Based on the 18th-century poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, it also showcased Maiden’s historical and literary approach to lyricism.
“It’s okay to write simple pop songs. There’s nothing wrong with that. But if kids went out and checked into Coleridge just because we wrote a song about it, then that’s really something,” bassist Steve Harris told Kerrang!. “The same sort of thing happened with To Tame A Land on the last album. The amount of people who went out and read Dune by Frank Herbert, which inspired it, was amazing.”
Released on September 3, 1984, Powerslave provided the band with their second consecutive million-plus seller in the States, where it reached Number 21 in the album charts. In the UK it was only kept off the top spot by the third instalment of the never-ending Now That’s What I Call Music! series – the sort of various-artists album that would have been ineligible just a few years later.
It was still a huge success, however, and it gave the band the platform to launch the mind-bogglingly vast World Slavery Tour. Running for more than 11 months – from August 9, 1984 to July 5, 1985 – it took in 189 shows and included their first tour in what was then the Eastern Bloc (documented in the video Behind The Iron Curtain), a four-night stint at the Hammersmith Odeon, runs in Japan and Australia, and their first-ever show in South America, playing the inaugural Rock In Rio festival to an estimated crowd of 350,000 people. And all this with a none-more-spectacular stage show themed around the Egyptian imagery of the album artwork and featuring gigantic sarcophagi, pyrotechnics of apocalyptic proportions and a 30-foot mummified Eddie.