IRON MAIDEN — THEY REJECTED BRUCE DICKINSON’S CHANGE. THEN CHANGED ANYWAY

By the end of the World Slavery Tour, Iron Maiden had pushed themselves about as far as they could go.

The tour behind Powerslave had taken them around the world for months, playing an exhausting schedule that helped turn Maiden into one of the biggest metal bands on the planet.

Bruce Dickinson came home wanting something different.

Not a bigger version of Powerslave.

Something different.

Years later, Dickinson recalled wanting to turn Iron Maiden “upside down.” The material he brought to the band moved toward a more acoustic direction, while Steve Harris remembered some of it as having a Jethro Tull-like character.

The band listened.

And rejected it.

Harris later explained that there were good ideas in Bruce’s material, but they simply didn’t feel right for Iron Maiden.

The result was unusual.

When Somewhere in Time appeared in 1986, Bruce Dickinson — the voice of Iron Maiden and already a contributor to songs including “Revelations,” “2 Minutes to Midnight” and “Powerslave” — had no songwriting credit on the album.

Not one.

But there is an irony at the heart of the story.

Dickinson had wanted Iron Maiden to change.

And Iron Maiden did change.

Just not in the way he had imagined.

Instead of moving toward Bruce’s acoustic ideas, the band pushed its existing sound into unfamiliar territory.

For the first time on an Iron Maiden album, guitar and bass synthesizers became part of the sonic landscape.

The opening seconds of “Caught Somewhere in Time” made that evolution impossible to miss.

Steve Harris later rejected the idea that synthesizers represented some forbidden step for the band. If the technology had been available earlier, he said, Maiden would have used it earlier.

They weren’t trying to abandon Iron Maiden.

They were finding another way to expand it.

And while Dickinson disappeared from the songwriting credits, another member stepped forward.

Adrian Smith.

Smith contributed three songs to Somewhere in Time:

“Wasted Years.”

“Sea of Madness.”

“Stranger in a Strange Land.”

Two of them became the album’s singles.

“Wasted Years” was especially fitting.

Written from the perspective of someone who had spent years living out of suitcases and moving from one place to another, it emerged from the same relentless touring life that had left Dickinson searching for another direction.

So Somewhere in Time became something neither side of that original creative disagreement had quite proposed.

It wasn’t Bruce Dickinson’s acoustic reinvention.

It wasn’t another Powerslave either.

It was Iron Maiden moving forward on their own terms — with a more futuristic sound, a larger songwriting role for Adrian Smith, and an album on which their singer did not write a single song.

Bruce Dickinson believed Iron Maiden needed to change.

The band rejected his version of that change.

Then they changed anyway.

Somewhere in Time was released on September 29, 1986.

Forty years later, that contradiction remains one of the most fascinating stories behind the record.

THE STORIES BEHIND THE NOISE