My band's been around since 1993. As fortune would have it, from the beginning everyone in the band was a huge maiden and metallica fan. That meant we got to do a lot of maiden and a lot of metallica over the years. And it's been a lot of years. And a lot of live shows. But no matter what we played, we got to be known as "the" maiden band of Bangladesh. And so it was a real joy and pleasure when we are invited by BATB to perform in one of their Tribute shows. And we would be giving tribute to my favorite band of all time, Iron Maiden.
First things first - the setlist. We made a list of around 16 songs we would like to play. But then we were informed that we would have an hour so we had to make a list of 10 songs. And boy was it difficult to make that list. There were so many songs we wanted to do! I always wanted to do Phantom of the Opera, one of the 3 instrumentals maiden has, Killers, Tailgunner, Infinite Dreams, Be Quick or Be dead etc etc. But then we settled on the absolute classics, plus one song which is not so popular but we absolutely wanted to play live. And then we started to practice.
Most of the songs in my own band are on the D scale. Whereas almost ALL the maiden songs are on E. So i was scared that i wouldn't be able to pull off 10 maiden songs in a row at the E scale. A so i suggested to my band lets tune down our guitars so i can sing more comfortably. But even as i made that suggestion I felt like a cheat and coward. It's like I was letting my favorite band down. Which is kind of ridiculous as they don't even know I exist. And my guitarrists grumbled and mumbled that dropping half a note on the guitars would make it go out of tune. So i said lets try it on E first, and if i can't hack it we'll drop down to D sharp.
So the day of the first practice comes around and I put on the set list on my winamp. The first 2 songs had me coughing and hacking and almost throwing up. In fact i later fibbed to everyone that i did throw up. But i didn't. Came close to it, but I didn't. But one wonderful fact emerged from this painful experience. I was able to sing the songs. With great difficulty to be sure, but i could match my scale to the ones Bruce was belting out. So it was with great joy i told everyone we'd be doing the songs in the original scale. No need for flummery of any kind. And than we got down to the brass tacks. We practiced like we've never practiced for a show. Every other day we got together, we played the songs, we identified problem areas, the drummer came under a lot of flak. It wasn't untill we threatened to throw him out of the band that he start taking his duties seriously. The 2nd to last practice, we went all out. We all geared up and then i announced that we'd be doing every song again if anyone of us made any mistake whatsoever while playing the song. Well we all made mistakes. And we ended up playing 5 or 6 of the songs thrice, even four times. But at the end of that practice session we felt really good. We had ironed out our demons. We were ready.
Then came the day of the live show. And we did good. Not as good as i wanted, but about as good as i thought. And the best thing was the sound engineer recorded our live performance. We now had our very own Live after Death. Farshed ma'man, wish you were there.
So the day of the first practice comes around and I put on the set list on my winamp. The first 2 songs had me coughing and hacking and almost throwing up. In fact i later fibbed to everyone that i did throw up. But i didn't. Came close to it, but I didn't. But one wonderful fact emerged from this painful experience. I was able to sing the songs. With great difficulty to be sure, but i could match my scale to the ones Bruce was belting out. So it was with great joy i told everyone we'd be doing the songs in the original scale. No need for flummery of any kind. And than we got down to the brass tacks. We practiced like we've never practiced for a show. Every other day we got together, we played the songs, we identified problem areas, the drummer came under a lot of flak. It wasn't untill we threatened to throw him out of the band that he start taking his duties seriously. The 2nd to last practice, we went all out. We all geared up and then i announced that we'd be doing every song again if anyone of us made any mistake whatsoever while playing the song. Well we all made mistakes. And we ended up playing 5 or 6 of the songs thrice, even four times. But at the end of that practice session we felt really good. We had ironed out our demons. We were ready.
Then came the day of the live show. And we did good. Not as good as i wanted, but about as good as i thought. And the best thing was the sound engineer recorded our live performance. We now had our very own Live after Death. Farshed ma'man, wish you were there.
