No Prayer For The Dying rarely turns up on anyone’s list of favorite Iron Maiden albums. The band’s 1990 eighth record has long lived in the shadow of nailed-on classics like The Number Of The Beast, Powerslave, Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son and A Matter Of Life And Death. But the album has at least one fierce champion, the man who built the band, and he’s just made his case, along with revealing the single change he thinks would have cast the whole thing in a different light.
Speaking to Metal Hammer, bassist and founder Steve Harris came out firmly in the record’s corner. He framed it as a deliberate course correction after a period of ever-bigger albums and productions.
“I think it’s a really strong album,” he said, noting that it followed a run of increasingly ambitious records 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.”
Part of that reset, according to Harris, came from an unexpected place, frontman Bruce Dickinson‘s solo work: “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. 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.”
The back-to-basics instinct even dictated where and how the album was made — famously tracked in a converted barn on Harris‘ own property. And it’s there that his one regret lies. The band, he explained, had been chasing a live feel that they never quite finished the job on:
“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.”
Harris also leapt to the defense of one of the album’s most criticized tracks, which happens to be its grandest. The sweeping closer “Mother Russia” has taken plenty of flak over the years, but its author stands by it: “’Mother Russia‘ got really slagged off, but I listened to it recently and I thought, ‘This is really good.’ 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.”
Ultimately, though, Harris made it plain that outside opinion holds little sway over him, and that criticism only stiffens his resolve. He contrasted his own attitude with a cautionary tale from rock history:
“I don’t care about that kind of stuff. 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. 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?”
