Железные Мамаи в альбоме «Somewhere In Time» объединяют прошлое и настоящее, отвергая ностальгию

Released 40 years ago today, Iron Maiden’s ‘Wasted Years’ single arrived at a moment when time travel saturated popular entertainment. The Terminator (1984), Back To The Future (1985), and Doctor Who had all made temporal dislocation a familiar cultural trope. Artist Derek Riggs knowingly draws upon this visual vocabulary on the single’s sleeve and the artwork for its parent album, Somewhere In Time (released a month later). The TARDIS appears on both covers, while a DeLorean-esque vehicle hovers in the background of the 1986-7 Somewhere On Tour programme. Yet Maiden’s interests lay less in travelling between historical moments than allowing multiple temporalities to coexist simultaneously, a preoccupation ‘Wasted Years’ announces immediately. At first pass guitarist Adrian Smith’s lyrics court nostalgia – a homesick lament written during the band’s notoriously gruelling 1984-5 World Slavery Tour. The single’s promotional video reinforces this reading by assembling a retrospective of Maiden’s first six years. Yet the song ultimately rejects nostalgia. “Don’t waste your time always searching for those wasted years”, Dickinson warns, before reminding listeners to “realise you’re living in the golden years”. Memory is acknowledged but never allowed to become habitation. The present itself will one day become memory, and longing for the unrecoverable past risks the overlooking of life unfolding right now. Riggs’ ‘Wasted Years’ artwork gives form to this paradox precisely. We occupy the cockpit of an apparent time machine, looking outward as the reflection of Eddie, the band’s ghoulish avatar, appears on the central display. Around him, smaller monitors replay earlier iterations of Maiden iconography: the flaming damned of The Number Of The Beast (1982), the pyramids of Powerslave (1984), the graveyard of Live After Death (1985). Eddie’s year of origin is given as 2050, while his destination is 25 August 1986, the single’s release date. The band’s visual past, the listener’s present, and Eddie’s future coexist within the same image. But Maiden’s sci-fi imagery of the era is less about travelling to the future than collapsing multiple histories into the same haunted site. Riggs’ artwork invites listeners to move through layered temporal landscapes in which past and present continually fold into one another. Somewhere In Time represents the culmination of a visual mythology that had been unfolding since Maiden’s earliest releases. Eddie doesn’t simply become futuristic in 1986, but evolves into a figure traversing histories, memories, and time. Having formed in Leyton during 1975, by the early eighties, Maiden had become one of the defining bands of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. While the band’s de facto leader, bassist Steve Harris, began writing songs about historical figures and famous battles, Riggs’ artwork established a concurrent relationship with history. Maiden’s earliest songs and sleeves are exercises in what Adam Scovell (2019) terms the “urban wyrd,” or magic realism, described by Matthew Strecher (1999) as “what happens when a highly detailed, realistic setting is invaded by something too strange to believe”. Eddie is presented as a broken-bottle wielding assailant in a sodium-lit alley (‘Running Free’), a wild-haired, feral punk (1980’s self-titled debut album), Margaret Thatcher’s assassin (‘Sanctuary’), or an axe murderer (sophomore album, Killers). Nothing supernatural seemingly occurs across this gallery, yet everything feels subtly wrong. As fundamental as he is, Eddie appears almost secondary to the environment surrounding him. Shop fronts, chimney stacks, television aerials, twitching curtains, pubs, and endless terraces create one of heavy metal’s richest exercises in visual world-building. 1981’s ‘Twilight Zone’ / ’Wrathchild single, quietly changes everything. For the first time we leave the London streets behind and enter one of those houses. Eddie is no longer physically present but appears simultaneously as an entity reflected in a bedroom mirror and as a signed photograph on a dressing table. Reflection, apparition, and photograph coexist without contradiction. Between The Number Of The Beast and Powerslave, Riggs progressively detaches our (anti)hero from any fixed location. Eddie doesn’t simply leave London’s East End behind; he begins to transcend geography altogether. On the former, Eddie manipulates Satan himself in marionette form. On the latter, he has become an Egyptian pharaoh presiding over an impossibly monumental civilisation. This expansion is echoed in the band’s songwriting. Although Iron Maiden are often celebrated for their historical songs, those histories are rarely presented as straightforward reconstruction. Instead, they arrive pre-haunted: mediated through literature, cinema, mythology, and popular memory. Opening 1983’s Piece Of Mind album, ‘Where Eagles Dare’ recalls the 1968 war film as much as the military operation upon which it was based, while ‘Quest For Fire’ owes more to Harris’ imagination than it does to the 1981 feature film (beyond the title) or to actual archaeology and palaeontology, given its decisively inaccurate opening gambit: “In a time when dinosaurs walked the Earth… To search for landscapes, men would roam”. Even Powerslave juxtaposes WWII ariel combat (‘Aces High’), Cold War anxiety (‘2 Minutes To Midnight’), Ancient Egypt, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1798 epic Rime Of The Ancient Mariner. History is never encountered directly, but arrives already remembered, retold through interim cultural forms. It’s this process that reaches a culmination of sorts on Somewhere In Time. Temporality, either implicitly or explicitly, structures every song on the album. Opener, ‘Caught Somewhere In Time,’ suspends its narrator within history rather than moving cleanly through it. ‘The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner’ stretches and compresses time through physical endurance, while ‘Deja-Vu’ transforms memory into lived experience, Dickinson singing, “Feel like I’ve been here before”, on loop. Themes of temporality are discernible even in the album’s deeper cuts, those which don’t seem to have anything to do with time. Take the chorus of the Adrian Smith-penned ‘Sea Of Madness,’ for example. “Like a river, we will flow,” Dickinson emotes, “On towards the sea, we go”! It’s not too great a leap from this to the idea that “No man ever steps in the same river twice,” as posited by presocratic philosopher, Heraclitus. On the album’s second single, ‘Stranger In A Strange Land,’ Dickinson is “lost and far from home”. Here, Riggs’ art paints Eddie as an uncanny accrual of Blade Runner’s bounty hunter and Clint Eastwood’s Pale Rider (1985), strolling through an analogue of the Mos Eisley Cantina Bar in Star Wars: A New Hope (1977). (Whether Riggs’ art in turn influenced the more recently devised character of Cad Bane in the Star Wars universe is a debatable point.) As Jeremy Swist observes, Maiden “were among the first to rewrite history from all eras and places as metal lyrics.” His choice of the word rewrite is significant. Even the most rigorous historical scholarship remakes the past in response to the concerns of the present. Maiden’s songs do precisely this. Take Somewhere In Time’s epic closing track, ‘Alexander The Great.’ Ostensibly the album’s most conventionally historical composition, Swist suggests that Ancient Greece and Cold War anxiety coexist not just because chronology has been abandoned, but because history has become available as symbolic material. “[W]ritten during the Cold War by British musicians whose own empire had been so recently dismantled, eclipsed by the new superpowers of the United States and Soviet Union,” Swist writes, “[i]n their nostalgia for a more recent past, Iron Maiden celebrate Alexander as a bringer of culture.” Following Swist, I’d argue that, although Somewhere In Time courts nostalgia, it does so without perpetuating what Douglas Coupland – in Generation X (1998) – calls “legislated nostalgia”. Rather, it yearns for time itself, for history as something simultaneously lost and still strangely accessible. In this manner, the album anticipates Simon Reynolds’ critique contained in Retromania (2011). It’s fascination with memory circumnavigates the pull of becoming imprisoned by nostalgia, as ‘Wasted Years’ explicitly decries, demonstrating that the past never disappeared. Significant differences in their conceptions of history as lyric material distinguish Harris (and Smith) from Dickinson. Yet the perceived tension between Harris’s working-class, salt-of-the-earth geezer persona and Dickinson’s public-school-educated intellectualism is less clear-cut than it might initially appear. Harris’s ‘Alexander The Great’, for all its historical accuracy, might also be described as somewhat perfunctory in lyrical terms, whereas Dickinson arguably supplies greater subtext and historical interpretation. Yet it should be said that Harris’ ‘Rime Of The Ancient Mariner’ can stand alongside any of Dickinson’s songs in terms of its literary-minded intelligence. Harris’ historical lyrics are, in a sense, more proto-hauntological. They are technologically mediated encounters with the past, facilitated by the cinematic imagination: songs about films about history. The historical event is already at a remove, refracted through another medium and experienced as an image, a reconstruction, a memory. They are prismatic, already spectral. Somewhere In Time also announces the first signs of Dickinson’s exhaustion. The rest of the band rejected all of his material for the album, leaving him seemingly out of step with the group’s developing direction. This is particularly striking given his now-infamous anti-synthesizer manifesto during 1984’s live video Behind The Iron Curtain: synths are, after all, the first sound heard on Somewhere In Time. Perhaps, then, it is not surprising that the album’s thematic and aesthetic concerns shift accordingly. As already alluded to, Blade Runner’s influence on Somewhere In Time is unmistakable. Riggs abandons the Victorian terraces and sodium-lit streets of early Maiden for a vast luminous city indebted to Ridley Scott’s Los Angeles. Yet Blade Runner itself is already an artefact of temporal instability. Released in 1982, but set in the then distant future of 2019, Scott’s film adapts Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, transforming its post-apocalyptic San Francisco into a city haunted by noir cinema, industrial modernity, and imagined tomorrows already beginning to decay. The band would even come on to Vangelis’s end theme from Blade Runner during the Somewhere On Tour campaign. Somewhere In Time’s sleeve is celebrated for its countless hidden references, but these are more than visual jokes or Easter eggs for dedicated fans. Earlier Maiden imagery proliferates throughout the cityscape in advertisements, architecture, and street signs. Pubs and litter bins survive beneath the neon skyline. The East End bleeds into cyberpunk Los Angeles, surviving beneath its surface like a palimpsest. Previous album covers echo across shop fronts and alleyways. Rather than depicting a brave new world, Riggs folds every previous Maiden world into the same visual field until chronology begins to collapse. Fredric Jameson’s account of postmodernism provides an illuminating framework for understanding this accumulation. Writing on Blade Runner Jameson describes a contemporary “weakening of historicity,” in which the past no longer appears as a stable sequence of events but as a reservoir of circulating images and styles. Elsewhere he describes the film as possessing “an elegant futuristic melancholy”, or a future already experienced as loss. That melancholy permeates Somewhere In Time. Although its cityscape glows with technological possibility, it remains saturated with memory. David Harvey’s notion of “time-space compression” similarly captures the peculiar logic of Riggs’ visual composition. Harvey, citing film critic Guiliano Bruno, characterises Blade Runner’s aesthetic through “recycling, [a] fusion of levels, discontinuous signifiers, [an] explosion of boundaries, and erosion”. The description reads almost as a formal analysis of the Somewhere In Time sleeve. Philip K. Dick offers perhaps the closest philosophical analogue for what Riggs achieves. In VALIS (1981), the character Horselover Fat experiences what he calls a “two-world superimposition.” California in 1974 ebbs away as first-century AD Rome emerges in its place. Rather than travelling through time, Fat experiences both temporalities simultaneously, describing them as a kind of “double exposure.” Neither world replaces the other. Each remains visible. Riggs imagines Eddie in much the same way. The cyborg does not supersede his earlier incarnations any more than ancient Rome replaces modern California in Dick’s novel. Every previous Eddie remains present beneath the cybernetic surface: the suburban apparition of ‘Twilight Zone’, the gleeful murderer of Killers, the pharaoh of Powerslave. Eddie no longer develops in a linear manner. He is the supra- or trans-temporal constant in the Maidenverse, accumulating himself. Eddie – thus also the band and their listeners – moves through history unbound, belonging exclusively to no single period while carrying every previous incarnation with him. This is one of the primary achievements of ‘Wasted Years’ and Somewhere in Time. Rather than guiding fans to a particular historical destination, Eddie and the band invite the audience to inhabit a world in which memory and anticipation continually interrupt the present. A recursive dance they peerlessly continue to this day. Up the Irons!