There’s big, there’s huge, then there’s whatever the fuck Rime Of The Ancient Mariner is. In translating the epic Romantic poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge to heavy metal form, Iron Maiden ended up testing the limits of the genre. The song filled up almost 14 minutes with its soaring highs and creaking, spoken-words lows, ending 1984 album Powerslave on one of the grandest notes the band have ever reached.
As with most of the musically intrepid things Maiden have done, Rime… was the brainchild of bassist, founder and lead songwriter Steve Harris. Just nine years after he started the band, ’Arry was known for exploring seemingly un-metal things in his lyrics. Songs inspired by sci-fi saga Dune, Gaston Leroux novel The Phantom Of The Opera and a fictional East London sex worker were already part of his repertoire.
Even by those standards, though, the Rime… poem was particularly out-there. First published in 1798, it’s a surreal morality play, about a nameless mariner who kills an albatross for no reason while at sea. For his crime against nature, his ship is cursed and he’s trapped in a state of living death, watching his crewmates die of thirst while his suffering never ends. Only after praying about the sanctity of all life does the mariner return to shore, and he spends the rest of his eternal life telling his tale.
Talking to Metal Hammer in 2008, Harris said he couldn’t remember why he chose to do a song about Rime…. Long-serving singer Bruce Dickinson has a theory, though. He implied during a 1984 interview with French magazine Enfer that the bassist wrote about it because he was sick of the devil-worshipping allegations which followed Maiden after their 1982 chart-topper, The Number Of The Beast.
“[The poem is] a warning to all that imposes the respect of God’s actions,” Dickinson said. “Steve says that if he hears again that we’re stuck with stories about Satan and other things, it’ll mean that people will never understand Iron Maiden.”
Work on the song started during the pre-production for Powerslave, after the band had flown to Jersey to great their creative juices flowing. As with most of his songs back in those days, Harris locked himself away and came up with the nucleus by himself.
Guitarist Adrian Smith told Hammer: “We had this system whereby we’d each come up with our ideas, then work with whomever to fill them out. I would often work with Bruce on lyrics to my songs or Davey [guitarist Dave Murray] on harmonies and guitar parts and that. Steve usually works on his ideas alone, and when they’re kind of 90 per cent done he’ll present them to the band.”
Harris added: “I wrote most of it in the Bahamas where we recorded the album. I had an idea back in Jersey, but really it was at Compass Point Studios where it all came together.”
Rime… was not just a long song – it was also insanely dynamic. While the lyrics retold the poem in its entirety, the music ebbed and flowed, starting with rock-solid metal before breaking apart into bassy segues and spoken-word interludes. Then it rebuilt itself for a bold, bombastic conclusion. But, when Harris presented it to his bandmates, there was no fear of taking on the mighty track.
Smith remembered, “When he put Mariner forward, I just knew we had to do it, because I’d never heard anyone do anything like it before. I think when we recorded it in the Bahamas he had to hang the lyrics from the top of the wall all the way to the floor, there were so many. And Steve was so fired up about it he convinced everyone else. It’s so dramatic, how can you not like it?”
The exact run-time was 13 minutes and 38 seconds – enough time to cook a frozen pizza. For decades, that fact was one of the most-dropped pieces of Maiden trivia, and it set a benchmark for scale that the band didn’t beat until three decades later, when they put out the 18-minute Empire Of The Clouds in 2015. According to Harris, they didn’t realise how long the song was for quite a while.
“The funny thing is, no one actually thought it was 13 minutes long at all,” he said. “We were all so into making it work, and we all enjoyed it so much that we thought it was only eight or nine minutes long, maximum. When our producer Martin Birch timed it at 13 minutes we were all like, ‘Fuckin’ ’ell, 13 minutes?!’ And when we play it live, it never seems like 13 minutes at all.”
And play it live Maiden do! Rime… wasn’t released as a single (of course it wasn’t!), but the band couldn’t get enough of it on their blockbuster World Slavery tour from ’84 to ’85. In the years since, much like the mariner himself, it’s refused to die, coming back for the Somewhere Back In Time run in the late 2000s as well as the ongoing Run For Your Lives 50th-anniversary trek.
For the rest of the 80s, Maiden would further develop their grandiose side, incorporating synthesisers into their sound before making a semi-concept prog album in 1988’s Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son. But, when it comes to pinpointing the band’s single most ambitious moment, Rime… usually has the last word. It pushed the barriers of metal to breaking point, filling up nearly a quarter of an hour while still having no wasted space.
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