now though – it’s over 10 years since it came out. I am obviously geting old – I saw them on that tour, as a teenager.
And, having read the Europe review, I’d say that this is the first metal number one. Final Countdown had a metal solo but not much else about it is actually metal to my ear. I’m not a huge fan of the genre but as someone who was a teenager in the 90s, Motorhead and NWOBHM are the start of metal as far as I can see – leading as they do to the big 4 and thrash, all of which have a lot more in common with modern metal/the metal that was big when I was a teenager than Europe (Final Countdown sounds to me as though it has more in common with Bon Jovi, Van Halen, etc – more rock than metal). Indeed, I would go further and say that listening to things that are classed as metal from before NWOBHM, I hear more stuff that sounds like rock than what I would actually think of as metal (and that includes early Black Sabbath and their ilk).
This is likely splitting hairs – and if so, fair enough!
I’ve always liked metal but Maiden have never done it for me, and this track seems to me to be especially dull – although the title is a classic. By way of contrast Alice In Chain’s Facelift was out by this point and was in some sense the metal of my dreams – a genuinely cool update on yer basic Sabbath spooky noises(guitar and vocals)+stonking bass riffing-style metal.
I’m surprised by Tom’s generous score for this track. 6 is pretty good after all (it’s what I Feel Fine got!): end of year highlight counts are for scores of 6 or more, right? But this is no highlight.
3
#5 yeah, lack of heaviness has always been my problem with metal. metal fans clearly find it plenty heavy, so it must be something about the way i’m listending rather than the music itself – i suspect that a lot of the stuff i think *is* heavy – early pixies, say – wouldn’t be heard that way at all by proper metallers.
as i’m typing this i’m increasingly wondering what i mean by ‘heavy’, of course.
I was surprised how much I enjoyed this – although it goes on a bit too long.
re 8: I’m not sure you can make such clear distinctions between ‘rock’ and ‘metal’ although bands like Iron Maiden self consciously identified themselves as the latter.
#10 – the early Pixies guitar sound is a thin, spidery thing, isn’t it? Little reverb/chorus, just dry and clean, which is why it doesn’t sound like metal even though it’s angry and loud. Or is that utter nonsense?
My memories of Maiden are similar to #3 and #5 – patches on the back of school jackets and all that – though I remember a metal snob dismissing them as a bit lightweight but good for introducing young kids to the genre. A gateway drug into harder metal, as it were.
5/10 for this; Can I Play With Madness might have got a 6.
@11 I think what I am trying to say (probably in a not very articulate manner) is that post NWOBHM and, I would say, certainly post Thrash, that metal sounds a hell of a lot different to what has been deemed as metal beforehand. Because of my age, I suppose, the stuff post Thrash is what I think of when I think of metal. You’ve got to draw a line somewhere I reckon. HMV, for instance, seem to draw that line in a totally different place to me. AC/DC are in the “metal” section – whereas for me, they are a rock band with a metal logo.
Europe, as a result, don’t fit into what I can hear my archetype of metal sounding like. Iron Maiden do – basically because of the fast downpicked riffing that’s going on. Therefore, for me, this is metal and TFC is not. Your mileage may well vary.
yeah, early pixies certainly don’t sound like metal, i was saying more that to me they deliver the aggressive and exciting thing that metal has always set out to offer a lot more effectively than metal ever has. ‘heavy’ probably isn’t the right term to use about the pixies, though i suppose a lot of grunge was basically sabbath’s heavy sludge added to pixies’ dynamics and economy.
Iron Maiden seemed nothing much beyond ridiculous at the time, but listening to it now this track has a pleasing Kiss / Alice Cooper 70s pomp rock feel to it. I’m not that familiar with any other IM tracks, though, might check some out this week.
According to Wikipedia this song won a “Razzie” for “Worst Original Song of 1989.” Apparently it was written for Nightmare On Elm Street 5. The page has a great quote from Bruce Dickinson about the song, I’ll just leave it here –
“Here I tried to sum up what I thought Nightmare On Elm Street movies are really about, and it’s all about adolescent fear of period pains. That’s what I think it is – deep down. When a young girl first gets her period she bleeds and it happens at night, and so she is afraid to go to sleep and it’s a very terrifying time for her, sexually as well, and Nightmare On Elm Street targets that fear. The real slaughter in the Freddie movies is when she loses her virginity. That is the rather nasty thought behind it all, but that’s what makes those kind of movies frightening.”
@5
No, they were very much still a Kerrang!/Metal Hammer fixture post-Kurt and onwards through to the general sense of relief when the ill-advised Blaze Bayley era came to an end and they could get back to interviewing the air-raid siren rentaquote himself again.
This was an odd one for me – I’d just turned 12 and was busy getting into things metallic from the sources many people have already mentioned, i.e. playground/peer-group osmosis and the like. 1991 would turn out to be a big year for the hard-hitters of the genre – “Enter Sandman”, Megadeth and Slayer riding the wave of their 1990 successes, Anthrax collaborating with Public Enemy, even the bombast and ambition of the “Use Your Illusion” albums if you’re willing to stretch the definition a little – and in this environment, “Bring Your Daughter…” already felt somewhat anachronistic even to my relatively untrained ears.
On the other hand, Tom is spot on when he says it was both sold and perceived as a “cheeky goblin raid on pop propriety”, and the chart aficionado side of me was as delighted then as when Slipknot improbably bulldozed their way to a #1 album a decade later. I’ll happily join the crowd wishing it had been one of Maiden’s many other, better tracks that hit the top – not only musically, but also on behalf of that pubescent metalhead who just wanted to be taken *seriously* dammit (*stomps feet, slams bedroom door*) – but in a way it’s entirely appropriate that they should have got the nod with something that distilled the essence of metal’s flair for the camp, ridiculous and borderline morally dubious into a neat, efficient, kid-friendly, parent-baiting package, and I very much doubt the band themselves regret it for a moment.
re 14 – er, my last sentence isn’t an especially blinding observation, i realise!
This was one of the few times I was completely unaware of a song’s existence before it went straight in at #1 and so as Bruno Brookes announced it at the end of the chart rundown that week I was shocked and confused – pleased that Cliff had been booted off but not really enjoying this one either, probably also thinking ‘well this isn’t as good as Can I Play With Madness? is it?’ (not that I was ever a big fan of the band or an expert on the genre at any point).
It followed ‘Holy Smoke’ which I think The Chart Show refused to air in full due to sexist content (I vaguely recall Dickinson’s “The Chart Show are a bunch of pricks” outburst on another TV show at the time).
I tend to think of ‘Enter: Sandman’ as my default favourite metal hit which is quite lazy but any interest I had in the genre dropped to practically zero over the next ten years although it may have peaked as “recently” as 1993 despite thinking Morbid Angel’s ‘God Of Emptiness’ (a world away from the metal and metal-based sounds you’d occasionally hear in the charts inc. grunge) had to be the worst thing ever watched by Beavis & Butthead.
Hmmmm, metal? I’m not sure Iron Maiden were ever taken very seriously by those who liked their metal, or certainly hard rock, stretching from Zep, AC/DC to Metallica and Slayer.
A sort of cartoon band really, occasionally good fun – and this is ok – nothing more. Bruce is a bit of a character though. The original lead singer, from Women in Uniform times – looked like he should have been working in a bank. Not surprised they replaced him pronto
Isn’t this song one of the records to suffer the largest fall off the #1 slot too? I think it fell to something like #10, then #30ish and was out of the top 40 chart before the end of January. Can anyone confirm? (I’m only half remembering this from my Dad’s 1995 Guinness Book Of Hit Singles which had a section of oddities in the back – which I wound up reading a couple of times in bored moments as an adolescent)
And has anything trumped it for falling from #1 rapidly since then?
@18
If “Holy Smoke” was banned from the Chart Show, I assume it’d be for its (cack-handedly Maiden, but unequivocal) anti-American-religious-nutter content (thus fearfully/incorrectly interpreted by ITV as anti-religion?) rather than anything sexist. At least I can’t see anything there.
Maiden were absolutely in the vanguard of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, along with Saxon and Def Leppard (hon.precursors: Budgie; Mötörhead), and I don’t think what they came to be seen as changes this, any more than it does with the Lep. No NWoBHM, no thrash, d00ds.
#22 The ‘Slaughter’ chart trajectory went 1-1-9-32-68
#18 IIRC ‘Holy Smoke’ was banned for its use of the word “shit”
@23 Pretty steep then. Would likely be difficult to beat that without the single in question being deleted wouldn’t it?
Apparently this is only the 74th most popular IM track! – http://www.the-top-tens.com/lists/best-iron-maiden-tunes.asp
Wow – a quick google shows a couple of records have fallen #1 to #20 (both still to come though in the distance at this point) and Mary’s Boy Child went from #1 to #12. By process of elimination this must have been the second or third biggest faller of all time at the time I read that book.
What is more – another (relatively distant) upcoming number one was out of the charts 3 weeks after getting to number one.
This didn’t hang around but it’s not as atypical as I thought. Apparently BYDTTS only sold around 100k copies in total and only 42k to get to #1.
‘only’
This was a great chart event – Cliff being toppled by an apparently Satanic record (although the drummer’s actually as devout as Cliff) – but Tom’s spot on about the marketing implications. I do however recall UB40’s complaints a decade earlier that King/Food For Thought was outselling Going Unnderground by 10,000 the week the latter went to number one.
If perspiration rather than inspiration merits reward then IM deserved this after a dozen years’ hard graft. Otherwise it’s awful- the same record they’d been making for years with the thudding bass of Steve Harris (no one’s ever looked worse in a football kit), cynically adolescent lyrics of Bruce Dickinson and off-the-peg dentist drill guitar solo. After more than thirty years they still haven’t written a decent song that’s “crossed over” – there’s no “Living On A Prayer” or “Sweet Child Of Mine” in their repertoire.
27, Mary’s Boy Child slipped from 1 to 2
22, I recall Axl Rose being interviewed at Donnington in 87 or 88, and being asked “do you have anything in common with Iron Maiden?”. His reply – “I hope not”
30. Did it? I wonder how crap the site was I was looking at then?!
“I’m not sure Iron Maiden were ever taken very seriously by those who liked their metal”
Oh, man, what a statement. You guys legitimately have never met any metalheads, have you?
legitimately? breakin the law breakin the law!
Vim: “I don’t think you can be funny about metal.”
Colin: “I think you can every time you pick up your ruddy guitar, you frightful thing.”
#30 and #31 –
Boney M’s Mary’s Boy Child/Oh My Lord dropped from 1 to 2.
Harry Belafonte’s Mary’s Boy Child dropped from 1 to 12 (and climbed back up to 10 the following Christmas).
Terrible record, really. I’d never particularly disliked Ver Maiden – you have to say their take on metal was pretty accessible, ‘The Trooper’ being a vague favourite among the few non-believers at my school – but certainly didn’t rush out to buy their records even when, at, say, 14 I was taking home half the chart. I do have a 7″ poster bag version of Stranger In A Strange Land, however, although there may have been some Heinlein regard in there.
But EVERYONE was into metal. I had a theory as a secondary school kid that it was all late-adopters. As I’d been buying singles since I was a tot, I was fairly settled in my tastes and (impeccable) judgement by the time I hit 12/13, but my peers who started taking interest in music then seemed to default to metal. A pressure thing, maybe. Or perhaps they loved it, though I suspect they’d wash their hands of it now.
Anyway, quality aside, I was still pleased Maiden had pulled off this trick. As Tom implies, it was a gambit ahead of the game and – whatever their real worth – they’d earned a spot in the record books.
Haha my best mates at school were metalheads, but this was the mid-90s and it was way too late for them to like Maiden (though Sabbath were highly respected!).
I think this became #1, pretty much as Tom called it; shrewd timing and a savvy fanbase. I certainly have “Run To The Hills”, “666 (The Number Of The Beast)” and “Can I Play With Madness” rated higher in the personal Maiden canon in my head. And we can’t attribute the Nightmare On Elm St tie in to it’s success, as the franchise was beginning it’s downward trajectory along it’s popularity arc with The Dream Child. “Slaughter” explores and mirrors the themes of teenage sexual awakening and the onset of menstruation, which Nightmare is built around. They could have used “Slaughter” in Carrie, if Hollywood wanted the metaphor to be telegraphed to it’s audience.
Their USP was theatrical live performances and a strong brand image with their mascot “Eddie”. [Eddie + Freddy, could it have been more obvious to the suits at New Line?]. But any Maiden fan would tell you, the strength of the band were their live performances, compared to to more utilitarian run-outs by AC/DC or Motorhead, as such Maiden appealed to a younger audience; the type who bought singles rather than albums, so Maiden were no strangers to the Singles Chart.
“Slaughter” on it’s own is a fairground ride of a single. Dickinson enthusiastically plays his part, with that cod-operatic voice of his. It’s hard not to smile listening to it. 7 or 8 on a good day.
@35. Result, evidentily that site wasn’t as crap as might have been the case – I just wasn’t clear.
@37 One of my mates really loved metal too – but as far as he was concerned, the less accessible the better (Dimmu Borgir, Burzum, Earthtone 9 and the delightfully named Rotting Christ being particular favourites of his, I seem to remember). I doubt he gave Iron Maiden a passing thought.
@39 my chums were the exact opposite: they basically taped everything off the R1 Rock Show then cherry-picked the ones that sounded most like Metallica. This is why I know who Corrosion of Conformity are.
So we’ve got to 40 comments and no-one’s brought up the topic of class, which seems far more pertinent to this record than any other number 1 for quite a while, in as much as I reckon those who rushed out to buy this record would generally have been from a higher socio-demographic group than those who were buying Mariah McKee, NKOTB, Black Box, or whoever.
Nowt wrong with that (and in part this must also be tied in with the relatively low weekly sales that this song sold when it was top of the pops)…
Is my perception (full disclosure: council estate in East London upbringing, aspirational and academically sound but not really “posh” but very right-wing state secondary school of a kind since outlawed by New Labour further out towards Essex) correct that Iron Maiden, in particular, had something of either a grammar school or public school (at any rate let us say boarding school) following?
Iron Maiden only had a very small number of fans at my school – and it had to be said that these people tended be both the more academically intelligent and also quite introverted and sensitive (though not hypersensitive). To generalise somewhat.
It’s possible this might just be a regional thing (I suppose dance music was more in vogue with yer average South Essex 15 year old in early 1991), and in other parts of the country this divide doesn’t exist (for some unsubstantiated reason I have the vague sense that in the Midlands this sort of music had a far more mainstream following) – but the presence of some kind of lyrical, mythological, even pseudo-intellectual depth in some of the Maiden’s lyrics might confirmt this, no?
Anyway, I’m glad they had a number 1, although like seemingly everyone else wish it had been with “Run For The Hills”. I also think that some of their other top 10 singles in the late 80s/early 90s (notably “The Clairvoyant”) are cracking little numbers. And certainly were it not for the top 40 show would I have been introduced to bands of occasionally magnificient talent like Metallica (the first track of theirs I heard, when it was a new entry at no 20 in summer 88, “Harvester of Sorrow”, was like absolutely nothing I had ever heard before), the (rather inferior) Anthrax, or even Megadeth (“Holy Wars-The Punishment Due” and “Hangar 18” – a quite splendid brace of top 40 singles that). Though I think my favourite HM-ish single from around that time remains, desperately uncool, and not that heavy at all, Van Halen’s “When It’s Love” from 88… and then there was Vixen..and still going strong, as fine and as quintessentially English as a strong regional ale, Magnum, but I digress.
The other point I wanted to mention, in this far too incoherent and rambling comment, is the enormous influence that heavy metal had on the development of popular culture in Russia during the perestroika period and afterwards. In visual imagery and sound it really caught on. To the level of blatant plagiarism, often.
I suspect in the UK the class signifiers for metal vary more regionally than for any other music.
That’s interesting, chelovek, and I am in an ideal position to confirm your thesis. There were plenty of Maiden fans about when I was at Dulwich College in the eighties, but I can’t recall any at all at Crown Woods School once I’d moved to there.
Although the Maiden have plenty of female fans, there’s something about the combination of their artwork and imagery, fantasy and allusion in the songs and the loudness and craft of the music that speaks particularly to boys in single-sex schools.
I hadn’t listened to the Top 40 that weekend (can’t remember why) so was quite shocked to see them at No.1 in the paper on Monday morning, though I do remember being extremely relieved that Cliff’s pile of bilge wasn’t number one anymore.
I think 6 is a fair mark for this record – it has a cracking chorus but the rest of the record is nothing special. I preferred some their late 80’s hits such as “Can I Play With Madness” and “The Clairvoyant”, especially the former.
Oh, and I didn’t know of any Iron Maiden fans at the school I went to (in Swindon). Infact, any mention of Iron Maiden was usually treated with derision
#41 – I must be desperately uncool as well then, “When It’s Love” is a fantastic record, Van Halen certainly knew how to pull off a Synth riff. While I’m being tragically unhip I’ll mention Whitesnake’s sublime “Give Me All Your Love” from early ’88. A truly stunning rocker I never tire of listening to (unlike the overplayed “Here I Go Again”)
Just a thought: Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, which didn’t come out in the UK until April 1990 (a year after in the US) was a pretty big slow-burning sensation at this time. It left a lot of people feeling something like affection towards relatively generic metal who hadn’t given it a second thought before. The film has some great Iron Maiden jokes and it does kind of set IM up as the template for wylde stallions (or whatever the hell B&T’s band is called). I wonder then whether this #1 is in part a result of that background cultural attention.
41 – interesting, but in my particular Essex school, Maiden fans (and metallers in general) tended to be from lower middle class/ working class backgrounds. The bottom set of any particular subject you care to name tended to have a few Iron Maiden jacket patches in the classroom. I’m still in touch with a few of them, and these days they all have manual labour jobs. Like Prog Rock before it, I’d be tempted to say that metal spoke to a certain kind of teenage male adolescent irrespective of class rather than being responded to solely by either posh people or salt of the earth types.
Anyway, I never got it really, but to this day if you forced me to pick a Metal band I found most listenable, Iron Maiden would be my choice. The polished slickness of Hair Metal appealed not, and the gruff masculinity of most of the rest of the bands was just perplexing to me (still is, actually). It always seemed as if there were hangovers from Prog going on with metal in that everything became reduced to discussions of the quality of guitar solos, musicianship and the “deep meaning of the lyrics” (which, like Prog, were and are frequently downright silly rather than profound).
Maiden, on the other hand, had a touch of The Who about them to my ears, just the right dose of pop sensibility (they had some fantastic choruses) and silliness for me to actually find a way into what they did. But… “Bring Your Daughter to the Slaughter” is far from being their finest work, as has already been stated numerous times above. I loved the fact that it got to number one, and I scoffed at people who made jokes at its expense (I remember some comedian on television wondering if the 21st Century equivalent of Max Bygraves would ever cover it on a light entertainment show as a nostalgic memory lane piece. It’s yet to happen) but I knew deep down it was a bit lukewarm and wasn’t even up there with “The Clairvoyant”, never mind “Play With Madness”. Not the best track they could have come back with, but perhaps they just liked the idea of having a song with that title at number one, and I can perhaps see their point.
RE the class issue – my experience (Essex again) is that metal picked up both extremes. The well-spoken sensitive loner types who were good at maths (although I went on to fail the A-level) seemed to go for it as something that welcomed the outsider. The bikers came at it via Motorhead, Hawkwind and Quo.
I always loved the idea of heavy metal far more than I liked the actual tunes or records. I was a fan of the idea for years.
At my state school in the late 80s, IM were definitely not a “middle class” band but they were one for the blokes – the geeky SF imagery that permeated most metal outside the LA hair outfits was both a cause and an effect of that probably.
Yayyy!! Chris Needhams first number one.
This is the first number one from my lifetime that I can’t play in my head, at least partially. I’m in favour of the idea, and think I was at the time – “Aw, bless, the metallers got a number one and they’re so happy, awww!”, but I heard too much metal with my Welsh cousins and never got into it.
Mind you, I like the hard-rock end of indie/grunge well enough, (especially if you count GnR amongst them) so it’s not a heaviosity thing. Metal just blurs into a vaguely irritating noise for me, better than some other genres but not something I could bear for long in a club. And I’ve been made to test that…
Still, this is painless enough. A perfect 5.