'We had a song called Heat-Crazed Vole. You know, like a rat. It was pretty awful!': Iron Maiden's Steve Harris recalls his early days
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In the 50 years since he formed Iron Maiden, bassist Steve Harris has been the band's leader and main songwriter - the author of classic heavy metal anthems including Run To The Hills, The Number Of The Beast and The Trooper.
But as he admits to MusicRadar, he wrote some very strange songs in his younger days before Maiden.
In his first band, Influence, Harris wrote the music but left the lyrics to a school friend named Dave Smith.
'Dave came up with a song that was called Heat-Crazed Vole,' Harris recalls. 'You know, like a rat. Which I thought was a pretty awful title.'
Dave Smith also provided the title for another of Harris' early songs - Endless Pit.
'That was a terrible title as well,' Harris says.
But that song ended up being hugely significant for Steve Harris and Iron Maiden.
The main riff in Endless Pit was developed into a new song named Innocent Exile.
Innocent Exile would eventually be featured on Iron Maiden's second album, Killers, released in 1981.
But Steve Harris first performed the song with Smiler, the band he joined after his spells with Influence and another group, Gypsy's Kiss.
'I played quite a few gigs with Smiler,' Harris says. 'Maybe twenty-six, twenty-seven shows with them.
'And it was good experience playing with guys that were quite a bit older than me. It's funny because at the time, I was seventeen, and they were like mid-twenties, and I thought they were pretty old!
'Smiler was a boogie band, so they quite liked Innocent Exile, because it's got a sort of a boogie bit at the end.
'But they didn't want to play any of my other songs, and that's when it got a bit weird.
"They told me, 'Oh, there's too many time changes in your songs.' And well, fair enough. I mean, I joined them!
'They were a boogie band, and that's what I joined. So I should have been content with that, really, but I wasn't.
'I wanted to introduce more of my stuff, and it wasn't really suitable for that band.
'We played a lot of covers, and because they had two guitar players I introduced a bit of Wishbone Ash. But they liked the boogie stuff like Savoy Brown and bands like that. That's what they were all about.
'So I was trying to pull them in a direction that they weren't really that comfortable with.
'And in the end I realised that the only way to do my own stuff is to leave and form my own band. Then I can do what I want.'
Harris put the first line-up of Iron Maiden together in the last months of 1975.
50 years later, the band are celebrating that anniversary with the Run For Your Lives tour.
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