“I had a thought: ‘I wonder if she could foresee her own death?’ I went to Bruce and he said, ‘Yeah, it’s a great idea!’”: How a dead psychic and singer with a point to prove inspired Iron Maiden to make one of the maddest concept albums of the 80s

Iron Maiden posing for a photograph in the 1980s.

On November 5, 1987, Iron Maiden finally reached the end of extensive touring in support of their sixth studio album, Somewhere In Time. Firmly established as the biggest heavy metal band on the planet by this point, their next move was clearly going to be a hugely important one. No one could have predicted what happened next, least of all famous British ‘psychic’ Doris Stokes, whose death in May 1987 proved to be the unlikely starting point for Maiden’s seventh and most impactful album yet.

“I just had a thought: ‘I wonder if she could foresee her own death?’” stated Steve Harris, in 2013’s Maiden England ’88 documentary. “Who knows? So I started off with that sort of idea. I wrote The Clairvoyant and then went to Bruce with it and basically he said, ‘Yeah, it’s a great idea!’