We’ve got to about halfway through and then done a song about Battersea Dogs Home in the middle of it… or something. “Because whenever we’ve done concept albums in Maiden, we’ve never followed the plot slavishly. “Like most things, it got about halfway down the track and then sort of veered off at a tangent,” Bruce noted in Maiden England ’88. Given how the album turned out, and you may struggle to find a diehard metalhead who doesn’t love Seventh Son…, it’s plain that Maiden were on the strongest collective form of their careers to date, working harmoniously and revelling in each other’s creativity – even if the much-discussed concept underpinning the album was not quite as coherent or precise as the band may originally have intended. Recorded at Musicland Studios in Munich, Germany, in February and March 1988, with long-time producer Martin Birch once again at the controls, Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son took shape at an insane pace, largely due to the fact that the band’s next world tour was already booked and due to kick off at the end of that April. The album that then emerged was full of great material, not least three songs written in their entirety by guitarist Adrian Smith, but it didn’t seem to have the same phenomenal impact that Powerslave had had two years earlier. Famously, Bruce Dickinson had come to Steve Harris proposing some more acoustic-based, prog-tinged material for the record but had been briskly turned down. It might seem silly to suggest that Maiden had anything to prove by 1988, but there was a sense that 1986’s Somewhere In Time had been difficult for the band to make. So I had those two ideas and Bruce went, ‘You know what? We should do a concept album about this…’” I wrote The Clairvoyant and then went to Bruce with it and basically he said, ‘Yeah, it’s a great idea!’ I started then having an idea for a song, Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son, because supposedly if you were born the seventh son of a seventh son you had the powers of a clairvoyant. “Who knows? So I started off with that sort of idea. “I just had a thought: ‘I wonder if she could foresee her own death?’” stated Steve Harris, in 2013’s Maiden England ’88 documentary.
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