By the summer of 1985, Iron Maiden were the biggest heavy metal band in the world and very nearly broken. The World Slavery Tour had run for 331 days and 187 shows. Bruce Dickinson came off the road wanting to make an acoustic record. Steve Harris took one look at the demos and said no. Their singer responded by walking away from songwriting altogether, leaving the sixth Maiden album to Harris, Adrian Smith and a brand new toy that nobody in metal had quite worked out yet: the guitar synthesiser.
"Somewhere in Time" came out on 29 September 1986. It is the only Iron Maiden studio album with no Bruce Dickinson writing credit, the only one to lean on synths from start to finish, and for years the most argued-over record in their first decade. It also gave them "Wasted Years", "Caught Somewhere in Time", "Heaven Can Wait" and one of the most densely loaded album covers Derek Riggs ever painted. This is the story of how Maiden made a futurist record while pretending nothing inside the band had changed.
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Artist | Iron Maiden |
| Album | Somewhere in Time |
| Release date | 29 September 1986 |
| Label | EMI (UK), Capitol (US) |
| Producer | Martin "Masa" Birch |
| Studios | Compass Point (Nassau), Wisseloord (Hilversum), Electric Lady (New York, mixing) |
| Genre | Heavy metal, with progressive and electronic touches |
| Track count | 8 |
| Total runtime | 51:18 |
| UK Albums Chart peak | 3 |
| US Billboard 200 peak | 11 |
| Other notable peaks | Finland 1, Netherlands 2, New Zealand 5, Sweden 6, Norway 8, Germany 9, Austria 10 |
| Certifications | US Platinum (RIAA), Canada 2x Platinum, Germany Gold (BVMI), UK Gold (BPI), Brazil Gold, Japan Gold (RIAJ) |
| Estimated sales | 4 million plus worldwide |
| Singles | "Wasted Years" (25 August 1986, UK 18), "Stranger in a Strange Land" (10 November 1986, UK 22) |
Coming Off World Slavery
To understand "Somewhere in Time" you have to understand how shattered the band was when they finally stopped. The World Slavery Tour, in support of 1984's "Powerslave", lasted from August 1984 to July 1985 and ended with a five-night residency at California's Long Beach Arena that yielded the "Live After Death" album and video. By any sensible measure it was the biggest tour Maiden had ever undertaken. By the time it finished, Dickinson was barely speaking to the rest of the group and Harris privately thought their frontman had lost his mind.
Manager Rod Smallwood, never one to let momentum go to waste, was already plotting album six. Maiden had released a record every twelve months since their debut in 1980. EMI expected another. The fans, primed by the chart-shaking success of "Live After Death", expected another. The only thing standing in the way was the small matter of the band themselves being held together with gaffer tape and resentment.
The compromise, such as it was, was a four-month break. Harris, Smith and Dave Murray spent that time experimenting at home with new gear. Synthesisers were everywhere in the mid-eighties; Roland's GR-700 guitar synth and the JX-8P keyboard had crossed over from new wave into mainstream rock; Judas Priest were already finishing "Turbo", which would deploy synths to instant fan revolt. Harris started toying with the idea of using them to thicken Maiden's sound rather than replace anything in it. Dickinson, meanwhile, was at home in Chiswick writing in an entirely different direction.
Bruce Dickinson Walks Away
Dickinson arrived at pre-production with a clutch of largely acoustic, folk-tinged songs. He pictured a Maiden album that owed as much to Jethro Tull as to Deep Purple. He also believed, not unreasonably, that he had earned the right to push the band somewhere new after fronting the longest tour of their career.
"Most of the things that I had were, really, trying to completely turn Maiden upside down and on its head. I said, you know, we've done this big metal thing, should we go a bit more chill-out, maybe we should go a bit more acousticy? And everybody looked at me like I had two heads."
Bruce Dickinson, Metal Hammer / Loudersound, 2016
Harris said no. Politely, but firmly, and on every demo. The bassist's argument, which has hardened in the retelling but remained essentially the same for forty years, was that Maiden had a sound and a job and Dickinson's songs were beautiful but not it. The singer, exhausted and outvoted, did the only thing left to him: he stopped writing. For the first and only time in the classic-era Maiden catalogue, his name appears nowhere in the credits.
"It's kinda very Jethro Tull-y kinda stuff, which I love, but it just wasn't really right. I don't know, it didn't feel right at that time."
Steve Harris, Metal Hammer / Loudersound, 2016
Dickinson's withdrawal opened the door for Adrian Smith. Smith had contributed only sporadically to previous albums, usually as a co-writer with the singer; on "Somewhere in Time" he turned in three fully formed songs of his own, including both singles. The rest of the record came almost entirely from Harris, with Murray sneaking a co-write on "Deja-Vu". The unspoken bargain was clear: Smith would carry the radio-friendly weight while Harris delivered the eight-minute Steve Harris epics that fans had come to expect.
Recording Sessions: Compass Point, Wisseloord, Electric Lady
Sessions ran from January to June 1986 across three studios. Bass and drums were tracked at Compass Point in Nassau, the Bahamian facility owned by Chris Blackwell that had handled everything from AC/DC's "Back in Black" to Talking Heads. Maiden moved to Wisseloord in Hilversum, Netherlands, for guitars and vocals. Mixing was done at Electric Lady Studios in New York, the room Jimi Hendrix had built. Mastering went to George Marino at Sterling Sound.
Producer Martin Birch was on his sixth consecutive Maiden album. He had handled everything from "Killers" through "Live After Death", and he had earned a reputation inside the band as the only outside voice Harris would actually listen to. Birch produced, engineered, mixed and, when nobody else fancied it, ran tape. He was assisted by second engineer Bruce Buchhalter, Sean Burrows at Compass Point, and Albert Boekholt and Ronald Prent at Wisseloord.
The signature production decision was Birch's call to commit to the synths rather than apologise for them. Dave Murray and Adrian Smith both played guitar synth, mostly through Roland units, while Harris ran his bass through a synth pedal on several tracks. Birch buried them inside the mix on most songs and brought them up to lead voice on others. The single exception was "Wasted Years": Smith refused to put any synth on it at all, insisting that the song be the album's straight-down-the-line guitar track.
The new sound was not the only break with tradition. Maiden also walked away from Marshall amps. Murray and Smith ran most of their guitars through Gallien-Krueger 250 RL combos, the same compact rack-friendly units that had become a studio favourite for clean tone and saturation control. The result is a record that is recognisably Maiden in performance but startlingly cleaner in tone than "Powerslave", with a midrange that feels like it has been polished rather than punched.
- Compass Point Studios, Nassau, Bahamas: bass and drums
- Wisseloord Studios, Hilversum, Netherlands: guitars, vocals, guitar and bass synths
- Electric Lady Studios, New York City: mixing by Martin Birch
- Sterling Sound, New York City: mastering by George Marino
One of the album's most quoted side stories happened in the New York mix room, when Adrian Smith was sitting in his hotel listening to rough mixes with Birch.
"When we were mixing in New York, I was in my hotel room listening to the tracks with Martin Birch, and there was a knock at the door. I opened it and Tom Jones was standing there. He said, 'I heard the music, lads. Do you mind if I come in?' He listened to the album, and as we talked I realised that what we do is pretty much the same: making records, doing shows. Except that with Maiden, it's a bit louder."
Adrian Smith, quoted in Classic Rock, 2024
Personnel and Credits
| Role | Player | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Iron Maiden | ||
| Lead vocals | Bruce Dickinson | No songwriting credits on the record |
| Guitars, guitar synthesiser | Dave Murray | Co-wrote "Deja-Vu" with Steve Harris |
| Guitars, guitar synthesiser, backing vocals | Adrian Smith | Wrote "Wasted Years", "Sea of Madness", "Stranger in a Strange Land"; lead vocal on B-side "Reach Out" |
| Bass, bass synthesiser | Steve Harris | Wrote five of the eight tracks; primary arranger |
| Drums | Nicko McBrain | Career-best performance on "Caught Somewhere in Time" and "Alexander the Great" |
| Production and engineering | ||
| Producer, engineer, mixing, tape op | Martin "Masa" Birch | Sixth consecutive Maiden album |
| Second engineer | Bruce Buchhalter | |
| Assistant engineer (Compass Point) | Sean Burrows | |
| Assistant engineers (Wisseloord) | Albert Boekholt, Ronald Prent | Prent went on to engineer for Rammstein and Def Leppard |
| Mastering | George Marino | Sterling Sound, New York City |
| Artwork | ||
| Sleeve illustration | Derek Riggs | 15 by 32 inch painting; took three months |
| Photography | Aaron Rapoport | |
| Sleeve concept | Rod Smallwood | Manager and band confidant |
The Songs
"Somewhere in Time" runs to fifty-one minutes across eight tracks, four to a side on the original vinyl. There is no concept linking them, despite later assumptions to the contrary, but every song save "Heaven Can Wait" gestures at time, distance or displacement in some form. Harris later insisted the band never sat down and decided to write a record about time. It is, however, the only thing the songs really have in common.
| # | Title | Writer(s) | Length | Single | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | "Caught Somewhere in Time" | Steve Harris | 7:22 | Album opener; later set opener on multiple tours | |
| 2 | "Wasted Years" | Adrian Smith | 5:06 | Lead single, August 1986 | Only track with no synthesiser |
| 3 | "Sea of Madness" | Adrian Smith | 5:42 | Up-tempo; one of the great Maiden guitar solos | |
| 4 | "Heaven Can Wait" | Steve Harris | 7:24 | Gang-vocal section recorded with crew and friends at Tehe's Bar | |
| 5 | "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner" | Steve Harris | 6:31 | Inspired by the 1962 Tony Richardson film | |
| 6 | "Stranger in a Strange Land" | Adrian Smith | 5:43 | Second single, November 1986 | Title nods to the Robert A. Heinlein novel |
| 7 | "Deja-Vu" | Dave Murray, Steve Harris | 4:55 | Only co-written song on the album | |
| 8 | "Alexander the Great" (356 to 323 BC) | Steve Harris | 8:35 | Closer; not played live until 28 May 2023 |
Caught Somewhere in Time
Harris opened the album with one of the heaviest things he had ever written. "Caught Somewhere in Time" is narrated from the point of view of a Mephistophelean figure offering a man the chance to travel through time in exchange for his soul. McBrain's single bass-drum performance is one of the textbook moments of his career, and the song became a live opener almost immediately. Smith and Murray's harmonised lead break, layered over guitar synth pads, is the album's clearest mission statement.
Wasted Years
Smith wrote "Wasted Years" late in the sessions, partly out of frustration that the band had been on the road for so long that he could no longer remember whether he had a home in London. The lyric is a homesick complaint dressed up as a stadium chorus. The chiming opening figure was first sketched on an acoustic guitar at his hotel and then arranged for the full band over the course of a single afternoon. Smith was adamant the track stay clean: no guitar synth, no bass synth, no keyboard. It is the album's only purely guitar-driven song and consequently the one fans who hated the synths still played the most.
Sea of Madness
Smith again, with Harris credit-free. "Sea of Madness" is the most metal-conventional thing on the record, a midtempo stomp built around a chromatic riff that Harris later said he wished he had written first. The solo runs through a long descending Smith run that several reviewers still hold up as a career best.
Heaven Can Wait
The Steve Harris epic of the side-one closer slot. "Heaven Can Wait" reflects Harris's belief in the out-of-body experience and the mind's capacity to fight death by sheer determination. The middle section's mass gang vocal was tracked in a Hilversum bar called Tehe's, with crew, friends and assorted hangers-on roped in to bellow the chant. The bar's name appears on the album cover as a small visual thanks. The song became a live staple within weeks of release and has reappeared on virtually every Maiden tour since.
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
Harris took the title from the 1962 Tony Richardson film, itself based on Alan Sillitoe's short story about a young Borstal boy who finds escape in long-distance running. Harris's lyric tracks the runner's interior monologue more than the plot. The song's main riff sits in unusual time and gives McBrain one of his more nuanced performances. In 2017 the BBC ran a feature for that year's World Athletics Championships in which Paula Radcliffe quoted the lyric to explain the mental weight of distance running, an unlikely cultural laundering for a song most listeners had filed under deep cut.
Stranger in a Strange Land
Smith heard a story, possibly apocryphal but persistent, about a sailor who disappeared during an Arctic expedition and was found years later perfectly preserved in ice. The song is told from the sailor's perspective. The title borrows from Robert A. Heinlein, although the lyric has nothing to do with the novel. The track became the album's second single and in production terms was the most layered: guitar synth pads, bass synth and double-tracked harmony solos all sit in the mix.
Deja-Vu
The only co-written song on the record, attributed to Murray and Harris. "Deja-Vu" is about the psychological sensation rather than any specific narrative, and its odd structure, fast verses dropping into a brooding chorus, has long made it a connoisseur's pick. It also gives Murray one of his rare credited writing slots on a Maiden record.
Alexander the Great (356 to 323 BC)
Harris closed the album with a chronological narration of the life of Alexander III of Macedon, complete with an opening Aristotle quote. The track runs to eight and a half minutes, has multiple instrumental sections and ends in mid-thought, as if Harris had run out of king before he ran out of song. For decades it was an article of fan faith that "Alexander the Great" was too complicated to play live. Maiden finally tackled it on 28 May 2023, almost thirty-seven years after release, on the Future Past World Tour.
B-Sides and Rarities
The two singles came backed with a small but loved set of covers, all tracked during the album sessions and released on the various 7-inch and 12-inch formats. They are some of the loosest performances Maiden ever committed to tape and a reminder that, for all the synth experiments, the band could still bash out a pub cover at three in the morning.
- "Reach Out" (Dave Colwell), backing "Wasted Years": lead vocal sung by Adrian Smith, the only Iron Maiden A or B-side to feature him as lead singer
- "Juanita" (Steve Barnacle, Derek O'Neil), Marshall Fury cover, on the "Wasted Years" 12-inch
- "Sheriff of Huddersfield", credited to all five members and based on Urchin's "Life in the City": an in-joke targeting Smallwood, who lived in Huddersfield as a student
- "That Girl" (Andy Barnett, Pete Jupp, Merv Goldsworthy), an FM cover, on the "Stranger in a Strange Land" release
All four were collected on the 1990 compilation "The First Ten Years" and the 2002 "Best of the B-Sides", which kept them in print long after the original singles had vanished.
Derek Riggs and the Cover
The single most discussed thing about "Somewhere in Time" is its cover. Derek Riggs, Maiden's regular sleeve artist since 1980, painted a fifteen by thirty-two inch panel showing a cyborg-augmented Eddie standing in a futuristic cityscape directly inspired by Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner". Riggs filled the painting with in-jokes, references to earlier Maiden records, nods to band history, hidden Hebrew and Russian text, and personal jokes aimed at the band, the manager and the label. He spent three months on it and famously said afterwards that he would never paint anything that convoluted again.
The cover has been the subject of fan analysis for forty years. Some of the references the band themselves did not spot until later. Among the most-cited:
- An "Acacia" street sign, partially obscured, recalling "22 Acacia Avenue" from "The Number of the Beast"
- A torn poster of Eddie from the debut album with "Eddie lives" graffitied across it
- An Eye of Horus neon sign pointing back to "Powerslave"
- A cinema marquee reading "Blade Runner" and "Live After Death", inside a building called the Philip K. Dick Cinema
- The Tyrell Corporation and Bradbury Towers, both lifted from "Blade Runner"
- "Asimov Foundation", "Long Beach Arena", "Hammerjacks" and "Tehe's Bar" buried in the background, each a private nod
- An electronic walkway sign reading "LATEST RESULTS WEST HAM 7 ARSENAL 3", a deliberate provocation from West Ham fan Steve Harris
- The TARDIS from "Doctor Who" sitting on top of a building, a reference repeated on the "Wasted Years" single sleeve
- A falling, flaming Icarus drawn in the visual style of the "Flight of Icarus" cover, Riggs himself confirmed it was meant to evoke the Swan Song Records logo
- A small Russian-language sign on a building reading "Menya Rvyot", which translates roughly as "I'm being sick"
- "Phantom Opera House", a "Sand Dune" sign nodding to "To Tame a Land", and an "Aces High Bar" complete with Spitfire
- "Herbert Ails", a wry reference to author Frank Herbert, who had refused the band permission to use the title "Dune" on "Piece of Mind" and who had died that year
The painting also earned Riggs his only on-record artistic signature, hidden on Eddie's chest. Aaron Rapoport handled the band photography for the inner sleeve. Manager Rod Smallwood is credited with the sleeve concept, although Riggs always insisted the in-jokes were entirely his.
Release, Charts and Critical Reception
"Somewhere in Time" was released on 29 September 1986. In the UK it entered at number 3, blocked only by the year-defining juggernauts of Madonna and Cliff Richard. In the US it reached number 11 on the Billboard 200, the band's strongest US showing to date. It went straight to number 1 in Finland, number 2 in the Netherlands, top five in New Zealand and top ten across Sweden, Norway, Germany and Austria.
| Territory | Peak | Certification |
|---|---|---|
| United Kingdom (OCC) | 3 | Gold (BPI) |
| United States (Billboard 200) | 11 | Platinum (RIAA, 1 million) |
| Finland | 1 | |
| Netherlands | 2 | |
| New Zealand | 5 | |
| Sweden | 6 | |
| Norway | 8 | |
| Germany | 9 | Gold (BVMI) |
| Austria | 10 | |
| Italy | 14 | |
| Canada | 15 | 2x Platinum (Music Canada) |
| Japan | 16 | Gold (RIAJ) |
| Australia | 23 | |
| Switzerland | 22 | |
| Brazil | Gold |
Critical reaction was bifurcated almost immediately. Kerrang!'s Mick Wall gave the album five stars in his September 1986 review, calling it the moment Maiden refused to stagnate. Metal Hammer would later, retrospectively, describe it as the band's most underrated 80s album. AllMusic's Steve Huey took the opposite line.
"The weakest album from Iron Maiden's classic 80s period, Somewhere in Time is really the first true disappointment in their catalogue, too often collapsing under the weight of their now-trademark ambition. Though it sold well on the heels of the hugely successful Powerslave tour, it clearly finds the band struggling to refresh what was rapidly hardening into formula."
Steve Huey, AllMusic
The fan response was more interesting still. The 1986 backlash, such as it was, came from purists who believed any synthesiser was an admission of weakness, an opinion sharpened by the simultaneous release of Judas Priest's "Turbo" and Ozzy Osbourne's "The Ultimate Sin", both of which had pushed in similar synth-dressed directions and both of which had taken a critical kicking. Maiden survived the comparison largely because Birch had buried the synths inside a recognisably heavy mix and because Smith's three songs had given them three indisputable singles.
Time has been kind. By the late 1990s "Somewhere in Time" was routinely listed in Maiden fan polls as a top-five record. Classic Rock's December 2024 four-star reappraisal, written by Adam McCann, declared the record "Adrian Smith's Finest Hour", four words that have become shorthand for the way the album's reputation has shifted.
Singles and Music Videos
"Wasted Years" was released on 25 August 1986, five weeks ahead of the album, and reached number 18 on the UK Singles Chart. The video, the first of two from the album, was a straightforward performance clip directed for the band's regular video agency that intercut the band miming with looping footage of clocks, planes and concert crowds. It became one of the most-played Maiden videos on MTV's Headbangers Ball and is the embed that follows.
"Stranger in a Strange Land" followed on 10 November 1986, peaking at number 22 in the UK. Its video was again performance-led, with cyborg Eddie cutaways drawn from the album sleeve. Both singles charted respectably across Europe but neither was issued as a commercial single in the US, where Capitol relied on album cuts and MTV play to drive sales.
Somewhere on Tour
The supporting tour, christened Somewhere on Tour, ran from 10 September 1986 to 21 May 1987. Smallwood, chastened by the World Slavery experience, had been ordered by the band to make this one shorter. Shorter, in Maiden terms, still meant 157 booked shows across 253 days, with 151 actually performed. It opened in Belgrade, then Yugoslavia, ran a full European leg, crossed to North America for arenas, and wrapped at the Nippon Budokan in Tokyo, the band's first headline at the venue.
"Somewhere in Time came off the back of the World Slavery Tour which was picked on by Bruce in particular for being long. Every album and tour, we would get a little bit bigger. This one was only 157 shows."
Rod Smallwood, Metal Hammer / Loudersound, 2016
The UK leg started with twenty-four dates and finished with six consecutive sold-out nights at the Hammersmith Odeon. Support slots on various legs went to W.A.S.P., Vinnie Vincent Invasion and, in the US, Anthrax. The stage production was the most ambitious Maiden had attempted to date, built around the cyborg-cityscape aesthetic of the album cover.
Stage designer Dave Lights had become, in Bruce Dickinson's later phrase, an inflatable megalomaniac. The show featured giant inflatable hands rising on hydraulics, a colossal cyborg Eddie head that inflated mid-set, a rising drum kit and, on at least one night, a deflating malfunction that has since become Maiden lore.
"Me and Bruce stood in the palms of the inflatable hands. On one night, a lamp was too close and burnt a hole in it. Consequently it was like, pffft, I felt a right plonker being up there like that. The next gig we did, they'd patched it up. They tied the fingers back so it came out with the middle finger up. That was quite hilarious."
Steve Harris, Metal Hammer / Loudersound, 2016
Dave Murray, ever the dry one, summed up the tour's aesthetic in two sentences.
"That was the era where it was big, loud costumes and loud production and a loud band. Everything was really loud. You had to wear sunglasses quite a lot because of the sheer volume. There was a lot of volume coming just from the clothing."
Dave Murray, Metal Hammer / Loudersound, 2016
None of the Somewhere on Tour shows were officially professionally filmed for release, a decision the band has since described as a regret. Bootleg audio circulates from Long Beach, Hammersmith and Budokan, and a small clutch of broadcast recordings exists from European TV. The closest thing to an authorised document is the various B-side live tracks attached to subsequent Maiden singles.
Legacy and Afterlife
"Somewhere in Time" was the bridge between two Maiden eras. The album that followed, 1988's "Seventh Son of a Seventh Son", was a full-blown concept record that swapped guitar synth for keyboards proper, with Michael Kenney brought in to handle them; many of the stylistic moves first tested on "Somewhere in Time" came of age there. Dickinson, his confidence rebuilt, returned to writing in force.
Within Maiden's discography the album sits in an awkward and beloved middle. It is the last record before the Smith-Murray-Dickinson-Harris-McBrain lineup briefly fractured with Smith's 1990 departure. It is also, with hindsight, the first record on which Harris began to lean fully on the long-form epic, a habit that would dominate the band's twenty-first-century output.
The album's influence on progressive and power metal has been openly acknowledged by Dream Theater, Symphony X, Avantasia and Iced Earth. Power metal as a self-identified subgenre, which exploded in continental Europe in the 1990s, owes a sizeable debt to the synth-and-gallop blueprint of "Somewhere in Time" and "Seventh Son". DevilDriver covered "Wasted Years" on Kerrang!'s 2008 tribute "Maiden Heaven", and Madina Lake covered "Caught Somewhere in Time" on the same release.
On 28 May 2023, in Athens, Iron Maiden played "Alexander the Great" live for the first time, almost thirty-seven years after release. The Future Past World Tour built its setlist around "Somewhere in Time" and 2021's "Senjutsu", with five of the album's eight tracks back in rotation. For Nicko McBrain, who retired from touring in late 2024, the Future Past run was a final on-stage vindication of a record that fans had long argued contained some of his best work.
Things You Might Not Know About Somewhere in Time
| Fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Bruce wrote nothing | It is the only Iron Maiden studio album of the classic 1980s era to feature no Bruce Dickinson writing credit. His acoustic-leaning demos were rejected by Steve Harris. |
| Wasted Years has no synth | Adrian Smith insisted "Wasted Years" stay clean. It is the only track on the record without a guitar or bass synthesiser anywhere in the mix. |
| Tom Jones knocked on the door | While mixing in New York, Adrian Smith opened his hotel room to find Tom Jones asking if he could come in and listen to the record. |
| Three studios in three countries | Bass and drums were tracked in Nassau, guitars and vocals in Hilversum, and the album was mixed at Electric Lady in Manhattan. |
| Three months for the cover | Derek Riggs spent three months painting the 15 by 32 inch cover and said afterwards he would never paint anything that convoluted again. |
| West Ham 7 Arsenal 3 | The score Steve Harris wanted Arsenal fans to read every time they bought the record is hidden on a walkway sign on the front cover. |
| Tehe's Bar choir | The gang vocals on "Heaven Can Wait" were recorded in a Hilversum bar called Tehe's, with crew, friends and assorted hangers-on belting out the chorus. |
| Alexander the Great waited 37 years | The closing track was not played live until 28 May 2023 in Athens, on the Future Past World Tour. |
| Paula Radcliffe quoted Steve Harris | The marathon world champion quoted lyrics from "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner" on BBC coverage of the 2017 World Athletics Championships. |
| RIAA Platinum | The album sold over a million copies in the US and is certified Platinum by the RIAA, despite Capitol issuing no commercial single in that territory. |
| Maggies Revenge | The neon sign reading "Maggies Revenge" on the album cover refers to Margaret Thatcher, who had previously turned up on the front of the band's "Sanctuary" single being garrotted by Eddie. |
| No Marshalls | For the first time on a Maiden record, Murray and Smith bypassed Marshall amps almost entirely, running most of their guitars through Gallien-Krueger 250 RL combos. |
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