From fear to eternity: "Iron Maiden: Burning Ambition"

As they celebrate their fiftieth anniversary, those original monsters of rock Iron Maiden find themselves central to two feature-length documentaries. Di'Anno: Iron Maiden's Lost Singer (currently touring) is an independently mounted profile of the group's irascible early vocalist Paul Di'Anno in his final years; the studio-backed, starrier-eyed Burning Ambition (now in multiplexes) the officially sanctioned overview of ver Maiden's five decades in the business. They were never fashionable: emerging amid the winter of discontent as hard rockers, just as punk was becoming the next big thing, they weren't what the labels were initially looking for, nor what mainstream radio was looking for, nor indeed the revolutionary MTV. "We weren't as good looking as Eddie [the band's ghoulish mascot]," founder member and guitarist bedrock Steve "Harry" Harris cheerily admits early on. In subsequent years, they would be pushed to the physical limit by management who wanted them out on the road 24/7 to make up for the lack of promotional airplay; they would also be dissed by such young pretenders as Nirvana, who responded to a touring request by insisting Maiden were "too old". Yet sustained by a longhaired fanbase who knew exactly what they wanted - to rock out - and by the blazing self-confidence of replacement frontman Bruce Dickinson, they survived and prospered, becoming something like Status Quo with an edge. (Never fashionable, always there.) One of Burning Ambition's biggest revelations is the scope of that fanbase. You could probably have guessed that Anthrax's Scott Ian and Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine were Maiden heads, as it were. But who knew Chuck D was an admirer? Who knew Javier Bardem was? Bardem proves effusive indeed in interview, unironically intoning the band's lyrics as if they were Coleridge. Do you think Penélope Cruz lets him put his records on in the front room of an evening, or would she shoo him away to his cueva de hombre?

As assembled by Malcolm Venville, a veteran pop-promo director who last entered cinemas with 2009's Sexy Beast-adjacent 44 Inch Chest, Burning Ambition otherwise assumes a broadly conventional form. The concert footage goes heavy on thunderous drumming and elaborate fretwork; unlike Quo, Maiden proceeded with a blokey virtuosity that marked them - again, unfashionably - as the children of prog. Often evocative, time-capsule archive - Bruce interviewed by Sally James on Tiswas, Nicko McBrain drumming up a storm on The Sooty Show (!) - is overlaid with the sound of the lads and close collaborators, enlisted as offscreen talking heads. Inevitably, certain anecdotes verge on the Spinal Tap, particularly those centring the swaggering Dickinson, a passable lookalike in his younger days for Christopher Guest's Nigel Tufnel. We learn the singer came to blows with Harris backstage at Newcastle City Hall; he brains himself with a guitar during the 1985 iteration of Rock in Rio, and furnishes a Hungarian press conference with an especially Tufnelian quote ("We prefer to write songs about things people don't do very often - like death"). Some of that archive describes the changing face (if that's the right word) of codpieces and tight Spandex slacks. Yet again, like Quo, Maiden persisted with a sense of humour, one that proved valuable amid the Satanic panic of the 1980s and whenever they were faced with the snobbery of the domestic music press. In a film as densely packed as some of those codpieces, Venville even begins to broach the politics of Maiden. As previously noted by Tarek Hodžić's 2017 doc Scream for Me Sarajevo, the group were greeted almost as liberators amid the Communist-controlled Eastern Bloc of the late 1980s and early 1990s. (They were at least as significant in the raising of the Iron Curtain as, say, David Hasselhoff.) Late on, reuniting with the band after his wayward solo career, Dickinson can be heard telling the crowd at one gig that "it doesn't matter if you're Muslim, Christian, Jewish... as long as you're a Maiden fan, we're one big fucking family", an idea that requires further parsing in light of the singer's role as a hypeman for Brexit, which proved a line in the sand for at least one sometime fan (my metalhead brother). In the closing moments, bringing us up to date, we see Maiden playing to another sellout crowd in the London Stadium last summer, grizzled and withered - that long hair now greying - and McBrainless, the drummer having retired on health grounds in 2024, yet undefeated by it all. Maybe Maiden only begin to make sense if we view them in terms of their own songs' protagonists: as men out of time, eternal rebels, some crucial part of them ever frozen in up-yours adolescence.

Iron Maiden: Burning Ambition is now showing in cinemas nationwide.