There were laughs of surprise around me in screen three of the Everyman in Muswell Hill, north London, as 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple drew to its conclusion. Without giving too much away for those who haven’t seen it, Ralph Fiennes dancing semi-naked among piles of human bones to Iron Maiden’s The Number of the Beast is not how you expect one of our greatest thespians to deport himself on screen.
“Alex Garland chose that song,” says the film’s director, Nia DaCosta. “He wrote it into the script. And you can’t get better than that in a film about satanists.”
Indeed you can’t. From the track’s spoken intro by actor Barry Clayton – “Let him who hath understanding reckon the number of the beast, for it is a human number. Its number is six hundred and sixty six” – to Bruce Dickinson concluding with “I have the fire, I have the force / I have the power to make my evil take its course”, it is a shade under five minutes of nothing but the dark lord.
The song was the title track of Maiden’s 1982 album, their third, and first with singer Bruce Dickinson, and it moved them to the peaks of the metal world – their first UK No 1 album and first US top 40 album. Released as a single, the track reached No 3 in the UK in 1990, and that remains the highest ever UK chart position for a song about Satan (in the US, that honour belongs to the Charlie Daniels Band’s The Devil Went Down to Georgia, also a No 3 single).
It’s a far from usual track: Clive Burr’s drum patterns judder awkwardly and, as Maiden are wont to do, they put multiple sections in. “That makes it so fun,” DaCosta says, “and gives you so many options in terms of when and how to cut.” The scene had to contrast the world of the Jimmys – a Satanist gang – with that of the warm, humanist Fiennes character. “We wanted it to feel as erratic and crazy as it was when we shot the Jimmys being violent in their scenes, but also having the romance of Ralph’s character’s world – which is why there is fire and warm tones. And that song gave us a lot to work with.”
Iron Maiden seldom license their music for use in film and TV. “The biggest thing to consider,” says Dave Shack, one of the trio who run the band’s team Phantom Music Management, “is: are we going to be made fun of?” Given popular culture’s propensity for mocking metalheads, that rules out a huge number of proposals off the bat. He still regrets the band allowing one character in Hot Tub Time Machine to wear an Iron Maiden shirt throughout. “That was a litmus test of what happens if you grant the licence and take the fee. We’re not bloody Spinal Tap or Steel Panther.”
Even with a great script, fantastic cast and crew, and amazing director, it can all go wrong, he says. “What happens on the day can completely kibosh it – we all accept that risk.” This time, though, everything went perfectly to plan. After the BFI Imax screening, DaCosta approached Shack and asked if he was happy. “Am I happy? Are you kidding me? People stood up in the cinema and clapped for it!” The scene itself might be startling, but Maiden don’t come out of it looking at all silly.
It’s the second time in weeks that Maiden have been at the centre of a pop-culture moment on screen. Their 1983 track The Trooper featured in the Stranger Things finale, and within seven days its streaming numbers across all platforms rose by 252%.
It’s worth noting that both 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple and Stranger Things were big budget, prestige productions, both of which used music as an integral part of plotting and character. Maiden, a band who were refusing to do things “for the exposure” long before the internet made it commonplace, have always maintained a sense of their own worth.
“The music budget is usually the ass end of everything,” Shack says. “That’s a big part of the reason why, historically, Maiden have said no. If you make a $10m film, why don’t you put half a million aside for music and licensing? They’ll tell you it’s crucial to the scene, that it’s the only song the director wants. Then pay some money for it.”
DaCosta quickly realised this scene would have an impact. It was shot over three nights, and within a couple of days her editor had prepared a cut of it. “It was so amazing, and in that moment I felt: Oh, we did it. I couldn’t have predicted people would be cheering or getting out of their seats and dancing. But I felt the impact from the first cut. If you have a needle drop in a movie it had better be great, because sometimes it’s used to blast over a scene that’s not so good. But when you use it right, it can be amazing.”
It’s another semi-naked snake-hipped showstopper for Fiennes after his dance to the Rolling Stones’ Emotional Rescue in Luca Guadagnino’s A Bigger Splash, and it’s all worked out very well for Maiden, too, albeit inadvertently. The band are currently in the midst of their 50th anniversary world tour. Both Stranger Things and 28 Years Later were under way long before that. Shack knows it was chance, but still he says, “Maybe they were vindications. But the big picture is that you’re always looking for validation from a new audience. And Iron Maiden are no different in that.”
