Iron Maiden is one of the most popular, successful, enduring, and iconic Metal bands of all time.
So, naturally, when equally iconic singer Bruce Dickinson (despite said status as an icon, he isn’t actually a founding member of the band) stepped away from the band, his replacement Blaze Bayley was not fondly received.
At the time, the two albums with Bayley doing vocals were seen as a low point in the band’s history. However, the consensus of Maiden fans now is that Bayley isn’t even a worse vocalist than Dickinson, he’s just not as stylistically unique as Dickinson. Plus, the fact that he seems to be a good dude has helped the fans not have many personal criticisms against him.
Also worth noting that other longtime member of the band Adrian Smith, who did a lot of the songwriting, also stepped away at the time.
Funnily enough, one of my favourite Maiden songs comes from this supposed low point in the band’s history. Clearly inspired by, but vague enough that it doesn’t seem to actually be about, well-known Italian novelist and academic Umberto Eco‘s The Name of the Rose, is the opening track of the band’s Bayley-led 1995 album The X Factor: Sign of the Cross.
Without going onto a lengthy and potentially spoiler-filled digression, The Name of the Rose centres around 14th-century monks investigating a murder at their monastery. Again, Sign of the Cross is vague enough that it’s not obviously just the plot of the book set to music, but draws on the general Catholic aesthetic and subject matter of the book with a lot of chanting and at least Catholic-adjacent lyrics about damnation and salvation:
They’ll be coming to bring the eternal flame
Every version of the lyrics I’ve looked up has “Holding Communion”.
They’ll be bringing us all immortality
Holding Communion so the world be blessed
My creator, my God’ll lay my soul to rest
“Holy Communion” would make a lot more sense to me…
Lyrics via Genius.
Sidebar: it would take some doing because the song is 10 minutes long, but Sign of the Cross is one of those songs that I listen to and think “If I’m ever a Wrestler, this is gonna be my entrance music.”
Especially if my ring name has a last name that’s either Cross or Rose…
Other songs on that list include Sails of Charon, The Black River, and Hard Rock Hallelujah.
Clearly, Maiden themselves see the merits of the song, because even after Bayley’s departure from the band, Sign of the Cross has seen pretty frequent play at the band’s live shows.
Exhibit A:
Incidentally, you can listen to (a remaster of) the original studio version of the song with Bayley’s vocals here.
For what it’s worth, I don’t have a clear preference for either the Bayley or the Dickinson vocals — though the two have clearly different vocal styles and the live versions seem a little faster to me.
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