When Iron Maiden created their 1986 album Somewhere In Time, guitarist Adrian Smith really stepped up to the plate - and created two of the band’s classic hit songs.
Going into this album, Maiden were a little short on material due to singer Bruce Dickinson being, in his own words, “mentally AWOL”.
Dickinson was exhausted after what the band had recently been through - the marathon World Slavery tour, which had kept them on the road for 13 months straight.
When they began work on Somewhere In Time, it was clear that Dickinson was suffering from what might be called metal fatigue.
As Smith tells MusicRadar: “That tour took a lot out of Bruce. It took a lot out of everybody. Bruce had gotten really into fencing. He used to go off and do these tournaments. And when he brought in these songs he’d written, it was all acoustic stuff. Some of it was good, but I guess it wasn’t what everyone else wanted to do.”
As a result, Somewhere In Time would have no songs from Dickinson, and it was up to Smith and the band’s principal songwriter, bassist Steve Harris, to pick up the slack.
Of the album’s eight tracks, four were written by Harris alone, one by Harris with guitarist Dave Murray, and the other three by Smith.
“We were in Jersey,” Smith recalls, “and we were supposed to be rehearsing every day, but we camped there for a month in the hotel and no one did anything. It was just drinking.
“I used to write with Bruce a lot, but he wasn't around, and I was stuck in Jersey in the winter, freezing my arse off in this hotel, and I just started writing. That was when I came up with Wasted Years, Sea Of Madness and Stranger In A Strange Land.
“At one point I had to go and have a root canal. I was in the chair for hours. It was terrible. I was coming back to the hotel in a taxi, it was pissing with rain, and the riff for Stranger In A Strange Land just came into my head. Got back to the hotel and put it down.
“We were also trying new ideas with that album," Smith says. "I always wanted to make an album that sounded really produced - as opposed to kind of live with a little bit of little bit of fairy dust on it.
“So the amps we used were transistor amps. Def Leppard used them a little bit as well, everyone got into them, because it was an instant gratification sound. It was like, plug in and whoa! - chorus and distortion and all this stuff.
“I got Dave [Murray} into using them as well on that album. And the guitar synth - we got well into that.
“And that's how I got the idea for Wasted Years - the guitar riff.
“I got this Roland guitar synth out of the box from Japan, and when I switched it on it started making this crazy noise - and I just played along to it. It was like a rhythmic thing. So it gave me a song straight away.
“I had a little four-track demo of it, and it sounded a little bit like U2. You have ideas that you think maybe wouldn't suit the band, so I wasn't even going to play it to Steve [Harris], but he heard me playing it in a rehearsal, and he said, ‘That’s good. We should do that.’
“Steve’s funny like that. You might think he wouldn’t go for it, but he was like, ‘Let's try it!’ And because Bruce wasn't around, I just dashed off the words as well.
“So it was written really quickly. But if Steve hadn’t heard it by accident, I would never have played it to him."
Wasted Years was a top 20 hit in the UK, and Stranger In A Strange Land, written under heavy sedation, made number 22.
As Smith says: “Funny how these things turn out!”
