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16 January 2022

Iron Maiden Planning To Perform Entire ‘Senjutsu’ Album Live

Iron Maiden Senjutsu Live Entirety
Photo: Alamy Stock Photo
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Bruce Dickinson has confirmed that Iron Maiden are planning to stage a tour where they will perform the new album, Senjutsu in its entirety.

The singer discussed the band’s future touring plans during an appearance on the latest episode of the “Talk Is Jericho” podcast, hosted by Fozzy frontman and wrestling superstar Chris Jericho.

Dickinson said: “The plan we’ve got — it’s not really a secret; I think everybody else has chatted about it — we will, I hope, we’ve talked about doing the entire [Senjutsu] album start to finish, but not this time around. And we all appreciate that that is something that really diehard fans will probably love and other people will go, ‘Hmmm, I’m not gonna go see that.’ So the answer is you play smaller venues so that they sell out with just your diehard fans. ‘Cause it’s a musical thing to do — it’s a musical thing.”

He went on to clarify that the 2022 leg of Maiden’s ‘Legacy Of The Beast’ tour, which is scheduled to kick off in late May in Zagreb, Croatia, will once again focus primarily on a decades-spanning setlist of fan favourites.

“The ‘Legacy Of The Beast’ tour, people have all paid their money to see the ‘Legacy Of The Beast’ show, with Spitfires and flamethrowers and Icarus and everything that goes with,” he said. “So they’re gonna get all that.

But the first three tracks are probably gonna be the first three tracks on the [Senjutsu] album. ‘The Writing On The Wall’ they already know, so everybody should know the first three tracks. And I just think [the] Senjutsu [title track] is just such a great opening song — so dramatic. And then once you’ve done that — and we’ll have a stage set to go with it — once you’ve done that, you’re back to the kind of ‘Legacy’ world at that point. But I think The Writing On The Wall is gonna be a great song — I mean, a crowd singalong song. You can imagine that. It’ll be fantastic.”

Addressing the fact that Maiden infuriated some fans by forcing them to sit through the band’s then-new, 75-minute A Matter Of Life And Death album on tour in 2006, denying the crowd the greatest hits they’d come for, Bruce said: “Nobody has to buy a ticket. If you don’t wanna go [see us play an entire new album live], you don’t buy a ticket. It’s gonna be plain as the nose on your face. This is gonna be what they’re gonna do. So given that, don’t complain that they did what they said they were gonna do.”

Clocking in at a hefty 82 minutes, Senjutsu came out in September. It marks Maiden’s second consecutive double album behind 2015’s The Book Of Souls which is the longest Maiden album, with a running time of 92 minutes.

Iron Maiden’s first album in six years, Senjutsu was recorded in 2019 in Paris with longstanding producer Kevin Shirley and co-produced by bassist Steve Harris. It features three tracks whose running time exceeds 10 minutes each.

For Senjutsu — loosely translated as “tactics and strategy” — the band once again enlisted the services of Mark Wilkinson to create the spectacular Samurai-themed cover artwork, based on an idea by Harris.

The record bowed at No. 3 on the Billboard 200 chart, charting higher than even the band’s early classics like Powerslave and The Number Of The Beast. Nearly 90 percent of the LP’s 64,000 equivalent album units earned came from pure album sales. The critically acclaimed double album debuted one place higher than 2015’s The Book Of Souls and 2010’s The Final Frontier, which both peaked at No. 4.

Senjutsu was the 13th Maiden album to top in the Top 40 in the U.S. According to Billboard, it logged the second-largest week of 2021 for a hard rock album in both equivalent album units earned and in traditional album sales. The record also topped the charts in several European countries upon its release, including in Belgium, Finland, Germany, Italy, Sweden and Switzerland.

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