everything that's on my mind

Now playing: Flight 666 (DVD)

I’m going to reach back into the summer again this week. If you know me at all or used to read blog 1.0 very often, you already know of my love for the music of Iron Maiden. I became a Maiden fan during my junior year in high school, shortly after the release of their 1983 album Piece of Mind. They are still, 26 years later, my favorite band.

In early 2008, the band embarked on a world-wide tour labeled the “Somewhere Back In Time” tour, in which they played primarily classics from their 80′s music and used a set similar to the “World Slavery Tour” of 1984-85. On the tour, they traveled via their own custom Boeing 757, flown by none other than lead singer Bruce Dickinson. (Bruce is obviously a trained pilot, who flies charter jets for a British airline, and is therefore the most awesome singer in metal history.) During the first leg of the tour, they managed 23 concerts in 11 countries in only 45 days, including dates in Australia, India, Japan and various countries in the Americas. And during that leg, a film crew accompanied the band in order to chronicle this unique experience. The result – the documentary film Flight 666 – was released to theaters in April of this year.

A few weeks later, in early June, the film was released as a two-disc DVD set. Disc one contains the full-length documentary film, and disc two contains 17 live songs, each from a different location on the tour. The documentary is great, and the live concert disc is equally outstanding, showing that Iron Maiden is still at the top of their game when it comes to performing live. On live DVD’s in recent years, they’ve played many of these classics. They’re the signature Maiden songs that will always be in their set list. But it’s really sweet to see them playing other songs from the 80′s era again, songs that they haven’t played for a long time, such as “Aces High”, “Revelations”, “Powerslave”, “Moonchild” and the 13-minute epic “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, one of my all-time favorite songs.

Maiden has done a lot of great work over the years. The Live After Death concert has always been the gold-standard of Maiden DVD’s, but Flight 666 may now have overtaken it. The combination of documentary of the tour and the live performances are just amazing. In this DVD set, Iron Maiden shows why they’re still the best metal band around.

Here are my two favorite performances from the DVD:

-gf