Drummer Nicko McBrain announced this week that Iron Maiden’s show in Sao Paolo, Brazil on 7 December, 2024 was his last with the band.
Nicko served Iron Maiden for 42 years and appeared on classic albums such as Piece Of Mind, Powerslave and Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son, and all the way through to 2021’s Senjutsu.
While Nicko has clearly earned his reputation as one of the great drummers of his generation, one of his finest moments came back in 1988 when the took on the nation’s favourite puppets Sooty and Sweep in what was surely the greatest drum battle ever seen on British TV.
And just before he announced his retirement from Iron Maiden, he told MusicRadar that it happened because his son was one of Sooty’s biggest fans.
The Sooty Show was a long-running series presented by puppeteer Matthew Corbett and based around the adventures of Sooty, a yellow bear, and best friend Sweep, a grey dog.
The series began way back in the ’50s, and was still popular in 1988, when Iron Maiden were undoubtedly the biggest heavy metal band in the world. Maiden headlined the UK’s Monsters Of Rock festival that year. Their album Seventh Son Of a Seventh Son was a huge hit.
And this was when Nicko received a surprise call from the band’s manager Rod Smallwood.
As Nicko recalls: “Rod calls and says, ‘Nicky, are you sitting down? I said, ‘As a matter of fact I am.’ He said, ‘I’ve had a call from ITV with a request from Matthew Corbett, who does The Sooty Show. And you've been asked to go on the show.’ I said, ‘Okay, now I get why you asked me if I was sitting down!’
“I remember saying to Rod: ‘Are you okay with that?’ Because Rod had always been a bit brash about saying, ‘You can’t do this, you can't do that.’ Or, ‘Don't wear a suit when you go out.’ All that bollocks. But Rod says, ‘Think about it, Nicky!’
“Now this was 1988, and my son was five years old. Rod says, ‘Think of your boy and the bragging rights he's gonna have!’ I said, ‘Okay. So is there a fee?’ I think he said it was a few hundred quid. So I said, ‘We’ll give it to charity.’
“So I went to the studio and I took my boy. Oh God, that was a big mistake!
“When I met Matthew, he was like, ‘Thank you so much for doing the show. This is how it's going to go down. There's a talent competition and you're in town, and Sooty and Sweep need a drummer for their band.’ That was the premise: they were having a talent competition, and you could win a quid!
“Matthew said, ‘It's gonna be great!’ He told me what the script was. And as we were talking, he said, ‘I gotta tell you, what a way to make a living - putting your hand up the arse-end of a glove puppet!’ And I just fell about.
“So they're doing the show, and they had all these different stages with beautiful toys that were all specially made for the show. And my son’s up there playing with them, making all these noises: ‘Whoo-hoo!’
“The director comes up: ‘What’s all this noise over here? Now we’re gonna have to do another take!’ And Matthew says, ’It’s Nick's boy.’
“Well, the director wasn’t happy. So I took my son out, and of course he started crying. He was really upset. So a girl from the show came over, took him to the canteen, and said he could play with the toys when they were done filming.”
But that was not the end of it, as Nicko discovered when Iron Maiden began a UK tour in Scotland in November 1988, after his appearance on the Sooty Show.
“I could hear the crowd before we went on,” he recalls. “All these Scotsmen, instead of shouting ‘Maiden! Maiden!’ they were going, ‘Sooty! Sooty!’ And then when we went on, f**king hundreds of these puppets were thrown on the stage!
“I remember thinking, ‘How come all these guys have seen the show at 3.30 in the f**king afternoon when they're supposed to be working?’ So that was the beginning of it: and I thought, okay, Sooty has got to be on my drum set from hereon in!”
