Personally, I recommend the passage from Slugs where the paraplegic is eaten from the inside out while taking a shit by a spine-consuming slug that crawls out of the toilet and into his anal passage, as opposed to his literary passage.
‘How on earth do you write a book?’ I asked.
‘Well, I just start in the morning, have a cup of tea about eleven, then write till five with a break for lunch,’ Shaun replied.
‘You mean it’s just hard work?’
‘Yes, mainly.’
‘Well, how long does it take you to write a book?’ I enquired.
‘About three weeks.’
It took us three months to make an album. Three weeks must be unbelievably intense, I thought.
‘What do you do to relax?’ I asked.
‘Twenty-four-hour horror-movie marathons,’ he replied. Thank God Shaun Hutson was an author and not a mass murderer. I fear he would have been very efficient.
I started to write, every day. I vanished from view. I no longer appeared at the bar. I was the invisible man on tour. One day, in Finland, there was a knock at the door. I opened it, and there was a member of the crew. I could see he was craning his neck to peer at the paper spread around the room, the curtains drawn and all the lights on.
‘The lads are wondering where . . . you . . . er, what are you doing?’
‘I’m writing a story.’
‘What sort of story?’
The bar decamped to my room, and for the rest of the tour I had to read every chapter of The Adventures of Lord Iffy Boatrace to the road crew as I wrote them.
If I didn’t produce a chapter sufficiently quickly to entertain them on a day off, there would be complaints. I had a series of mini-deadlines to keep, and at the end of the tour I had a large sheaf of papers, all belonging to various four- and five-star hotels, which had been conveniently placed for correspondence in my bedroom.
It was my version of the Marquis de Sade’s toilet paper.
Astonishingly, Sidgwick & Jackson eventually published the book and promptly commissioned the sequel. Pan Macmillan followed suit by putting both books into paperback and giving me a three-book paperback deal.
The Adventures of Lord Iffy Boatrace took a while to get into print but amazingly sold 30,000 copies, and suddenly I realised that I had a deadline and a sequel to write. My two-fingered typing skills were put severely to the test as I invested in that most ridiculous portable contraption, the original Mac Portable.
With its suitcase-sized case, bicep-building weight and six-volt lead acid battery with enough juice to jumpstart a Fiat Uno, the Mac Portable still managed to run out of power after about two hours. It was possible to extend its life by switching off the backlight, but then, of course, you couldn’t see anything at all except in bright sunlight.
It was good for people with colour blindness, being only available with screens in black and white. On a trip anywhere, it was a simple choice: computer or clothes, but not both.
As with everything Mac back in the eighties, it was all about style and nothing to do with practicality. Even while I was staggering up flights of steps with my spine-crippling device, admiring humans would stop me in awe.
‘Is that a Mac Portable?’ they would enquire, as if about to touch a holy relic.
‘Yes, it fucking is,’ I’d reply. ‘Would you like to carry it for me?’
I wrote big chunks of the sequel, The Missionary Position, on trains and on tour, and the rest of it while drinking pints of tea at home. I found sleeper trains particularly useful. Nobody bothered you, and you didn’t do much sleeping, so bashing away at the keys made sense in the tiny compartments rattling through the night.
So incensed was I at the withdrawal of the Manchester to London sleeper that I included it in the credits on the sleeve. I don’t suppose anybody else used it. Sleeper trains have always featured on tour, if at all possible. Before Google I always carried the Thomas Cook European Rail Timetable. One evening in Lausanne after a show, the talk in the bar was becoming very tedious, so a quick glance at the European Rail Timetable revealed a sleeper train to Venice, which sounded like a good place to wake up. Travelling light, with only a rucksack, suited me just fine. I think I make tour managers nervous. Managers even more so.
The main reason I liked trains was for the time to think the journey offered, in a degree of peace and quiet. Modern trains, alas, are becoming less and less like that, but there is still something theatrical about boarding a train. Its size and speed are momentous, even if its interior is nowadays a bland mix of plastic with coffee-stained cushions, unemptied waste bins and toilets ankle-deep in unfathomable liquids.
Once, in New York, I decided to take the train to New Haven, just up the coast. The local trains were commuter machines, and not terribly interesting, so I opted for Amtrak, from Penn Station, with a proper locomotive and an egg and cheese muffin.
At 2 p.m. we pulled out of the platform, and shortly thereafter we stopped – and we stayed stopped. For two, going on three hours, we remained stationary. Luckily, I had my copy of the OAG Pocket Flight Guide with me (never leave home without it), and I discovered a flight to New Haven from La Guardia.
I asked the guard what was going on.
‘The lines are down,’ he said. ‘We are waiting for a diesel train to take us back to Penn Station.’
I was going to miss the show if I didn’t catch that plane. ‘I have to get off this train. I have to get to New Haven.’
The guard shrugged. ‘Gonna be a few hours yet.’
A young lad had overheard the conversation.
‘Are you in Iron Maiden?’ he asked.
‘Yes, I am.’
‘I can get you off this train.’
I stopped in my tracks, much like the carriage I was in. ‘If you can get me off the train, you’re coming with me to the show – backstage, the whole lot.’
We went to the door, and he pulled a couple of levers and it slid to one side with a lazy action, as if to say, ‘I’m not really supposed to open this way, but if you must . . .’
We jumped onto the tracks, ran down the embankment, scaled a chain-link fence into a US Postal Service depot and ran out onto a suburban street.
I flagged down the first driver I saw: ‘How far is La Guardia?’
‘Hey man, it’s right over there.’
‘A hundred bucks if you take me and my friend.’
We got the last two seats on the tiny plane, and I got to the gig 10 minutes before show time.
The Somewhere in Time tour came to an end somewhere, and we languished in England again at last.
I was living in the countryside, or the suburban version of it in Buckinghamshire, just outside London. I had a swimming pool because I don’t like swimming, a tennis court because I didn’t play tennis, a garden because I disliked gardening, and a very long walk to the nearest pub because all I required was a quiet pint without having to drive there and break the law on the way back.
Be careful what you wish for, as the saying goes.
There was a big garage for the bright red BMW I didn’t drive, and there was a snooker room, long and wooden-floored, because I didn’t play snooker. It was, however, long enough to fence in, so I chucked out the snooker table and turned it into a training room.
Around this time a very colourful Hungarian entered my life and remained in it for the next 25 years, taking me from a place where I didn’t know my left from my right to winning the British junior foil championship. Between us, we won the British team championship and represented Great Britain at the European championships. Under the unlikely auspices of Hemel Hempstead Fencing Club.
There were only a dozen of us meeting up two or three times a week in dismal school gymnasiums or community centres. The irascible, eccentric and utterly brilliant coach behind the whole set-up was my Hungarian mentor Zsolt Vadaszffy.
Zsolt had white hair, spoke like Count Dracula and had girls swooning in the aisles despite his being twice their age. He h
ad been one of Hungary’s youngest foil prodigies, but his career in sport was curtailed by the arrival of a Russian tank under his window during the Soviet crackdown of the Budapest uprising.
At the age of 16, Zsolt took his passport and walked into Austria. He taught fencing across Europe, and he also ended up as an actor in The Ipcress File (evil Bulgarian doctor) and a racing-car driver, before running an import-export business for white goods.
His first and last love was fencing. When we buried him, it was with his fencing glove atop the coffin, and his sword by his side.
Zsolt was almost a second father to my fencing friend Justin, in social as well as sporting terms. Zsolt lived on the other side of the valley from my adapted snooker room. He came round and we started to train. I realised after a while that I had never had a coach who’d taken the time to teach me how to think. When martial artists speak of someone being a ‘master’, this, I imagine, is what they mean. In fact, a fencing master is beyond a coach; he imparts a philosophy of thought, strategy and movement. It is intensely personal, and it’s hard to describe the level of commitment that goes into a one-on-one fencing lesson given at full speed.
At some point in the evolution of the relationship between master and pupil, enlightenment occurs. I mean this literally. It is as if a chain has snapped, and your body and mind have been freed of intention – freed of the tyranny of ‘what if?’ and the consequent fear of failure.
It happened to me on a few occasions, when, for 20 minutes or so out of our 45-minute lesson, we played only with distance, movement and the feel of the engagement and disengagement of the blades. Consciousness was transferred to the point of a bendy piece of steel, which prodded and conversed with the partner opposite – no longer an opponent, but simply a collaborator in the dance.
No words are exchanged. The actions start and stop, and are resumed according to the language of the blade alone. Afterwards, it’s hard to explain to people where you have been, so it’s best not to try.
In the beginning, of course, it’s not like that. In the beginning it is awkward footwork, unsteady coordination, patient repetition, constant correction and constant frustration until the movements start to automate, and the mind can control the intention without having to worry about the act.
I was lucky that my first teacher at school, John Worsley, taught me well. Not so much on a technical level, as on an intellectual one. He taught as a teacher, not just a coach. Every action was analysed; every action had a motivation, even if it was only ‘I want to give up and go home’.
When Bruce Lee wrote his classic Tao of Jeet Kune Do, he based his analysis of offensive, defensive and counter-offensive actions on the system developed by Western fencing. It’s a very effective and clear analytical tool to pull combat apart – and even tennis matches, for that matter, because any one-on-one sport is, in effect, combat by proxy.
Moonchild
All of this extracurricular activity was bound to be impacted eventually by Iron Maiden, and so began the writing process for our next album, Seventh Son of a Seventh Son. It would be one of our best.
Steve was constructing the bones of the album out in Essex at his home, Sheering Hall, which had a replica pub, a real football pitch with home and away dressing rooms and, eventually, a rehearsal room and a recording studio.
Steve and I reignited our songwriting partnership. He mentioned the words ‘concept album’ and my ears pricked up and my heart began to beat faster. Story, theatre: Seventh Son of a Seventh Son had it all.
Except it didn’t. Not quite all of it. Somewhere in my dusty collection of mouldy scribblings I have the short story that tells the tale of the seventh son and his family issues and unrequited love that lead him to take a terrible and tragic revenge. We never really consummated the story relationship: my lyrics alluded to the story, whereas Steve’s didn’t. None of this matters that much in the overall picture because the show, the album cover and the title track were more than epic enough to satisfy the faithful. I would just have liked to have given it a bit more, even to the extent of a graphic novel.
Germany was our destination to record, at the improbable location of the Arabella high-rise building, a hotel in Munich. Musicland Studios was down in the bowels of the building, among the heavily lagged heating and sewer pipes, laundry baskets and kitchen equipment.
It reminded me in many respects of Ian Gillan’s Kingsway Studios down in the car-park basement of the Civil Aviation Authority building in Holborn, London. Martin Birch had recorded Deep Purple’s In Rock down there and, of course, I had later been dragged out of the toilets covered in sick by Ian Gillan.
The studio itself at Musicland was tiny, and the control room cramped, but some great albums had been produced there, everything from Queen to Rainbow’s Rising. For recreation there was a notorious nightclub called the Sugar Shack, and casualties were frequent and painful.
I discovered the local fencing club, MTV München, and set about training and improving my table-dancing. The Germans were very enamoured of post-training drinking and dancing. I could do a half-decent Cossack dance if plied with enough beer, and the Greek restaurant seemed to enjoy the spectacle.
Wheat beer was a new experience, and it came in brown, blonde and Hefe varieties, the latter being full of yeasty bits more reminiscent of marmite soup. All of them made your head hurt the next day.
We all went a little stir-crazy in Munich. Dave Murray had decided to try a little conjuring in his spare time, of which there was far too much. One famous evening on the sixteenth floor, Marvin appeared when Dave was attempting to make something disappear.
‘See that chair,’ Marvin growled. ‘I can make that disappear.’
So he chucked it off the balcony. This stir-crazy stuff was starting to get quite serious.
I had a plan to save my sanity and, when the opportunity to escape the awful brown and green apartments came, I pottered up the road to what was then the capital of this side of a divided Germany, Bonn.
I rented a small bedsit, bought a second-hand telly and put a mattress on the floor. I would fence full-time at the elite Fechtclub Bonn, a Bundesleistungszentrum. Just rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?
I was one of the oldest guys there, and I still wasn’t 30 yet. It was entirely dedicated to producing champions, and everyone thought I was a bit mad, especially as I was still getting to grips with using my left hand. I completely forgot about albums, music and all the rest of it. I had breakfast, went for a walk, went training, then for a beer, watched telly and then to bed.
A young journalist and a photographer from the Daily Mirror turned up. I invited them up for a cup of coffee to discuss the article they were going to write – it was obviously all Iron Maiden related. When I went down to the front of the building with the photographer, he asked where the journalist was.
‘I left her upstairs,’ I replied innocently. He looked at me aghast.
‘I wouldn’t do that.’
‘Really?’ I replied. Surely she wouldn’t go through any personal stuff, would she?
We retrieved her from my dirty laundry and tins of baked beans. She looked genuinely horrified at where I was living.
‘Why do you live like this?’ she said.
‘What’s wrong with it?’ I replied indignantly. It was as if having a simple life was an affront to the gods of gossip, which I suppose it is, really.
I learnt a few things about Germans, and one of them is that they love to discuss bodily emanations, especially poo.
I caught a bad cold and was feeling a bit miserable. I had been invited round to a Sunday lunch with Thomas, another fencer. A dozen of us sat around, with me shivering away.
‘You are sick,’ Thomas announced, and went to a back room. After some rummaging around he came back with a long piece of brown flexible pipe, and what looked like a stirrup pump.
‘There, take this,’ he proudly offered.
‘What is it?’ I enquired cautiously, although I had a pretty good idea
.
‘Well,’ he grinned broadly, ‘this tube, you put up your ass, and this you fill with water, and in a few moments you will shit like thunder.’
There were murmurs of agreement from around the table.
‘Thomas, that’s an enema,’ I said.
‘Ja, exactly so.’
‘Thomas, what gave you the idea that an enema will make me better?’
‘Oh, ja, for sure. I use it all the time.’ Louder voices of agreement from the guests.
‘My mother gave me them from childhood.’
‘Your mother?’
Thomas’s sister piped up: ‘Not just Thomas. We all had them together – the whole family.’
Shit happens, as the saying goes. The family that enemas together, stays together.
Eventually, the band joined me and we rehearsed in nearby Cologne, in a nightclub that was also a gymnasium. I believe the owner was eventually entertained by the German government for a number of years because the powders he was selling certainly weren’t Beechams.
I had worked with Derek Riggs on the cover for the album, which had a touch of Salvador Dalí about it, with its slightly surreal procession of candles and a partially disembodied, skeletal Eddie. Next to Powerslave, it’s my favourite Derek Riggs cover art.
The stage set was enormous, and was based around being elemental, as in ice. The tour was predictably successful, particularly in Europe, where we were hitting the big festivals – famously Donington in the UK.
Sadly, that day was marred by tragedy, with death and injury on account of the appalling muddy conditions underfoot caused by torrential rain. We were spared the details of the terrible event until after the show had finished. Any moment of triumph was short-lived. Nothing is worth the cost of a human life, especially not an entertainment event.
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