“If someone says they don’t like something, that makes me embrace it even more”: Steve Harris defends Iron Maiden’s No Prayer For The Dying album – and names the one radical thing he’d change about if

Iron Maiden’s Steve Harris performing onstage.

Is No Prayer For The Dying up there with your favourite Iron Maiden albums? If the answer is ‘yes’, you’re in a fairly select group. It would be a massive stretch to say the record, released in 1990, is as beloved as such nailed-on classics as The Number Of The Beast, Powerslave, Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son or A Matter Of Life And Death.

But if you are willing to go into bat for the metal legends’ eighth album then you’re in good company. One person who really loves it is Maiden bassist Steve Harris himself. Speaking to Metal Hammer as part of a feature on supposedly rubbish metal albums that are nowhere as bad as people say they are, ’Arry leaps to No Prayer For The Dying’s defence – and reveals the one thing he’d change about it that would have cast it in a completely different light.