Blaze Bayley (ex-Iron Maiden)

by Greg Prato

It must be an extremely daunting task attempting to replace a longtime singer in one of heavy metal's most successful bands of all time, but Blaze Bayley was up for the challenge when Iron Maiden asked the Birmingham, England native to follow Bruce Dickinson behind the mic in 1994.

And for several years, he did just that - touring the world and issuing such albums as 1995's The X Factor and 1998's Virtual XI. When Dickinson rejoined the group in 1999, Bayley launched a solo career, and has been steadily issuing his own albums ever since, including 2012's The King of Metal and 2014's DVD release, Soundtracks of My Life: Live in Prague.

Bayley connected with Songfacts via Skype to discuss the Soundtracks DVD, as well as how the songwriting process worked in Maiden, working with some of the world's top producers, and the stories behind several Bayley-era Maiden classics.
Greg Prato (Songfacts): Looking back, how would you say that you write your best songs?

Blaze Bayley: I'm not sure if this is the best way, but what I've tried to do is gather together enough interesting words that could be lyrics or titles, and I try and gather together melodies. When things pop into my head, I put them on my dictaphone or record them somewhere.

What I'll try and do is have a book with at least 30 ideas for lyrics for songs. Then I'll sit down with a guitarist or I'll sit down at my keyboard and I'll start coming up with things and we'll try very hard to match the lyric to the emotion of the music. And that's the way I feel it's best for me. What I'm searching for is those moments where the music and the lyric are totally together and they're like one thing. It's not the words on the music, it's one thing. Those are the most triumphant moments, and I've had a couple of those.

Bayley's solo debut, Silicon Messiah, was originally issued on May 22, 2000, via the SPV label. The 10-track album was produced by Andy Sneap, a gentleman who first came to the attention of metalheads as a member of the UK band Sabbat (no, not Sabbath), before turning his attention to album production - and subsequently working with the likes of Megadeth, Trivium, Bullet for My Valentine, Carcass, and Exodus, among many other headbangers.
"Stare at the Sun" from the Silicon Messiah album. That fits together so well, the lyrics and the music, much by accident. So that's what I'm trying to do, really. But I never say I only do things this way. Sometimes, somebody I'm working with will come up with a couple of riffs on the guitar, and it might nudge me in a direction and I can come up with a new lyric very quickly that I'm pleased with.

And other times, it's work and it's using my technique and it's okay. Sometimes it's hours and hours of fiddling around with things and catching syllables and repeating and repeating to get things to make sense and actually fit together. And if you're lucky, then you get a real result. So that's the way I generally approach it.

I don't cut anything off. Before I get in and start looking for the songs for a new studio album project, I like to have a lot of lyrics available, a lot of ideas for words. That's when I feel most comfortable and relaxed, and I try to match up those words with the music. But, you know, they sometimes start with the music first and I'll just come up with the lyrics.

Sometimes it's inspiration, sometimes it's technique. When you get those inspired moments, that's great.

It's crafting it like a sculpture. I think of it like a sculpture: If you get the block of stone, contained within that is something beautiful, so you want to take away enough to leave what's beautiful, and you don't want to take away too much. You don't want to work on it too much so that the beauty becomes small and ineffective, because it's not big and majestic anymore.

Songfacts: How would you describe how the songwriting worked in Iron Maiden?

Blaze: Well, that's where I learned so much from Steve Harris. He's just great. No music was written before I started recording The X Factor, so Steve said, "I don't care who has the ideas that go on the album, they've just got to be great ideas."

So it doesn't matter who writes the song, it just has to be a great song. That's reassuring. I got quite a few of my ideas onto a work with Steve or with Janick Gers that became part of The X Factor. The first single from The X Factor was my lyrics for "Man on the Edge."

In some situations, Steve likes to come along with a completed idea - he'll have something in his mind that he really wants a certain way. I've learned since working with Steve a lot more about how to get that idea from your mind into the recording and into the arrangement. Whereas before, it would be very hit-and-miss. "Why didn't this idea turn out so well and that one did? And why didn't this song sound anything like my idea and this one did?" Working with Steve Harris and seeing the way he puts things together, that really helped.

And the other thing is self-censorship. There's not a lot of second guessing with Iron Maiden. It's, "Does this feel good? Does this make sense? Does this move you?" Then "It's good, that's it." We don't think about it anymore, we'll do it. Generally speaking, it's trusting your instincts and your gut feeling. Working in Iron Maiden gave me so much confidence, because things that I thought were right actually were right, and things that I wasn't quite sure of didn't make it.

I came up with "Man on the Edge," I thought it was a very good idea. Steve said, "Yes, this is a good idea." So that's a huge boost from someone who's written some of the all-time classic songs.

When I worked on one of the ones that we did together, "The Edge of Darkness," which is based on the Apocalypse Now movie, it didn't really have a chorus as such. Well, there's quite a few Iron Maiden songs that don't have conventional chorus or conventional fallouts, but they make sense as musical pieces. We call them "songs" as a convenient name. That was a big part of the experience in Iron Maiden.

So there's a collaborative thing there, which we did on "Virus." And I collaborated with Steve on "Futureal" and another couple of songs. There's also en element of, "Bring in something that's done and see what people make of it and if i's good enough to get everybody's attention and make them feel good." So that's what it was like.

One of the sadnesses of my life, a twinge of sadness, is I was working on the lyrics and melodies for a third Iron Maiden album when they fired me. So a lot of those ideas that I was going to use on a third Iron Maiden album are actually on my Silicon Messiah album: "Stare at the Sun," "Ghost in the Machine," "Born as a Stranger," "The Launch." A lot of the ideas I'd already got on my dictaphone or got lyrics sketched out, then I didn't get the chance to work with the guys.

But I'm so proud of my Silicon Messiah album. It turned out great. I put that level of satisfaction that I have with that to the experience I had with Iron Maiden songwriting and with everything I learned there. I never doubted myself after that like I may have done before. Now if I feel it's good, I'll follow that idea through.

Wolfsbane was the band that Bayley fronted immediately before joining the lads in Maiden. Although they never scored a true breakthrough hit, Wolfsbane did make believers out of the British metal press, some of rock's most renowned producers (see below), and of course, Iron Maiden, who after touring with Wolfsbane as their opening act, immediately thought of Bayley as a potential replacement for Bruce Dickinson.
Songfacts: Wolfsbane worked with some really great producers. How would you describe the production styles of Rick Rubin and Brendan O'Brien, and did you pick up anything that you still use for them in the studio?

Blaze: With Brendan O'Brien, he is just a magnificent producer, and he's a very generous person. He's such a talented musician, as well. He can play guitar very well, he can sing very well. So, when you're working with him and he has an idea, you listen. And also, he can articulate his ideas very, very well and he can demonstrate to you. He can say, "Play this way," and show you the chord and show you the notes and sing the notes.

One of the things that really shaped our songwriting before Iron Maiden was working with Brendan O'Brien. He's a huge Beatles fan, and we did a Wolfsbane album called Down Fall the Good Guys at Abbey Road. He managed to get that because he was such a huge Beatles fan. We recorded in the same studio The Beatles recorded in. He did a great job on that record.

The one before that was called All Hell's Breaking Loose Down at Little Kathy Wilson's Place. He came in, we had three days rehearsal and two days recording, and we did these six songs. It's a defining moment for Wolfsbane, that EP. That is one of the things where you think, "We did that with Brendan O'Brien. How come we didn't get anywhere after that?" It was down to promotion and taking that advice.

Brendan O'Brien was a huge influence on me, and then the next step was Iron Maiden. Brendan O'Brien is an absolutely fantastic producer, and I really enjoy working with producers that are also players, because what you'll find is that many good guitarists, they're never satisfied with the basic demos. Years ago you couldn't afford to have the guitar and the recording equipment, so you would go to these studios with these people that knew how to work the gear, but didn't know a thing about music or how to get sounds or follow feelings any more than by the textbook or the instruction manual.

And a lot of really good producers have been guitar players that have learned to record themselves. Andy Sneap is another guitar player that learned to record himself and turned into a producer. And Brendan O'Brien was a guitar player that learned to record himself and then learned his way around the studio, became a studio engineer, and then became a wonderful producer.

Songfacts: "Man on the Edge," what is that song about lyrically?

Blaze: It follows pretty closely the movie Falling Down with Michael Douglas. A lot of things happened in that movie. One of the key lyrics is "cannibal state," where the system of government consumes the individual and the materialistic society consumes the individual and digests him and spits him out, so his identity is completely gone.

In that film, Michael Douglas goes to work every day, because he's lost. But he is not going to work: He's pretending to go to work. He's getting dressed, packing his bag, making his sandwiches, and leaving the house the same time every day and coming home at the same time, because he's too ashamed to tell his family that he's lost his job. And the only reason he's lost his job is because it was a government job where he was designing missiles, and they don't want any more missiles.

That's the tragedy of it: He's a geeky oddball kind of guy that finds it difficult to communicate, but he finds himself trapped in this situation where he can't tell the truth because he can't even tell the truth to himself. He can't face up to the fact that he's redundant and unnecessary, which, obviously, is so unpleasant.

This struck a chord with me because years ago - and maybe this is melodramatic - but when I was a kid I used to have a paper route, delivering papers. A basic job that hundreds of teenagers have when they're in school. But I lost that job, and I was so scared of my stepfather, that he would beat me, that I kept leaving the house at the same time pretending I was going to do my paper route.

Songfacts: What about the song "The Aftermath"?

Blaze: "The Aftermath," I was reading a lot of poetry from the first World War. And around the same time, my father gave me a picture of my great-grandfather. He died in the first World War. These two things seemed to connect, and when I was searching for lyrical ideas for The X Factor album, I had this photo of my grandfather in my notebook, and it just seemed to strike a chord. That was where "The Aftermath" came from, really.

"Silently to silence fall... toys of death are spitting lead."

"Once a ploughman hitched his team
Here he sowed his little dream
Now bodies arms and legs are strewn
Where mustard gas and barbwire bloom."

Some of my favorite lyrics, really. Just completely influenced by poets like Siegfried Sassoon from the first World War. That's something I worked on with Steve Harris and Janick Gers.

It's a song that I occasionally do in my setlist, but it's heavy in a very emotional way, so I find myself getting very bound up with that song and sometimes mentally it's a dark place to go. So I don't always do it in my set.

Songfacts: Before, you mentioned the song "Futureal."

Blaze: "Futureal" is that feeling of paranoia. At the time when we were working on the Virtual XI album, there was a lot of conspiracy theories that I was listening to. I'm very interested in physics and cosmology and life on other planets. And the question, "Do aliens exist?" Because of research into quantum physics and quantum fluctuations, the possibilities of people or beings coming from another dimension.

And this general feeling of paranoia and of people telling you what is right, but you actually not knowing. So much of the news media decides what they think is newsworthy, but that's not everything that's going on in the world - that's what they think you should know. And worse than that, sometimes that's all they want you to know, is my belief. Authors like Noam Chomsky are always exploring these topics.

So that's where it came from really. What is real? Futureal. Because is the future real? Is the future that they ascribe to us that they say we're having, is that real? At the time there were arguments about global warming. Scientific facts, global warming. It's a scientific fact, but somebody else says there's no global warming. So how do you know what's right?

Songfacts: What about the song "When Two Worlds Collide"?

Blaze: Well, "Two Worlds Collide" works on two levels, really. It's a metaphor in many ways for two cultures colliding. I remember going to Japan for the first time, a country that I'd dreamed of going. But I had culture shock. Very much like the time I first visited Los Angeles years ago. I just was shocked at their way of doing things, the culture, the people. It was alien to the way that I'd been born to, and to most things that you're used to in the Western world. That's not bad. That's just different, and you've got to get used to it.

I found that many of the things in Japanese culture that I didn't like the first time I got there, on my second visit were the things I liked the most. So it works on that level.

It's two worlds collide, two cultures, and also it's about the comets and the asteroids. Only a tiny proportion of the asteroids are mapped. It's a lot more now, but really, there is no program. Bruce Willis cannot get into a spaceship with movie stars and go blow up an asteroid. It's just not viable at the moment.

So Armageddon really will happen, because these things are so big. They come out of the asteroid belt, these massive things that will destroy life on Earth.

I also like the idea that people say, "Save the world or destroy planet Earth." Well, it won't destroy the planet Earth. The last big asteroids to hit planet Earth destroyed the dinosaurs and made way for humans. So it may destroy you, but it'll make way for something else. The earth will still be here.

Songfacts: Looking back through all the albums that you've sang on throughout your career, what would you say is your favorite from a songwriting perspective?

Blaze: That's so difficult. I'd choose between my album Blood & Belief and my album Silicon Messiah. There's some great music on both.

But I'm very proud of everything I've done. I always put everything I have into my music and into my lyrics. Sometimes I write from the perspective of observing a character, which is really an observation of how I may feel if I was in that situation. And otherwise, I write very directly: This is how I feel about what's happening to me.

So it's those two things that I often mix up that make it very difficult to choose. Sometimes I use very strong metaphors for the way that I feel, because I don't want to engage myself into that situation - I want to tell it as an observer. And other times I really want that direct thing that I'm telling my listener, "Look, this is exactly how I feel and I think it's how you feel, because we're the same kinds of human beings."

Songfacts: Let's discuss the DVD, Soundtracks of My Life: Live in Prague.

Blaze: It's my 30th anniversary in a way. It's 30 years since the first time singing with Wolfsbane, which was when I first got in a band. So, I've done an album called Soundtracks of My Life, which is 30 songs, some of them my favorite songs to do live, a couple of rare things.

I haven't done a DVD for a while, and I've changed quite a lot my style of performance and everything, and I've got different songs in the set. So I wanted to make a new DVD to go along with the CD to commemorate those 30 years.

I wanted to do a small, intimate show. I've got a DVD called Alive in Poland, in front of 10,000 people, and then I've got one which is a big gig in Switzerland. I wanted to do something more intimate because I play all kinds of places, and I've got a load of old bits and pieces that people keep asking me about. Then I thought, "Well, I can't use this as an excuse for a lot of things I've just had lying around for a while, together on a DVD." So it's the Soundtracks of My Life world tour DVD.

And it's with a different band than I've had previously. I've got some guys from the UK. They're in a band called Absolva. We started working on a setlist about a year ago and it only took us a few days, really, to get things on the final rehearsals up to scratch. And my whole European tour was just fantastic. It's my favorite European tour that I've done headlining with my solo stuff. I just had a couple of my old Maiden ones in the set.

I know a film director in Czech Republic, and I've got some great fans there, as well. I always do very well there, and thought I'd use the opportunity to do a lot of the DVD, the new performance section of it, in Prague, and that's what's happened. What I've seen so far looks pretty good.

And we did another show that we recorded as well in Czech Republic and I'm hoping it will all come together, this documentary footage of us on tour, which people seem to really enjoy.

So that's it. I've just started the preorders there. You probably know that I'm completely independent - we do everything ourselves. My wife is the manager and runs the record company and the web shop, and I write the songs and go on tour. We're doing a limited edition in a metal box. So far it's looking really, really good.

So it's something I'm very proud of. I've wanted to do another DVD for a while, and I like to come to these moments at the end of a tour, or in a tour somewhere.

Songfacts: Thanks for taking the time out to do the interview Blaze, I appreciate it.

Blaze: Thank you very much. I'd just like to say a huge thank you to all my fans in USA for the incredible support that they've given me. Thank you so much. And I really hope to announce some dates, however small they are, in the USA very soon.

September 10, 2014.
For more Blaze, visit blazebayley.net.

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Comments: 1

  • Lop from SomewhereX-Factor is the best Maiden album between 7th son and Brave New World.
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