Nicko McBrain spent 42 years playing Steve Harris compositions. Asked to pick the best of them, he narrowed a catalogue of some 17 albums down to three.
The drummer, who joined Iron Maiden in 1982 and stepped back from touring in 2024, made the calls at “An Evening With CapnHarris“, a fan event held last month at Rock n Roll Ribs, the barbecue restaurant he owns in Florida.
The format was a knockout bracket. Song titles were pulled from a bucket two at a time by McBrain, his co-hosts and audience members. He would then make the case for whichever of the pair he preferred. The survivors advanced, and the room voted the field down to a single winner.
Most match-ups produced some deliberation. One did not.
When co-host James Tucker pulled “Back In The Village“, the Powerslave deep cut written by Adrian Smith and Bruce Dickinson, McBrain dispatched it immediately in favour of the other name in his hand: “When The Wild Wind Blows“, the eleven-minute track that closes 2010’s The Final Frontier.
That choice sent him off on a tangent about the man who wrote it.
“It’s a stunning piece of music,” McBrain said (via Loudwire). “It is, in my opinion, the second best song Steve Harris has ever written, next to ‘Hallowed [Be Thy Name]‘ and ‘The Red and the Black.'”
He did not go on to separate the other two, so which of them he considers the outright best remains unstated.
What the three have in common is worth noting: “Hallowed Be Thy Name” from 1982’s The Number Of The Beast, “The Red And The Black” from 2015’s The Book Of Souls, and “When The Wild Wind Blows” all carry a sole Harris writing credit. No co-writers. They are also all long — the shortest runs past seven minutes, the longest past thirteen.
McBrain continued: “It’s got a great storyline to it. It’s a tragedy. It’s a love story but with a tragic ending, isn’t it?”
He is describing a specific narrative. The song follows an elderly couple who build a fallout shelter as nuclear war looms, drawing on Raymond Briggs‘ 1982 graphic novel “When The Wind Blows“, in which a retired pair follow government pamphlets to their deaths.
Then, without changing register:
“Also, we named our beans in this restaurant after ‘When the Wild Wind Blows.'”
For all that, “When The Wild Wind Blows” did not take the bracket. The room settled on “Where Eagles Dare“.
There is a certain symmetry in the result. It is another sole Harris composition, and it opens Piece Of Mind, the first Iron Maiden album McBrain played on, with the drum intro that introduced him to the band’s audience in 1983. The night’s winner is, in effect, the sound of him arriving.
