I discover that Paul Di'Anno, the singer of Iron Maiden's first records, has left this world as I go to the bar to get a beer. And so, pint in hand, I toast to this genius with skinhead tendencies who – in his words – had formed his vocal composition precisely by dint of alcohol, an outspoken interpreter and author who invented from scratch what was once considered the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal and who brought Iron Maiden to success thanks to his explosive singing performances.
I still remember when in middle school they made dubbed cassettes of the heavy metal scene of the time at home and obviously Iron Maiden couldn't be missing. Their 1980 self-titled debut and Killers the following year they were cannon shots. However, I found the subsequent chapters of their saga unappealing. Something wasn't right, all you had to do was listen The Number of the Beast to get the feeling that it was another band. Everything was clean, impeccable, musically perfect, and even the graphics were no different: the monster Eddie looked like he had dried his hair with a hairdryer after a good coat of conditioner. And instead, right from the cover, Iron Maiden's first album paints the rot of society, no glossy images: a toxic and splattered boy from the future, a zombie wandering around in a dystopian city.
That's the real Eddie. Before becoming the mascot of the group in favor of almost Disney-like merchandising, he was a dangerous entity who was painful to look at. Paul Di'Anno himself represented Eddie's voice, Munch's scream of that generation of young zombies, a punk who joined Maiden almost by chance, someone who lived the street as his home and whose main occupation was ruining the evening to anyone who passed near him, through brawls. A rock singer as a teenager, Paul Andrews worked as a chef and butcher in Essex, giving himself the stage name Di'Anno to underline his presumed Italian origins (his father was Brazilian in any case) and working class.
Put in contact with Maiden thanks to the band's first drummer, Di'Anno was much closer, in terms of attitude, to the hardcore movement than to anything else (the comparison that comes naturally is the one with the Germs' Derby Crash), so much so that it was customary to speculate on the bandmates for their technical rate which he considered superfluous, making fun of their prog releases. This, however, allowed him to enter the Maiden formula as a breath of fresh air: the metal and the virtuous antics of Maiden could not do without Di'Anno's street voice, his look all black leather and studs which gave credibility to the everything and lightened the “rich card” attitude of the other members.
Thanks to this contrast between Di'Anno and Steve Harris, the band's compositional mind, Maiden pushed against all the pomposity of hard rock known up to then, moving on multiple levels and uniting multiple musical worlds (including new wave and post punk), interpreting reality with a look of lucid madness. Madness that Di'Anno, anti-poet par excellence, embodies perfectly on and off stage: a character not to be imitated, an anti-rock star, a destructive and self-destructive outsider, a bad boy who has never been redeemed but who however takes the band to depths never reached again.
The second album with Di'Anno, Killers of 1981, sees him prophesying the future of the young living dead, who suddenly – inflated with exciting substances – from passive puppets become murderers who randomly slaughter people in the subways. The whole world becomes a megalopolis under siege, there is no escape: the album is fundamental for any thrash metal or speed metal band to come, and Di'Anno embodies the album to such an extent that, in addition to co-signing the title track, he begins to bomb himself with drugs and alcohol simply to kill (precisely) the idea of being successful, and often fails to stand up on stage. His unhappiness in the band is due to an almost conscious self-sabotage, to test the limits and tolerance of his members: he realizes that the group is moving more and more towards pure heavy metal, moving away from the punk urgency which he cannot do unless, which is why “breaking through” becomes a way to maintain the wild spirit of the beginning.
Obviously Harris & Co. aren't of the same opinion, they decide to talk to him and make him go straight, but Di'Anno doesn't let himself be lectured, plays ahead and decides to give up and go back to being a maverick. He even gets himself given, without even asking for royalties, a simple severance package that clearly gets disgraced in revelry. Maiden don't let him go with pleasure, on the contrary: they realize they have lost a great frontman. But Bruce Dickinson arrives and becomes the right singer at the right time. Because Maiden are now a band of professionals who don't go a bit wrong, discipline is in force and instead of the mephitic fumes of a post-atomic street life without direction comes the historical epic, the legend, the myth (which was present in the first Maiden, but marginally).
Di'Anno, on the other hand, continues his career riding the steed of chaos with Di'Anno, creators of a hard rock which however – perhaps under pressure from the manager – sensationally moves to the AOR zone, contradicting the punk demands of the singer, who in fact dissolves the band almost immediately. He then gets to work with Gogmagog, a supergroup set up by manager Jonathan King, but as soon as he realizes he has gotten himself into a commercial ploy, he leaves the place and the puppets. Disappointed by everything, he founded Battlezone in 1986, perhaps his most valid project, his personal interpretation of heavy metal which – due to the ups and downs due to his proverbial inconstancy – went so far as to record classics of the genre without succeed fully (they released two albums between '86 and '87). Also in this case, turbulent management of the band, with members being kicked out, massive use of drugs and constant conflicts between megalomaniacal personalities, will lead to the dissolution.
Di'Anno's next project is (look at that) the Killers, who take up the raw spirit of the singer's beginnings with granitic power metal: two albums that did quite well in the early '90s, with a contract that linked them to Sony. A miracle was also close to occurring in that period. When Dickinson leaves Maiden it seems that his old traveling companions want him back, a choice that would have been very appropriate given the terrible results of the album The X Factor with singer Blaze Bayley.
Apart from this episode, everything seems to be going swimmingly. Di'Anno moves to the United States and gets married. And yet once again drugs and excesses destroy everything, especially his marriage (in his CV, among other things, there are five). During an argument with his girlfriend Di'Anno pulls out the knife, is stopped by the police and arrested and searched: they find everything in his house, including cocaine and weapons, and he is put in a cage, considered a socially dangerous person. From this moment, banned from the United States, Di'Anno's career proceeds in fits and starts, between attempts to relaunch himself in Brazil – for economic reasons rather than origins – with the Nomads, health problems that are increasingly evident due to his bad habits and an imprisonment for fraud in 2011 in England which undermined his mettle.
In 2021, forced into crowdfunding to get rid of it, his former Maiden teammates help him cover the costs of a knee surgery which will be successful, but this will not prevent him from ending up in a wheelchair later on. Despite this, the fearless bad boy continued to shout into the microphone on stages all over the world, without losing a shred of punkness and style: he never gave up on time and his destiny as a loser.
Perhaps he didn't even know who Di'Anno really was. In interviews he was famous for constantly contradicting himself, a technique he used on purpose to deflect investigations into his personality (egregious when he said he had become Muslim, despite drinking like a camel). His was the life of a loose cannon, a constantly gut approach that he paid the price for. For us, with his dazzling lights and his equally engulfing shadows, he remains the rock antihero par excellence: «I'm a guy who has to do what he feels like doing», he said interviewed by True Metal in 2004. And the mind immediately goes to Running Free by Maiden: “I've got nowhere to call my own / Hit the gas, and here I go / I'm running free, yeah”.