No surprises. Iron Maiden presented The Future Past World Tour at the Palau Sant Jordi yesterday. A colorful setting, two Eddies – his pet monster – and the already classic musicians, the voice and engine of Bruce Dickinson, the command of Steve Harris on bass, the guitars of Dave Murray, Adrian Smith and Janick Gers and the great Nicko McBrain on drums.
The tour was supposed to be the presentation of Senjutsu – from 2021 -, but since covid changed their plans they already showed it a year ago at the Olympic Stadium, and now they are mixing it in equal parts with the legendary album Somewhere in time, from 1986, five songs of each, plus other past hits from the eighties, but without some of the classics that were not very essential until recently.
The atmosphere heats up – in addition to the heat wave, clear, intense – with the introduction over the speakers of the Doctor, doctor of the Ufos, followed by the final theme of Blade runner by Vangelis, and the ovation and the heavy horns burst out when Caught somewhere in time starts to play, a song that hasn’t been on any tour since 1987. After the intro of twin guitars, with the stage empty and dark, the band starts near the stage at full volume and a scenery on screens flanked by mutant iterations of Eddie and the image of a colorful street as if it were all neon from a Japanese dystopia. Throughout the concert, the various screens will change the scene, now landscapes, now references to time travel, or various versions of Eddie coming to life as the songs go by, including the fusion of the 1986 with the samurai of 2021. The future past? The past future? A present that does not erase and does entertain. Between statism and hardened dynamics. Stuck somewhere in time, they’ve been singing for almost half a century as a band.
Next, another look at the past with Stranger in a strange land, in a land that is not strange to them. Harris wanders up and down the bass, as do Smith and Murray between riffs, accompaniments and solos, Gers plays by posing and somersaulting and Dickinson moves the audience as she walks up and down the stage. The bounty hunter version of Eddie appears in a corner just for us to see and walks away, while everything remains the same.
“Hello, Barcelona, ??hello Spain and hello Catalonia!”, shouts Dickinson, and celebrates that they have sold out all the tickets. He introduces the first of the three themes of Senjutsu, The writing on the wall, with an ecological simile. The audience celebrates the newest songs as if they were from a lifetime, as they do with Days of future past and The time machine. As in a time machine, the fans keep the uncertain epic of this menacing future and the band covers one of the great classics of all time, The prisoner, which reminds us that we are not numbers, but people, we are free men, and not prisoners
They return to the present with Death of the Celts, another of Harris’ themes around the annihilation of cultures, and Dickinson remembers that “if you have a language, a culture, a tradition, a family, they cannot annihilate you. It sounds like Catalonia, but this is not a song about the death of the Catalans, but of the Celts”.
Can I play with madness, their almost mainstream hit from 1988, opens the final stretch. It won’t be until the end of Heaven can wait, past the concert hour, that bounty hunter Eddie returns and duels with Dickinson during the guitar solos. Eddie hits him so hard that the singer skips a few bars.
Then, an impressive Alexander the Great that fans have been able to hear live for the first time just before one of their stadium anthems, Fear of the dark, everyone singing along, and the classic from the first album, the self-titled Iron Maiden , with Eddie the samurai play fighting with the musicians.
Already in the encores, the last track of the last album, Hell on Earth, with flames on the stage, followed by another classic like The trooper, this time without Dickinson waving the flag and without losing the magic, for ending with Wasted years, with Adrian Smith’s iconic riff and a message that may seem contradictory: “Don’t waste your time looking for the lost years (…) realize that you are living the golden years”. It is clear that you can live in the present without renouncing a glorious past, and Iron Maiden have been proving this by riding on stage for decades.
