Piece of Mind – Commentary

Piece Of Mind is my favourite Iron Maiden album, although The Number Of The Beast and Powerslave are incredibly close. It was my first Maiden album, and was very influential in guiding the evolution of my musical tastes.

What does it mean? It might be alluding to the eastern concept of nirvana, which when achieved features the extinction of individual consciousness and desire (hence, no 'Brain'). It could also be referring to Christianity, implying that it is for brainless morons. But it is most probably referring to the lobotomisation of Eddie... you can see on the album cover that he has had is brain removed and his skull is now screwed shut.

The original idea for the cover was to kill Eddie, but the band thought that it was too extreme. The trepanation is, according to a Bruce Dickinson interview, an allusion to an old Aztec ritual during human sacrifices. The album was originally going to be called Food For Thought, but they finally decided to give it a more subtle name.

Commercially Piece Of Mind was a huge success, and was even voted the number one metal LP of all time in a KERRANG! magazine poll. It was also the first album with drummer Nicko McBrain, completing a line-up which would last through four studio albums – the longest stable line-up in Maiden history.

The comments by Steve Harris were taken from an interview with John Stix in July 1983.

(...) The first Maiden album to feature Nicko, Piece Of Mind actually begins with a big drum flourish, as if announcing the arrival of the Mad McBrain into their midst. Like Bruce with Paul, in terms of sheer technique, Nicko was a far superior performer to his predecessor, and his addition to their ranks allowed the band an even greater capacity to finesse what was now recognised as the quintessential Maiden sound: full-metal-jacket vocals, combat guitars, artillery-fire drums and the ever-present rythmic pulse of Steve's manic bass, bulging like a vein in the foreground. The sheer strength of the material on Piece Of Mind reflected the fact that, in master technicians like Bruce, Adrian and Nicko, allied to the gutsy rock 'n' roll energy and emotion of Steve and Davey, Maiden now had all the tools they needed to stretch out and begin to create their first real masterpieces.

"For me, Piece Of Mind was the best album we'd done up to then, easily," says Steve, "and I carried on thinking that right up until the Seventh Son... album, which was five years later. I'm not saying the two albums we did in between – Powerslave and Somewhere In Time – weren't good, 'cause there's a lot of stuff on those albums I still think of as some of our best ever, but Piece Of Mind was just special. You can nearly always go back to an album and pick out things you might have done differently, or whatever, but I still think Piece Of Mind is good the way it is. It was Nicko's first album. We felt like we were on a high, and you can hear that mood on the album, I think. Most of all, though, it was just the songs. Between us, I thought we'd really come up with the goods this time."

They certainly had. As usual, a clutch of Harris-penned tracks provided the backbone of the album, including 'Where Eagles Dare', a sky-kissing paean to self-reliance and inner strength; 'The Trooper', a Boy's Own tale of wartime derring-do; 'Quest For Fire', inspired by the thought-provoking movie of the same name, released in 1982; 'To Tame A Land', an epic album-closer with lyrics only comprehensible to readers of Dune, Frank Herbert's labyrinthine novel of space-age politics, love and war. In fact, the band had originally planned to call the track 'Dune', and had discussed using a spoken-word passage from the book as an intro, but then Herbert sent word via his agent that he was refusing them permission because, he said, "Frank Herbert doesn't like rock bands, particularly heavy rock bands, and especially bands like Iron Maiden." Ouch! "He just assumed that, because we were a rock band, we must be a load of morons," says Rod, nonplussed, "which, to say the least, is a pretty narrow-minded attitude."

Of the remaining five tracks, 'Flight Of Icarus' and 'Sun And Steel' were Bruce and Adrian numbers; 'Still Life' was a Steve and Davey tune; 'Die With Your Boots On' was a Bruce and Adrian idea onto which Steve grafted some ideas of his own; and 'Revelations' was a song that Bruce came up with on his own. All of them were superb, but two, 'Flight Of Icarus' and 'Revelations', deserve special mention. The former, a mid-paced growler that suddenly bursts into a multi-tracked vocal chorus straight out of the REO Speedwagon back catalogue, was the controversial first single from the album. An unbelievably cheesy piece or just unbelievably catchy, depending on your point of view, despite reaching Number Eleven in the UK in April 1983 and gaining the band their first single release in the US (where, unlike the UK, singles aren't released unless a record company is utterly convinced that they have a potential hit record on their hands), 'Flight Of Icarus' divided critical opinion, not least amongst the band themselves. "I don't think there's anything wrong with 'Flight Of Icarus' as a song," says Steve, "though I do wish we'd had more time to break it in live before we recorded it. It was a lot more powerful live, a lot faster and heavier." However, Bruce insists, "Steve never liked it. He thought it was too slow, but I wanted it to be that rocksteady sort of beat. I knew it would get onto American radio if we kept it that way, and I was right."

He was. 'Flight Of Icarus' remains the only Iron Maiden track ever to receive any real level of airplay in the USA, and climbed as high as Number Twelve in the Rock Radio charts in 1983. It was this radio success, plus the tour, which led to their first American platinum album. However, it was the storming follow-up single, 'The Trooper', which most Maiden fans from those days still recall first when you mention the Piece Of Mind album.

The only people who didn't like Bruce's 'Revelations', though, were the ones who weren't supposed to like it, the neo-fundamentalist religious groups in America who still accused Maiden of being Satanists. Ironically, what appeared to offend them most this time was the witty use on the sleeve of an actual quote from the Bible's Book of Revelations, chapter 14, verse 1, which reads, "And God shall wipe away all the tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more Death. Neither sorrow, nor crying. Neither shall there be anymore pain; for the former things are passed." However, where the scripture reads "pain", the band had inserted the word "brain" as a pun on the title of the album, itself a pun on the fact that a post-lobotomy Eddie is pictured on the sleeve of the album chained up in a padded cell, the top of his skull sawn off. It was a deliberate wind-up which worked only too well, and before long families all over the American South were again being urged to burn their teenage children's Iron Maiden records.

The band themselves found the whole situation so absurd that they couldn't resist really taking the piss, and at the last minute inserted a few words played backwards between 'The Trooper' and 'Still Life' as a joke on anyone gullible enough to believe stories that accused bands like Maiden and Led Zeppelin of inserting evil messages on their albums that could only be revealed by playing the records backwards. Playing Maiden's little message on Piece Of Mind backwards would reveal a very different kind of devilment, one extremely drunken Nicko McBrain doing what he calls "my famous Idi Amin impression". He still laughs when he remembers the story.

"We were sick and tired of being labelled as Devil worshippers and all this bollocks by these fucking morons in the States," he says, "so we thought, 'right, you want to take the piss? We'll show you how to take the bleeding piss, my son!' And one night the boys taped me in the middle of this Idi Amin routine I used to do when I'd had a few drinks. I remember it distinctly ended with the words, 'Don't meddle wid t'ings yo don't understand.' We thought, if people were going to be stupid about this sort of things, we might as well give them something to be really stupid about, you know?"

The album was recorded at Compass Point Studios, on the beautiful Bahamian island of Nassau, in January 1983, and was their first recorded outside England. Apart from the relaxing atmosphere provided by the beachside studio, the main reason for this was financial. As Rod explains simply, "It was for tax reasons. We were still trying to save every penny. The problem with being a rock band is you're either earning a lot of money or you're earning nothing. And no matter how well you've been doing one year, you never know what's going to happen the next. It's not like a normal business, where you can fairly safely predict what the figures will be over the next two or three years; in the music business, you're only ever as good as your last record. Particularly in the early days, when you're still trying to build an artist's reputation, you can just assume that everything you do is going to be as successful as the last thing you did."

Even so, Rod never personally doubted that Maiden would continue to enjoy ever greater success, as his ever-astute partner, Andy Taylor, now remembers: "You can't balance the books entirely on dreams, and we don't want to end up with a big tax bill and no money to pay it. To save as much money as possible against that rainy day is the job of all responsible managers to consider, especially on those sunny days when no one else wants to think about it, so we recommended the band do the next album outside Britain."

"Rod said to me, 'We've got to record the album outside England. Where can we go?" says Martin Birch. "The options were Air Studios, in Antigua, which later got blown down by a hurricane, or Compass Point, in Nassau. I went down and checked them both out and I liked Compass Point, so we went there. Personally, I would have preferred to go somewhere like the Record Plant, in New York, or somewhere in Los Angeles. It would have been easier and we might possibly have got better technical results. It was pretty bare bones down in the Bahamas, but it was sunny, we liked it and it was available, so we decided to do the recording there and then mix it later in New York."

Released in Britain on 16 May 1983, Piece Of Mind entered the UK charts at Number Three. Critical response in the UK had been lukewarm, compared with the fanfare that accompanied the release of Number Of The Beast, and although Piece... would outsell any previous Maiden album in the UK, it never quite reached Number One in the charts and remains strangely overlooked by the critics to this day. Only the readers of Kerrang! magazine seemed to get it, voting the album Number One Album Of All Time in their 1983 end-of-year polls, with Number Of The Beast just behind it at Number Two.

With no title track in evidence, for once, the title of the album was conceived around an idea that Rod and Steve came up with for the cover and which Derek Riggs had actually flown out to Nassau to paint for them while they were still recording, depicting a typically grotesque Eddie who had quite literally flipped his lid. "We decided to lobotomise him," Rod explains. "Originally, the working title was 'Food For Thought'. Then we were talking about it in this pub in Jersey, where they were writing before they went into the studio, and one of us – we can never remember who, because I think we were pissed at the time – said, 'Piece Of Mind,' and we both went, 'Yes! That's it! Quick, get Derek on the phone.'"

Mick Wall (2001) Run To The Hills – The Authorised Biography of Iron Maiden – Revised Edition pp. 243-248.