Iron Maiden: 14 Minutes I'll Never Get Back

I need to say, before anything else, that Iron Maiden are one of the great loves of my life. I have shouted along to "The Trooper" in fields. I own the shirt. If you cut me open, you will find NWOBHM in the blood work. So it pains me, it genuinely pains me, the way it pains you to tell a friend their new haircut isn't working, to say that "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is the sound of a band who had just discovered they were allowed to do whatever they wanted, and decided the correct response was everything, all at once, for thirteen minutes and forty-five seconds.

For anyone who's somehow avoided it: this is Maiden's attempt to turn Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 1798 poem about a cursed sailor and a dead albatross into a Powerslave deep cut. Full marks for ambition. A metal band adapting an eighteenth-century narrative poem is the kind of idea that sounds brilliant at 2 am after four pints, and somebody, somewhere, should have been in that pub to say "yes, but maybe not the whole poem, mate."

Because that's the issue. They did not adapt the poem. They transcribed it. Steve Harris apparently sat down with the actual text of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and treated it less like source material and more like a checklist. Albatross: check. Curse: check. Two hundred men dying and the ship just sort of sitting there while it happens: check, at length, in real time, with a bassline underneath that is doing genuinely incredible work holding this whole thing together while everyone else in the band seems to have forgotten there's a running time.

And then there's the spoken word section.

Look. I understand what they were going for. It's meant to be eerie. Atmospheric. The sound of a man haunted by his own bad decisions regarding a seabird. What it actually sounds like is Bruce Dickinson doing a GCSE Drama audition over a synth pad, and it goes on so long that I have, on multiple occasions, checked to see if my CD player has jammed. It hasn't. It's just Bruce. Being spooky. For what feels like several fiscal quarters. There's a moment where the wind effects kick in, and I swear I have aged visibly waiting for a guitar to come back and rescue us.

Here's the thing about Bruce Dickinson, and I say this with love: the man has one of the great voices in metal, an instrument capable of genuine menace and genuine soaring joy sometimes in the same verse, and he is also, demonstrably, incapable of leaving well enough alone. Give him four lines, and he'll find a way to make it six. Give him a haunting narrative pause and he'll hold it two bars longer than the song needs, because somewhere in his soul he has decided that the audience requires the full theatrical experience, when what the audience actually requires, at minute nine, is for the wedding guest, sorry, wrong story, but honestly at this point I've started confusing my own reviews, is for somebody to just get to the bit with the albatross round the neck and move on with his life.

There's a version of this song, a much better version, hiding inside the actual song, and it's about eight minutes long. You can hear it. The gallop is there. Adrian Smith and Dave Murray are doing genuinely gorgeous, intricate guitar work that deserves a tighter frame than the one it's stuck in. The bass intro is one of Harris's best pieces of writing, full stop, no asterisk. If someone had gone in with scissors, cut the spoken section down to a sentence, trimmed the outro where the band seems to be vamping because nobody's had the nerve to call time, you'd have a genuine top-five Maiden track. Instead you have a song that requires you to plan your bathroom breaks around it.

I've timed myself doing chores to it. I made a cup of tea, several biscuits happened, I had what I can only describe as a small argument with the cat about whether he was allowed on the worktop, and the song was still going. Coleridge's original poem is 143 stanzas long and even it knows when to end a scene. Maiden, God love them, apparently looked at that and thought: not enough.

I still play it. That's the annoying part, the part that makes this whole review feel like a betrayal; I love this band enough that even their most bloated, self-indulgent, nine-minutes-too-long epic still gets a full listen every single time it comes on, because somewhere under the wind machine and the drama-school narration there's a great song wearing an enormous, ill-fitting coat. I just wish, every single time, that someone in 1984 had leaned into the booth and told Bruce the ship had sailed.

He'd have ignored them. Obviously. But I'd have liked to see it tried.