217 - Iron Maiden Two minutes to Midnight 1984

'2 Minutes To Midnight', is one of "Powerslave"'s masterpieces. Adrian explains: "Well, that's basically a hard rock tune. People know me and that's what my thing is in the band, and it runs through to what I did with Psycho Motel. I'm guitar-oriented. That's where my writing goes. I was one of the first of us to get a little four track, a multi-track sort of recorder and I was sitting in my hotel room in a Jersey working on this riff and there was a banging on the door, and it was Bruce, because we had taken over the whole hotel to rehearse, and he's banging on my door and saying 'wow, what's that riff?' So I played him the music to it and he had a bunch of lyrics and he started singing and we had '2 Minutes To Midnight'. We wrote it in about 20 minutes (laughs)." Whatever its germination, it wins the day for Maiden by being "rock 'n' rollsy", fresh, riffy, something that is inherent in Adrian's playing more so than Dave's. It steps outside the half dozen rules to which Maiden is becoming increasingly tethered. It is mature, dangerous, groovy and lyrically intelligent. This song was written by Adrian Smith and Bruce Dickinson. It has references to the clock of the apocalypse, the symbolic clock used by the "Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists." In September 1953 the clock reached 11:58, the closest the clock has been to midnight. This occurred when the United States and the Soviet Union tested an atomic bomb with a difference of nine months between them