Iron Maiden Slate Live Album ‘Nights of the Living Dead’ for Fall

Iron Maiden played a high adrenaline, career-spanning setlist on their last tour and documented it for a new live album, Nights of the Living Dead: Legacy of the Beast: Live in Mexico City. The material comes from the three nights the group played at a Mexico City arena last September.

A limited-edition triple-LP will feature vinyl colored to match the Mexican flag; the collection will also be available in a limited-edition two-CD book format, as well as conventional two-CD, three-LP and digital releases. The record, in all its formats, will come out on November 20th.

“When the final leg of our 2020 Legacy tour this summer had to be canceled due to the Covid pandemic, the whole band was very disappointed and deflated and we know our fans felt the same,” bassist Steve Harris said in a statement. “We’d been really looking forward to bringing the show to even more countries and although we’ve been able to reschedule most of our European shows for 2021, we thought we’d take a listen to the recordings from the tour so far and see if we could create a definitive live album souvenir that everyone, everywhere could enjoy.

“I’m very pleased with the results,” he continued, “especially as this setlist includes songs that have never made it to a live CD before, such as ‘For the Greater Good of God,’ and other older songs like ‘Where Eagles Dare,’ ‘Flight of Icarus,’ ‘The Clansman,’ and ‘Sign of the Cross,’ which haven’t been included in our live set releases for many years. We’ve never released a live album from Mexico before and I think this recording does justice to the passion and joy of our Mexican fans who always give us such a fantastic welcome whenever we play there.”

As Harris mentions, the band intends to continue the Legacy of the Beast tour in Europe next year. The group has June and July dates booked, starting in Warsaw and ending in Paris.

In a 2019 interview with Rolling Stone, Harris reflected on the band’s earliest days and how they settled into their charging musical attacks. The band was not, he said, influenced by the nascent punk scene of the late Seventies. “I think we were just naturally fast artists because of that adrenaline,” he said. “It’s not like we sat down and said, ‘Oh, we’re going to play fast.’ You start with the adrenaline and get onstage and it was even faster than it was when you recorded it. Sometimes it can get a bit out of hand, but the energy at a gig can be really quite amazing at times. It was never premeditated.”

Nights of the Living Dead Tracklist

1. “Churchill’s Speech”
2. “Aces High”
3. “Where Eagles Dare”
4. “2 Minutes to Midnight”
5. “The Clansman ”
6. “The Trooper”
7. “Revelations”
8. “For the Greater Good of God”
9. “The Wicker Man”
10. “Sign of the Cross”
11. “Flight of Icarus”
12. “Fear of the Dark”
13. “Iron Maiden”
14. “The Number of the Beast”
15. “The Evil That Men Do”
16. “Hallowed Be Thy Name”
17. “Run to the Hills”