I’ve been an Iron Maiden fan since the ’80s. Between their awesome music, phenomenal album artwork, and videos that the MTV’s Headbangers Ball played nearly every week back when it mattered, I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one. In between the band’s 30 year career and 15 albums, they’ve got a great body of work, and are hands down one of my favorite bands. When their last album, A Matter of Life and Death came out in 2006, the band played the entire new album on tour, and while the album itself wasn’t bad, you could noticeably see and hear the crowd turning against Maiden as they kept skipping over classics in favor of the new stuff.
It seemed they learned their lesson for the next tour, Somewhere Back In Time. Consisting of a Powerslave-era stage set, the band blasted through songs mostly from the first seven albums, including their most epic song, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Well, the band played their first show of their The Final Frontier tour last night, and if this is the set they’ll be playing the entire tour, they might be losing some more fans this time.
Don’t get me wrong, I have absolutely no problem with a band playing some newer stuff, especially when they have an album to promote. And trotting out the same songs every show has got to get boring for the group. At this stage in their career, they’ve earned the right to play whatever they want to. But 11 of the 16 songs they played come from their four most recent albums. If they’re really not going to play anything from Piece of Mind, Powerslave, Somewhere In Time, or Seventh Son of a Seventh Son on the whole tour, there’s going to be a lot of disappointed Maiden fans out there. Hit the jump for the set list.
pic [via]
01. The Wicker Man
02. The Ghost Of The Navigator
03. Brighter Than A Thousand Suns
04. El Dorado
05. Paschendale
06. The Reincarnation Of Benjamin Breeg
07. These Colours Don’t Run
08. Blood Brothers
09. Wildest Dreams
10. No More Lies
11. Brave New World
12. Fear Of The Dark
13. Iron Maiden
Encore:
14. The Number Of the Beast
15. Hallowed Be Thy Name
16. Running Free
