Iron Maiden bassist Steve Harris has expressed interest in writing an autobiography.
The London-born musician, who founded the metal band in 1975, discussed the topic during a recent interview with Sirius XM.
“I’d love to write a book at some point,” he said (as transcribed by Blabbermouth), “but it’s just a question of time. ’Cause there’s so many other things that I do when I’m not on tour.”
The bassist then compared himself to Maiden’s longtime singer Bruce Dickinson, a renowned polymath who released his autobiography, What Does This Button Do?, in 2017.
“I couldn’t do like Bruce does,” Harris explained. “I mean, he just does 10 things at once. He told me that he was writing [his book] like even in the dressing room before shows… I can’t do that. I need to sort of set it out and do it really more methodical than that. So I know it would take me quite a bit of time to do. But, yeah, I would like to do one.”
He continued: “I mean, I probably would write a book just about the early days, really.”
After Harris formed Maiden on Christmas Day 1975, the band became a cornerstone of the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal in the ’70s and early ’80s. Their third album and first with Dickinson on vocals, The Number Of The Beast (1982), topped the UK album charts and courted controversy in the States with its satanic imagery.
Dickinson reflected on the outrage in a recent interview with The Telegraph: “We never aimed to do anything like that. [It was] primarily a phenomenon of the USA, where they have an underdeveloped sense of irony. We just thought, ‘People want to buy our records and burn them? Go ahead!’”
Maiden have since topped the UK album charts twice more with Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son (1988) and Fear Of The Dark (1992), and are currently between legs of their Future Past tour, where they perform tracks mostly from Somewhere In Time (1986) and latest album Senjutsu (2021).
The Future Past tour will pick up in September with a tour of Oceania, then continue through Japan, North America and South America for the remainder of the year. Tickets and the full list of dates are available at the Maiden website.
