It’s an old adage, but life on the road isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Moments of alcoholic excess, white-line lunacy and stud-farm fever do exist on tour, of course (it’d be foolish to suggest otherwise), but not in anything like the rock’n’roll-all-nite/party-every-day abundance of music folklore.
Nah, your regular ‘hard-giggin’ band’ lives not in a drug-infested, groupie-packed underworld, but in a distinctly unromantic and altogether harsher reality. All of the above was well and truly rammed home to me in autumn 1980, when I spent some time in continental Europe, travelling from venue to venue with Iron Maiden.
To annotate the moments of mayhem experienced during this period would be difficult. Alright, so I did catch Maiden singer Paul Di’Anno (later to be replaced by Bruce Dickinson) relieving himself in a hotel corridor, and guitarist Dave Murray doing much the same thing in a Holiday Inn ashtray. But in truth, events on any sort of crazed chicken-shooting/plane loop-the-looping level were conspicuous by their absence. Allow me to cast my mind back, and I’ll try to explain…
Iron Maiden are supporting Kiss
