I didn't have the hair for it really (by 19 I'd already started receding quite badly) but I had the taste for music that could drive me through a really boring job, and metal (particularly Iron Maiden) fitted the bill perfectly.
At the time I was working more or less alone, but ended up supervising a work experience guy from a local college called Jeremy (for the life of me my addled brain can't recall his surname). Like me he was a complete metalhead but up until now I'd not been listening to Maiden, preferring stuff that was a little more old school like AC/DC, Motorhead and Dio.
Jeremy and I ended up on a shit detail, as cable rats for a Polytechnic (long before it became a posh university), laying thick wadges of 50 core communication cable between buildings and a central server room. It was a hot, dirty and disgusting job often taking place underground in cable ducts. We brought a cheap tinny-assed stereo down into the ducts with us, and loaded that sucker up with music including Iron Maiden's "Powerslave" which ended up being listened to on a loop for most of that summer.
As much as I'm delighted in kids discovering the joys of Kate Bush and Metallica via the recent series of Stranger Things, I'd love for 'em to listen to some of Iron Maiden's albums from the 80s and 90s, but especially this one.
"Powerslave" preceded a massive world tour (The World Slavery Tour) and was Iron Maiden's 5th studio album, released all the way back in 1984 (so it's coming up for its fortieth birthday - which just completely blows my mind!)
It's a lot more theatrical than most Maiden albums, containing the infamous track "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" which chugs on for 15 minutes or so, taking lines and influences from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's darkly themed prose and turning it into a heck of a headbanging track. The album's Egyptian themes also come to the fore with a lot of guitar riffs and lyrics almost bordering on the cheesy and pantomime-like, but you can't fault the band's prowess in making something that should have been a bit twee and daft into something as excellent as this album.
Kicking off with "Aces High", a high octane track that you should definitely never attempt to drive a car while hearing (unless you're trying to get somewhere in a real hurry), the album punctuates speedy riffs and thrumming bass numbers with quieter moments and even an instrumental ("Losfer Words").
This was the album that kicked off a bit of an obsession with Iron Maiden, until the 90s came along and ruined all that by tempting me away with a ton of more dance / trip-hop stuff.
As I listened to it again on Spotify (and tried to imagine what 80s me would have made of being able to listen to any album of choice almost on demand on a digital device small enough to cram into your pocket), it took me right back to being crammed into those claustrophobic ducts, splicing wiring together alongside my work buddy, both of us trying not to smash our own heads in by headbanging in such a confined space. It must have been amusing for folk in offices above us, wondering where the faint strains of music were coming from as we worked under their feet, but when you're 19 and working a shit detail, you really don't care about stuff like that do you?
A great album, probably still my favourite IM album of all time (just edging out "Somewhere in Time" which followed a couple of years after "Powerslave"). I wonder what happened to Jeremy, I like to imagine he's still out there somewhere moshing away to this album just like I am.
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