The worst concert I saw in 2024: Iron Maiden and its dodgy drummer
When this veteran British heavy metal band toured Australia last year, one of the musicians on stage was so far past it that he dragged down the entire show.
It wasn’t long after the lights went down and the crowd’s roar had greeted the headline act that it became apparent something was off. Very off.
The occasion was a concert by veteran British heavy metal band Iron Maiden when it returned to Australia for its first visit since 2016. The locale was the Brisbane Entertainment Centre on a Tuesday night in September, toward the end of this leg of its seven-date tour titled The Future Past, which would be seen by more than a million people worldwide.
The band was composed of three guitarists, a bassist, a drummer and singer Bruce Dickinson, whose operatic vocal style had incredible and immediate cut-through amid his bandmates’ pummeling wall of noise.
Most rock and metal shows live or die on the strength of the singer, particularly those now decades into their career, and this band – formed in 1975 in London – was no different in that respect.
Yet it quickly became apparent that Maiden’s man with the microphone was no slouch.
At 66 years old – and having undergone treatment for a cancerous throat tumour nine years earlier – Dickinson stood before the sold-out crowd as a formidable frontman.
The drummer, however?
He was dragging, or playing behind where the beat should be. Consequently, he dragged down the entire show.
His tempo was so off, in fact, that at times it felt like he was still working his way down the setlist from the Melbourne show three nights prior.
It took a little while to figure out what, exactly, was amiss. Theirs was an extravagant, multi-level stage set-up befitting a tour of this scale, complete with rolling stage smoke effects, beautiful murals depicting historical scenes matching their song lyrics, video screens and a giant puppet/robot character named Eddie that ambled on to the stage early in proceedings, and presumably appeared later on.
In other words: plenty of distractions, in the usual manner of show business for arena-sized music tours.
It was the high-definition video screens that helped confirm what the ears had already detected: when the cameras cut to views of Nicko McBrain, Iron Maiden’s 72-year-old drummer, they showed a man who was struggling to keep pace with the band’s genre-defining brand of heavy metal, which has long lent heavily on a galloping rhythmic style emphasised by palm-muted guitar riffs performed as triplets.
McBrain, plainly, was past it. Couldn’t keep up. Was actively detracting from the otherwise polished performances emanating from the five men in front of him.
It easily ranked among the strangest things I saw or heard at a concert in 2024, having attended more than 100 shows at venues large and small.
Here was a drummer who was unable to perform at the highest level befitting Maiden’s hard-earned status as one of the most esteemed metal bands of all time.
His clear and present dragging might have caused a few raised eyebrows at a pub gig played by weekend warriors before an audience of friends and wellwishers. But this was all happening before some 10,000 fans who’d paid good money for the experience: $189 for floor tickets, for instance.
Reports to live industry trade publication Pollstar from other stops on this tour put the box office gross takings for both Perth and Sydney at about $1.2m per show, and that’s without counting the mountain of black T-shirts being sold at the merchandise desk outside for $70 apiece. (Hoodies: $160.)
I can only presume that the giant Eddie character reappeared later on in the show, because I wasn’t there.
After 50 minutes and eight songs, I arose from my seat with my metalhead mate Angus – who, like me, was much more interested in the support band, US metalcore quintet Killswitch Engage (which played brilliantly, and expertly fulfilled its role of warming up the baying crowd of headbangers).
Fed up, Angus and I figuratively enacted the title of a popular Maiden song by running to the hills, from the swampland of Boondall back toward the lights of Brisbane City, while chatting animatedly about the dog’s breakfast of a concert we’d just witnessed.
As an avid gig-goer, I’m forever searching for novelty. It’s a major factor in why I walk into music venues two nights a week, on average, in my role as music writer for this newspaper. I’m a sucker for the thrill of surprise, the uncertainty of what I might hear, and the spontaneous joy that arises when artists use their talents to cast a spell on us, if only for a few moments.
This, though, was the worst kind of surprise: a dodgy drummer who knocked the entire enterprise off its axis. It was the worst show I saw all year.
Curious, I had to know more. What was the deal? Why was this happening?
The long-running British act was presumably being advised by smart business operators: how could any of them allow the good ship Maiden to be driven into the ground by a man who simply can’t keep time?
Cursory web searches revealed the answer, and yet more surprises therein. McBrain, it turned out, had suffered a stroke in January 2023. He was paralysed on his right side, and had to relearn how to play drums.
During rehabilitation, it became apparent that his right arm could no longer move at full speed. As a consequence, during rehearsals the band had agreed to drop certain songs from its setlist – including some of its signature tracks such as The Number of the Beast and Run to the Hills – and only play ones that McBrain could keep up with.
And based on what he’d just offered to a capacity crowd in Brisbane, even those remaining numbers he couldn’t play well – or at least well enough to not attract attention to his shortcomings.
As a casual observer and non-fan of this band, I was gobsmacked by all of this, and I could only wonder at how Iron Maiden had landed on deciding to continue charging its loyal fans nearly two hundred bucks apiece to attend performances that they know are far from full-strength.
None of this is intended as a dig at stroke sufferers: there’s no denying that McBrain ought to be commended for recovering from his brain injury enough to subject his body to the rigours of touring the world while doing an undeniably physical job. It’s inspiring.
Nor is it a slight on ageing performers: some of the best shows I’ve seen in recent years were by artists much nearer the end than the start of their careers, including Paul McCartney (aged 82), James Taylor (76) and Elton John (77).
At the Maiden gig, though, I can’t recall seeing a stronger case for a multimillion-dollar musical organisation that should have gotten to the point of thanking an employee for their time, and medically retiring them from taking to the road.
Or as a mark of respect, perhaps McBrain could have been kept on the payroll as a ‘non-playing shareholder’, which is akin to what the members of US rock act Motley Crue attempted to do for founding guitarist Mick Mars after he resigned from touring in 2022 due to medical reasons: he was offered 5 per cent of the band’s subsequent tour profit, as a sort of exit package payment for services rendered earlier in their career.
(Somewhat predictably, this Motley matter soon involved lawyers, managers and musicians sniping at one another via the press; it’s unclear whether Mars reached a resolution with the Crue. But it seemed like a reasonable offer, and a model other major acts could follow – or at least those who remained on speaking terms with one another.)
After learning this background, my conclusion from the sub-par Brisbane show was that anyone but McBrain should have been holding those sticks, and hitting those skins and cymbals that night.
On a premium-priced tour of that scale, cuddly precepts such as triumphing over adversity – or a band of brothers proudly standing behind their man – simply weren’t enough. Heavy metal music needs a dependable rhythmic bed or it falls apart.
There are thousands of competent metal drummers working today who could easily have learned those songs, sat behind the kit, kept actual time and driven the show, rather than bumming out anyone willing to be honest about McBrain’s clear deficiencies – including his bandmates, perhaps, who are all still firing on all cylinders, and might well miss playing some of the songs they know their fans most wanted to hear.
It’s all academic now, anyway. Three months after its Australian tour, Iron Maiden made a sudden announcement that the drummer’s time had come: he would be playing his final show with the band that night, in Sao Paulo, Brazil, to conclude its Future Past world tour.
“Touring with Maiden the last 42 years has been an incredible journey!” wrote McBrain in a statement on December 7.
“To my devoted fan base, you made it all worthwhile and I love you! … To my bandmates, you made it a dream come true and I love you! I look into the future with much excitement and great hope! I’ll be seeing you soon, may God bless you all, and, of course, ‘Up the Irons!’”
With McBrain’s overdue retirement, and his replacement – British drummer Simon Dawson, reportedly aged in his mid-60s – already announced ahead of the next world tour, beginning in May, hopefully “the Irons” will now shake off the percussive rust and reforge their place as one of the great live metal bands, having recently lost more than a little of their former sheen.
Andrew McMillen is The Australian’s national music writer.
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