{"id":77077,"date":"2026-11-13T16:18:39","date_gmt":"2026-11-13T16:18:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musicianvoice.com\/index.php\/2026\/11\/13\/iron-maidens-nicko-mcbrain-talks-somewhere-in-time-in-book-excerpt\/"},"modified":"2026-11-13T16:18:39","modified_gmt":"2026-11-13T16:18:39","slug":"iron-maidens-nicko-mcbrain-talks-somewhere-in-time-in-book-excerpt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musicianvoice.com\/index.php\/2026\/11\/13\/iron-maidens-nicko-mcbrain-talks-somewhere-in-time-in-book-excerpt\/","title":{"rendered":"Iron Maiden’s Nicko McBrain Talks ‘Somewhere in Time’ in Book Excerpt"},"content":{"rendered":"


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\n\tForty years ago this fall, Iron Maiden<\/a> released their sixth album, <\/em>Somewhere in Time, which became an instant classic thanks to the singles \u201cWasted Years\u201d and \u201cStranger in a Strange Land.\u201d About a year had passed since they\u2019d concluded their gargantuan World Slavery Tour, which had made them metal superstars, so they worked hard to find ways of making a run of shows they dubbed Somewhere on Tour even more over-the-top.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n\tAn excerpt from Maiden drummer Nicko McBrain\u2019s newly released book, <\/em>Hello Boys and Girls!<\/a>, highlights some of the right and wrong turns they made while making the album and on tour. Elsewhere in the book, he also tells his life story, both before joining Maiden in 1982, his time in the group, and after he decided to step away from touring<\/a> with the band in 2024 due to the aftereffects of a stroke a year earlier.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n\tDiehard Maiden fans will instantly recognize McBrain\u2019s voice when they read the book, especially since \u201cHello boys and girls\u201d was his catchphrase. He refers affectionately to bassist\/bandleader Steve Harris as \u201c\u2019\u2019Arry\u201d and guitarist Adrian Smith as \u201cH\u201d and shares anecdotes about singer Bruce Dickinson and guitarist Dave Murray. (His use of \u2019kin\u2019 should make sense if you read it out loud.)<\/em><\/p>\n

\n\tHere\u2019s what he wrote in the book about the period surrounding <\/em>Somewhere in Time, beginning with the initial writing sessions for the album, which took place in the Bahamas<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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\n\tBruce clearly thought the band needed to go in a different direction and turned up to Nassau with a bunch of acoustic songs. \u2019Arry thought he\u2019d lost the plot, and rather than getting us all in and saying, \u201cWhat do you boys think?\u201d he rejected them on the spot.<\/p>\n

\n\tI could tell that Bruce was a bit miffed about that, but it was \u2019Arry\u2019s band and he called the shots. I never heard Bruce\u2019s efforts, but \u2019Arry said they were quite Jethro Tull, and while I\u2019ve got nothing against Jethro Tull (we\u2019d actually covered their song \u201cCross-Eyed Mary\u201d), they\u2019re definitely not very Maiden.<\/p>\n

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\t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n<\/h2>\n<\/section>\n

\n\tLuckily, H stepped up to the plate with three great tracks, including \u201cWasted Years\u201d (about homesickness, funnily enough) and \u201cStranger in a Strange Land\u201d (about a sailor who went missing on an Arctic expedition and was discovered in the ice years later), which were both released as singles.<\/p>\n

\n\tAs for \u2019Arry, his influences on that album included British film (The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner<\/em>) and ancient history (\u201cAlexander the Great\u201d). But despite a lot of references to time on the record, we didn\u2019t mean it to be a concept album, as some have suggested. Perhaps the time thing was subconscious, given that the World Slavery Tour had seemed never-ending.<\/p>\n

\n\tFrom Nassau, we decamped to the Wisseloord Studios in Holland to record the guitars and vocals, before moving on to Electric Lady Studios in New York for the mixing. H and Davey used guitar synthesizers for the first time on that album, and you can hear the effects from the opening note of the first song, \u2019Arry\u2019s \u201dCaught Somewhere in Time.\u201d But while Maiden using synths might sound risky in hindsight, that\u2019s just the way the wind was blowing in rock music in the mid-Eighties. The march of technology stands still for no man.<\/p>\n

\n\tA few people felt betrayed, like when Bob Dylan went electric, although one fan in Poland must have been over the moon. When we were over there a couple of years earlier, this kid had said to Bruce, \u201cI want to play heavy metal with synthesizers,\u201d and Bruce had snapped back, \u201cYou can\u2019t play heavy metal with synthesizers\u201d (we\u2019d occasionally remind Bruce about that and the clip pops up in the recent Maiden documentary Iron Maiden: Burning Ambition<\/em><\/a> \u2014 now available to rent, boys and girls!). But Somewhere in Time <\/em>obviously hit the mark with most of our fans because it did even better business than Powerslave<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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\t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n<\/h2>\n<\/section>\n

\n\t\u201cWasted Years\u201d was the first single, and we had a lot of fun performing it on German TV. We thought we were going to be playing it live, but when we were getting ready to go on, the director told us we\u2019d actually be miming. As a kind of protest, we switched instruments midway through, so that \u2019Arry was on the drums, Bruce was playing the bass, and I was singing, even though I didn\u2019t know the words. The director went spare at us, not that we cared.<\/p>\n

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