The story of Iron Maiden is one of a band that believed in itself, a band who hooked up with a totally supportive management company, and a band that from the beginning has drawn fans who have become incredibly loyal and devoted.

In the field of Heavy Metal,where radio and music television airplay are especially limited for Iron Maiden, they have sold millions and millions of albums around the world, along with breaking countless records for sold-out concerts.

This incredible success story stems from great music combined with savvy marketing, but the bottom line always comes down to the fans. Because the people that buy records, that stand in line waiting to hand over cash money for concert tickets and original merchandise, the street people, all love this music and, in particular, this band. In return, Iron Maiden love their fans.

Musically, Iron Maiden has always been much more than just another Heavy Metal band. You could never mistake a Maiden song for any other band's, for somehow they've managed to combine being intelligent and musical, but with a heavy, aggressive sound.

It all began in a pub in London's East End called the Cart and Horses in May 1976. The only member of the current band there was, of course, bass player Steve Harris. An East Londoner himself, from Leytonstone, Iron Maiden was his dream and his band and, for the time being, all his songs, which on this occasion featured the first public performance of their anthem, "Iron Maiden."The chorus to the song included the lyrics "Iron Maiden's gonna get you, no matter how far," though at the time he wrote them, the young Steve Harris would never have guessed just how prophetic those words were.

Over the next two years, the band went through several line-up changes and a stream of local gigs organized by Steve, before arriving at a line-up that most ardent Maidenites would feel was the first definitive band. This was the beginning of the era which saw singer Paul Di'anno fronting a line-up from which only guitarist Dave Murray and Steve Harris have survived to the present day.

The band played as often as Steve could book the gigs, pedaling their wares in local ale-houses like the Bridgehouse Canning Town, the Cart and Horses, Stratford, and the infamous Ruskin Arms in East Ham. For a long while, Steve tried, and failed, to get the band into the West End clubs of London where the real opportunities for getting a group signed to a major label existed. But this was now the late 1970s and Heavy Metal was about as unfashionable as the long hair the band was wearing. Punk and New Wave was the in vogue theme of the times, and club owners, the rock press and record company A&R men had no time and money to "waste" on a group like Iron Maiden.

In the Iron Maiden story, it was the fans that changed all that for them. With Di'anno really developing a handsomely exaggerated onstage persona, and Steve Harris coming up with the songs, the band was attracting followers every time they played. For thirty pounds a night, local East End club owners would pack-out the bars with absolute crazies pulling their hair out over this powerhouse, no frills, young band. The people just could not be kept away from an Iron Maiden night, and for as many nights of the week as the floors and walls would stand up. Recordings were desperately requested by the fans, so it was time to make a demo.

On New Year's Eve, 1978, at Spacewood Studios, out in the quiet green of Cambridge, Maiden recorded three Steve Harris compositions: "Iron Maiden," "Prowler," and "Strange World."It cost them two days and 200 pounds to do it.

Next, they took the tape to the master of Heavy Metal DJ's, Neal Kay, who at that time was holding a regular Heavy Metal night at the Bandwagon Soundhouse, a headbangers sweat box on the side of the Prince of Wales pub at Kingsbury Circle, North London.

Kay listened to the tape and it started to unleash such an unholy religious fervour in him that after he started playing Maiden regularly at the club, it inspired devotion and delight in the local clientele. They went crazy for the band and it became the single most requested item for 12 solid months. Metaphorically, it was their first number 1 hit. The Bandwagon had its own Heavy Metal chart published in Sounds magazine in Britain, and at the start of 1979, Iron Maiden was at the top of it.

The second good thing that happened that was to change the course of all their lives was meeting a certain Mr. Roderick Charles Smallwood, a non-graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, and a towering son of Yorkshire. Rod had been at MAM Agency in London, signing Cockney Rebel, Judas Priest, Be Bop Deluxe and Golden Earring,also taking care of Mott the Hoople and The Kinks. He managed Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel for a time.

In July 1979, Smallwood got to hear the demo tape through a friend at his rugby club, called up Steve and agreed to go see this band. But, Smallwood said, no way was he venturing into the East End, so he booked the band two showcase gigs closer to relative civilization: the Windsor Castle in North London and The Swan in Hammersmith. Both gigs were packed with fans from the East End and Rod was impressed. Iron Maiden was hard and powerful, fast and raucous, and the audience identified very strongly with the band. There was an unusual joy and honesty about the band, despite their ferocious demeanor and music.

From there, a relationship began although not yet inked into a management contract. Rod found gigs for the band all over Britain and more people began to get curious. Sounds magazine ran the band's first feature story and word was being passed around in weekly A&R meetings. Eventually, Rod booked the band's first date at Soho's most famous rock club, the Marquee. He took with him John Darnley, then an A&R man at EMI. The gig was sold out by 7:30 P.M. and Darnley saw enough that night to persuade his boss, A&R Director Brian 'Shep' Shepard, to attend their next gig at the Bandwagon Soundhouse. Shep was extremely impressed and, following the necessary legal dancing around, a deal was struck. On December 1 5, 1 979, their signing was officially announced in Music Week magazine.

In a Knightsbridge pub one evening shortly after, Steve Harris proposed a management marriage to Rod Smallwood, and Rod said, "I will . . . " That was how it all began.

Their confidence brimming over into direct action, the band pressed 6,000 vinyl copies of the Spacewood demo, giving it the title, "The Soundhouse Tapes." Steve Harris hand-wrote the sleeve and label personally, and Rod Smallwood began mailing out the record to anybody who wrote in requesting a copy. Meanwhile, the band was taking copies with them to their gigs and selling as many as the fans could carry. By the end of the first week, "The Soundhouse Tapes"had sold over 5,000 copies; by the start of the second week, Smallwood was fielding calls from U.K. chainstores like Virgin and HMV who wanted to order 20,000 copies each. But Maiden refused to press any further records. They wanted it kept special, for the hardest of the hardcore, and that's how it went. Today, "The Soundhouse Tapes" is a collector's item on both sides of the Atlantic and liable to stay that way forevermore.

When their off icial EMI Records debut single "Running Free" was released on February 15, 1980, it entered the U.K. charts at number 44. Maiden was offered an appearance on "Top of the Pops" (a weeky chart television show watched by megamillions in the U.K., and the recognized key to the bank within the British music industry). Maiden, ironically, is the only band ever to get "Tops" the first week of release of their first single.The record company was in a frenzy as this went against all their predictions and, what's more, the band could not be cajoled into complying with the show's staid and dreary lipsynching format. However, the BBC demurred and at the start of 1980, Iron Maiden played live on "Top of the Pops," a thing no one since The Who in 1973 attempted!

From the beginning Iron Maiden had something besides the music going for them. They had the imagery of "Eddie." In the band's earliest days, way back in line-ups, Maiden used to have a stage backdrop featuring this sort of leering skeletal head, with raw features and flashing, smoking eyes. It got christened Eddie the Head, hence on to Eddie. By the time Maiden got round to finally releasing their first record, Eddie had grown considerably in size and stature achieving his own special notoriety amongst their fans. Today, Eddie is a 12-foot tall,heavy metal monster,straight out of a late-late-late show horror flick, surrounded, on the 1984-85 World Slavery Tour, by giant mysterious Egyptian imagery, flash bombs and state-of-the-art lights. Now Eddie appears on album covers, single sleeves, t-shirts, posters; all types of other merchandising items and even the band's Christmas cards.

Maiden's first album, Iron Maiden, hit the U.K. charts at number 4 in its first week of release, and the band hit the road for the first of many tours.

In 1980, Maiden began their world domination process in earnest, taking on three massive U.K. tours before heading off on a long and serious trek across Europe as special guests of Kiss.

They kicked off 1981 by completing their second fiery album, Killers, with producer Martin Birch (renowned for his previous work with Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Rainbow, etc.), then immediately headed out on another of their characteristically huge British tours. Their second major European tour, this time headlining, began straight after that, and then on to Japan, picking up their first gold record for Iron Maiden. It was a year of "firsts" and in June the band arrived for their first visit to America where they toured for six weeks as guests of Judas Priest and headlined Eastern Canada. Their albums are released on Capitol Records in the United States.

In 1982 came Number of the Beast and its accompanying U.K. Top 10 single, the anthemic "Run to the Hills." Maiden was among the first heavy metal bands to shoot their own promotional video, directed by Dave Mallet, who's since gone on to working with Queen and David Bowie.

The "Beast on the Road Tour" commenced on February 25 in Dunstable, a small provincial town in Northern England and ended up in Niggata, Japan,on December l8,1982. Maiden, literally, was storming their way through hundreds of gigs all over the world in bigger arenas.

It was also around this time that Rod Smallwood went into a partnership with an old college chum, Andy Taylor. In his business executive's pin-stripe suit and glasses, Andy is very much a behind-the-scenes personage in the maiden scheme of things - He is an astute man and very much a part of the Maiden success story.

The "World Piece Tour" of 1983, which followed the release early in the year of their fourth blinding album Piece of Mind, saw the band collecting still more gold and platinum records from the far-flung corners of the world. The tours were getting even longer, with each new album surpassing the previous one creatively and commercially. Their enthusiasm on the road paid off mighty dividends.

After their British and European tour that year Maiden opened their first headline tour of the United States in Casper, Wyoming on June 21. When the tour finally ended in St. Louis on October 25, the band allowed themselves a seven-day break before taking off for another two months on the road around Europe. No one and no place was going to be left out. Through all of their recorded product there have been line-up changes. At one point early on, you were never sure just who was going to be riffing away on the axe strings alongside David Murray. The most significant change in personnel was the firing of vocalist Paul Di'anno after the Killers album. Di'anno was strictly a case of having too-much-too-soon, burning out on the road and killing his voice. His replacement was ex-Samson singer Bruce Dickinson, quickly nicknamed "The Air Raid Siren" by the fans due to the ferocious power of his voice. However, the current line-up of Bruce Dickinson (vocals), Steve Harris (bass), Dave Murray (guitar), Adrian Smith (guitar) and Nicko McBrain (drums) has been together for over three years since starting on Piece of Mind.

The "l984-85 World Slavery Tour" began in Poland behind the Iron Curtain in August 1984 and wound to a close on July 5,1 985, in Southern California after some 200 performances in 26 countries over the 11-month period. The final show, billed in jest as a "British Independence Day Celebration," came complete with fireworks. The tour showed Maiden on-stage at their best, both musically and visually. The tour supported the bestselling Powerslave album which went gold all over the world including the United States where it went on to sell over three-quarters of a million copies. During the tour, the band sold-out four consecutive nights (for the first time in history) at Long Beach Arena in California. The concerts were recorded by longtime producer Martin Birch and videotaped by Picture Music International. Now the two record live album and long-form retail video are available on Capitol Records and Sony Video respectively.

While this live album and video summarizes Iron Maiden's career to date, fans will be glad to know after a much-needed rest, the band will begin work on a new studio album. Iron Maiden crunches on.

(from the Live After Death press release)