Blaze Bayley fronted Iron Maiden for two records in the 1990s when Bruce Dickenson left the band. Since leaving the band, Bayley has embarked on a prolific solo career which includes his new record Circle of Stone. Blaze recently took some time to talk about his new record and look back on his career.
Please press the PLAY icon for the MisplacedStraws Blaze Bayley interview –
On who plays on the record with him – Well, I work with some guys from a band called Absolva, and this is our fifth album of writing. Chris Appleton from Absolva, he’s my co-producer. We work very closely on different parts of the music and the production and we’ve toured together. We’ve had a consistent lineup. He has his own band. They’re called Absolva they’re starting to really get a name for themselves now, and they’ve got their own albums really worth checking out, and we’ve managed to keep it together for five albums and quite a few tours and that relationship has meant that we’ve improved.
We really wanted to produce our own albums as part of the creative process as an artist. I feel I want to be more like Jimmy Page and Led Zeppelin taking the process, every part of it from the songwriting through to the mixing, the production, the whole thing. So that what you hear as my fan, my listener is something that I wanted you to hear. I’ve shaped that song for you to be in your headphones, on your hi-fi, in your car with you to take you on that journey. That’s how we’ve done it and we’re really pleased with the way Circle of Stone has turned out. It’s it’s a big album and it comes in two halves. We’re very lucky to be able to have the vinyl at the same time as the CD.
Side one is six songs which are unconnected and side two is six songs which are connected by a central theme. That’s a concept where the ancestors call to you, in your dreams and ask you to find your lost tribe and take back your homeland. That’s what it’s about. So far, people who have heard it have really liked it. We’re very nervous about it. A lot of anxiety because it sounds different to previous Blaze albums. It started more from the guitar, from electric guitar, this one than previous ones. I think that shows, but we still have our main idea when we produce an album, we want strong melodies, we want honest, truthful lyrics that will resonate with you. If English isn’t your first language, we want you to feel emotionally what that song is about. Those are the things we go with. So I think we’ve done that on this album and so far the reaction has been incredible to the three singles. Big day tomorrow, the album is available everywhere for streaming and in stores and so everybody gets to hear it so we’re just very hopeful that people will like it.
On his lyric writing, particularly “Broken Man” and “Until We Meet Again” – Well, I think both of those that you mentioned, they come really from my fans and what’s spooky about the lyrics in particular on this album is when you look at them, it feels like they could have been written after a heart attack. But in fact, because it takes, at the moment, you have to get your vinyl ready nine months before. You’ve got to send that to the factory and you’ll see nine months later, kind of like a child. That was finished and it was done. I signed off on the final master on Friday. On Saturday, I had a heart attack and I was in hospital. I almost never saw the album. So that’s incredible really. What’s got me through that time is, apart from my partner Kate who nursed me back to health after the operation, is the support of my fans. For all of the time that I’ve been going, from after Iron Maiden where I’ve had my ups and downs and I’ve been broken all sorts of things I’ve been through, my fans have always been there saying, “When’s your next album When’s your next tour? ” So “Broken Man”, really it’s reflecting on that. All of the ups and downs I’ve been through. From working in a shop and people used to come into the shop and see me and say, “Hey man, when’s your next album?” They didn’t say, “What are you doing working in the shop?” They just say, “When’s your next record? When’s your next tour?” When I had nothing and friends stuck by me. So “Broken Man” really is for the fans and the friends and the family that stuck by me when I almost gave up on myself. They said, “No, come on, keep going”. That’s what it’s for.
“Until We Meet Again”, we play some bigger shows, festivals, and we play some intimate venues. Sometimes there are nights when you just don’t want it to end and you don’t want to say goodbye to anybody. It comes from that. The meet and greet to the Blaze Bayley gig. Is included in your ticket price at most headline Blaze Baylet shows. I sign for everybody and that’s just included there’s no extra cost and I know some other people don’t like that I do that but I don’t care and that’s where it comes from, “Until We Meet Again.” It’s the feeling that we don’t want to say goodbye. We have to because I have to go to that town and play that gig. We have to say, “Come on, we’ll see each other next time”. The fans, there are some places that I go, and this is so humbling, Jeff. They say, “If you’re here, Blaze, I’ll be here”, and they are the next time that it’s incredible to have that level of support and people just don’t even think about it.
“If you’re here, I’ll be here”. It’s it’s unreal. So that’s where that came from. Then expanding it as we started the story, which we never thought about before. Not like with the trilogy where we had this story that we were writing to, the story for side two, the Call of the Ancestors, the whole Circle of Stone story, as that started to come together, then that song took on its own life. We make with me this vow here and now that we’re going to try and meet again, no matter what. So that’s where it came from. Most of the songs, there’s some truth. There’s some connection that I tried to always have a bridge between me and what’s in my life. and the character that I’m writing about that I’m putting in the song that is talking to you or asking you to understand and empathize, sometimes sympathize with the situation that I put them in and I’ve tried to keep the lyrics simple, very simple. I thought, well, it’s a risk because, on the trilogy, there’s a lot of complex lyrics and they work well, and it’s a lot of work. On the last album, War Within Me, then there was some challenging lyrics and phrases. This one, I thought, “I want to keep it simple and have it so you can catch the lyrics easily the first time that you listen”, there’s not too many different phrases and awkward things to try and catch, and I just was hoping that people would get from that. the emotion and passion of the situations in the song.
On how he views his 5 years in Iron Maiden within his 40-year career – It’s a small part. It’s two albums. I’ve done 14 albums, something like that. It’s going from being a young man and then into my thirties with a voice that I’m trying to sound powerful and have a certain way of singing, a soft and loud. But I didn’t have a depth before Iron Maiden and I did everything to the best of my ability. Then working in the studio with Steve Harris and finding this other part of my voice that I never knew that I had and then getting it to become strong and actually writing, including this part of my voice. Those five years you find as I started with Wolfsbane and developed my technique and then again with Maiden and change, then after that I’m strengthening and learning more about my voice. There are more places to go. I’m able to bring lyrics and melodies to life and give them emotion that wasn’t possible for me before.
So with Circle of Stone, you can draw a line back to Wolfsbane and then back to Maiden, and you can see the way it’s developed, and you can see my voice. “That’s what he learned in his Wolfsbane days when he learned to sing, and that’s what he learned in Iron Maiden when he found the rest of his voice”. You can hear that on this record, perhaps more than any other album that we’ve done since Iron Maiden. Things have developed on the five albums that Chris Appleton and I have produced together, then I think you can hear that more on this and it’s very, very satisfying to be able to have a lyric and then vocalize that, in a way, that brings the emotion out of that lyric to my listener. So far, I’m so happy and relieved, relieved in a big way that people have understood what we’re doing and not going, “Well, it’s a bit quiet and mumbly there, and it’s a bit loud and scratchy there”. So they haven’t done that, or if they have, I haven’t seen it, thank goodness.
On Iron Maiden still playing his songs live- Well, I think the biggest single thing that I got from Iron Maiden is confidence. “Man on the Edge” was my lyric and my melody. I wrote that with Janick Gers. That was chosen as a single from the X Factor album, which is the first album with a brand new singer and it’s my song. So it goes top 10 and number one in some places. around the world. So, that’s me. There’s no taking that away. You can’t say, “Well, you didn’t do that. You didn’t go top 10. You didn’t go number. No. 1”, I did. That’s it. It’s my song. My lyric, my melody, me and Janick, and then Steve producing it. So that’s it. That’s a lot of confidence. No matter what. When you have that confidence, it’s something you can really hang on to. It will get shaken and it has got shaken over the years, but it is something you can hold on to. I’m immensely grateful to everyone in Iron Maiden, of course, particularly to Steve as a producer of those albums for giving me that confidence and making me see, “You know what? Yes, you can do this”.
It’s not that you aren’t good enough to write this, to write a song. Sometimes it’s just that people that will like this haven’t heard it, don’t know about it. It’s getting that exposure, getting over to the people. There is an audience for this, for me, for this kind of music, people that love interesting lyrics, powerful guitar, great melody parts, interesting instrumentals that aren’t just noodling, then there are people that love that. But they don’t know about me. Now, it seems, for some reason, that people are starting to find out about what I do and it’s a great time because I’m an independent artist. I own every record in my catalog since I left Maiden except one. So it’s a great time for me. One of my very, very favorite things, Jeff, is people, new fans will listen to X Factor or Virtual XI album and they’ll go, “Bruce sounds really different on this album”, and then they will go down the rabbit hole of Blaze Bayley and come out in the universe of Blaze Bayley. So it’s all these albums and everything and I’ve got live albums and all my studio albums and it’s really fun for me when that happens. So that’s great. I think it’s satisfying, but I would say satisfying in a way that you go, “You know what? Yeah, this is good, but the single most important thing. Does that song work? Is that song the best you can do? Is the journey of that song two and a half minutes or six minutes? Doesn’t matter. Does the journey of that song make sense and take you from here to here, and it’s good enough so you’ll go, I’ve got to hear that again”. There’s no show, there’s no flashing lights, there’s no computer that is going to replace that.
It’s all about the music and for me and working with the guys in Absolva and working with Chris Appleton, then for us, we go, “It’s the music. If this music doesn’t work on its own, forget everything else. We just shouldn’t be here. That’s what we strive for. That’s the pressure we put on ourselves every time we record and write a song. Is this good enough? Can we do this live? How will we do this live? How do we bring this to life on the album? What’s the album version of this song? And then how will we take it? What would the live version of it feel like? Because the two are a bit different. It’s like different seasons almost. So that’s what we’re struggling to do. We continue to struggle and when we get it right and we feel we get it right we go, “Ah, relieved. We’ve done something that we wanted to do. It’s worked.”
On his upcoming tour – If you look on BlazeBayley.net and look at the tour dates, you’ll see that some shows say “30th Anniversary” and some shows are “Circle of Stone”. So what we start next week is a “Circle of Stone” tour, which is playing quite a few songs off the new album and at different parts of the year on festivals and in Sweden, then we do the “30th Anniversary” shows. So it’s nice to go back. We just did Spain and Ireland with the “30th Anniversary” and now we go back to Europe with “Circle of Stone” and there’ll be a couple of festivals of “30th Anniversary” Maiden set.
It’s nice to sing those old songs with the voice I have now. I did my best back in the studio in my thirties but now my voice has more depth and character than it had back then. So I feel the lyrics and melodies come to life in a different way. We’re a little bit cheeky, Jeff, about what we do. We’re never trying to make the album version. That’s the song from the album. This is the song live by Blaze Bayley. There are a couple of places we think, “On the album, it doesn’t have a harmony” and we’re a little bit cheeky. We go, “Let’s put that harmony in there”, and no one ever complains. So it’s fun to do it. We just feel that the way that we look at things, my morals, the things that I use to keep me going. I’m not trying to replicate a studio album. I’m playing a song live because I’m looking you in the eye and I’m singing and my energy and my being is trying to bring that song to life, not replicate it, not copy it, trying to say, “Look, here’s my idea”. No, let me show you my idea.
On if there will be US dates – We just struggle to get over there. We’re trying all of the time. We talked to different promoters. It’s just a challenge to get there. I have a lot of fans in the US. The last tour was a long time ago. We really want to come back. We love touring there. We absolutely love it, but it’s just tough to get there. That’s all. It’s a vast country. You need a lot of resources to even start thinking about a tour. Well, we would love to return and I want to thank all my fans in the USA for all the support they give me even though they don’t get to see me that often.
