Maiden songwriting 1976-1980
I have always had a soft spot for the first two albums and have also always been intrigued by the lack of recordings or sometimes even credible information from the pre-1980 era of the band. I've obviously always been aware that Killers was essentially an album of leftovers with a few new songs added to it. In that way, it's a typical second rock album of pre-internet era. I wanted to see how the timeline of songwriting for the Paul Di'Anno era releases breaks down.
The above list includes all the songs off Killers and Iron Maiden, as well as the non-album singles Sanctuary and Twilight Zone. It also includes Burning Ambition and Invasion, though not Women in Uniform and I've Got the Fire since they're obviously covers. The songs Di'Anno wrote the lyrics to are marked in red. This doesn't include Sanctuary, which on some releases is credited to Harris/Murray/Di'Anno since we know with certainty Di'Anno did not write the lyrics and the actual songwriting credits to Sanctuary are controversial.
The info above came from multiple sources. I've used Mick Wall's book, some of the early setlists that are known to be accurate, the snippets of 1977 shows Wilcock had put up on Youtube, as well as full recordings from 1979 and 1980. All the years should in some ways be treated as "terminus ante quem" as us historians would say. Songs or their parts may have been written before, but these years can be taken as points when the songs in their final form existed and were in most cases played live by the band.
There are a few issues with dating some songs. There's a pretty good chance that at least some of the songs which are listed as having been written in 1977 had already been finished in 1976. The Ides of March is difficult to date, but it must've been written before or during the time Barry Purkis a.k.a. Thundersticks was in the band.
Invasion is hard to date in terms of whether it was written before or after Di'Anno joined. Considering that The Soundhouse Tapes were recorded on the last two days of 1978 and that Di'Anno had joined the band in 1978 and the focus seems to have been on practicing as much as possible with him in order to record what would become TST, I'm leaning towards it being written before he joined the band. I don't believe there's record of the band playing it with Wilcock, but perhaps someone else will correct me.
One thing that really stands out to me is how cleanly you can divide the chart above into three periods: Pre-Di'Anno, period between Di'Anno joining and Adrian joining(Nov 1978-Nov 1980), and then the last year of Paul being in the band.
14 out of 22 originals from this early era of Maiden were already written before Paul joined the band. Judging by the few recordings we have from 1977, most of the arrangements were virtually identical to later released versions, Purgatory being an obvious exception.
Only 4 songs seem to have been written during the middle period, and three of those have lyrics by Paul. I find this really interesting, both in terms of Maiden songwriting pace 1982-1988 and in terms of the rise of the band. It's puzzling that during the years when they finally broke through and became a well-known band and started playing regular gigs outside of east London and put out an album, they engaged in so little songwriting. Steve only writing lyrics to Phantom of the Opera during those two years really contrasts to his later output.
There is little evidence as to when the bottom 4 songs on the list were written, but they were not performed live until after the Killers recording sessions were completed. Considering the band had played the title track extensively during 1980, I think this would point to them being written shortly before they went into the studio or perhaps even during the recording of Killers. The nature of the four songs points in this direction, as well. One of the four is an instrumental, and seems like a throw-away. One is a fairly unrepresentative ballad that they have never played live, which hints at what the band might have thought of it. Twilight Zone is supposed to be the one song on Killers Adrian had a significant hand in arranging, so this would point to a very late composition date. It's also a 2:32 song which makes it the shortest actual song in the Maiden catalogue, if we think of Ides of March as simply an intro piece to an album.
Three of the four songs have lyrics and they were all written by Steve. This stands in contrast to the 4 songs written in the previous period which have lyrics mostly penned by Paul. We all know the stories of Paul's state around this time and his (lack of) reliability, so I wonder if Steve's hand was forced. The whole situation seems like the band was expected by the label to produce a second album quickly, didn't have enough songs even with leftovers, and 4 more had to be written overnight.
No new songs were played during the Killers tour and while there are hints that Steve might have had some ideas floating around already for songs on TNotB, the vocal range of a lot of songs on the album feels like they were specifically written for Bruce. I'm highly doubtful that any of the songs were fully written in 1981, and like with Killers, several seem like they were written quite late simply to have an album's worth of songs.