Paul Di’Anno: The raggedly talented wildman who helped Iron Maiden change the course of metal

If Steve Harris is Iron Maiden’s brain and backbone, then Paul Di’Anno was their raw throat and clenched fists. As they introduced themselves to the world via their self-titled 1980 debut album and the following year’s Killers, they did so under the stewardship of their rough and tumble singer. While Maiden would go on to become the definitive metal band of the ’80s with Bruce Dickinson at the helm, a singer with a foghorn voice capable of matching Steve’s increasingly grand visions, those early works carry with them a ragged charm and threatening directness that came directly from Paul.

Insisting that he’d always been a punk singer, though Steve remains adamant that no such element entered Maiden’s orbit, it’s hard not to see where Paul was coming from. As well as the ability to deliver a line like a headbutt, he also possessed a natural relationship with a note that the punks just didn’t have. It made Maiden a deadly proposition when he joined.

“You’ve got all these metal singers trying to sound like that, and I’m just this punk bloke doing it better than all of ’em!” he remarked years later. For a man whose mouth could get him into trouble, here, it was hard to argue with him.

Born Paul Andrews in 1958 in Chingford, London, Paul admitted that even from a young age he was a tearaway. “I was a pretty wild kid,” he said in his autobiography, The Beast. “East London was my turf, and me and my mates used to run completely wild in it, like something out of Mad Max.”

The landlord of one pub the underage Paul and his friends frequented would tell them stories about his associations with the infamous East End gangsters of the time: The Kray twins, 'Mad' Frankie Fraser. Hearing that this eventually earned said landlord a visit from men armed with razors gave them pause for thought, but it didn’t quell Paul’s taste for chaos for long, or the sense of bravado that came with it.

“I was the mouthiest [of my mates], the loudest, the hardest, the most obnoxious. By a mile. Even then, I had to be the centre of attention. If one of our guys had fattened someone’s lip, I’d have to split someone’s nose. If they knocked out a tooth, I’d have to break a jaw. And we fucking loved it.”

Such were the streets and pubs from which Iron Maiden were born in the mid-’70s. When the opportunity arose in 1978 to audition for the job of singer, following the departure of Dennis Wilcock, Paul gave it a shot, playing Deep Purple's Dealer and Free’s All Right Now, albeit without too many dreams of it leading anywhere. Having already fronted a punk band named The Paedophiles, the notion of joining this group – who he’d seen before and not thought too much of – seemed like something to do, if not necessarily for long.

“I honestly didn’t think they’d get anywhere, which shows how much I knew at the time,” he remembered. “Plus, it seemed a bit too much like hard work to me, and I couldn't really be fucking arsed, you know?

“It was only when I sat down and had a cup of tea and a chat with Steve Harris round at his place in Leytonstone that I started really getting into it. I can still picture the two of us sitting there at his kitchen table, with him telling me about all these big plans he had for the band. He must have been convincing ’cause he inspired me, and that took some doing.

“Right now, any number of rock fans are reading this thinking: 'Christ, I'd have given me left bollock to be given a chance like that.' Yeah, right, only I didn't have the faintest clue of the significance of it all back then. It was a sign of how things were going to carry on, really.”

Onstage, though, something started to happen. With great material, Maiden were already building a following, from his first show with the band at the now-legendary Cart & Horses pub, the new frontman with his wild energy and in-your-face attitude, not to mention a voice that had both impressive range and sandpaper coarseness, made them genuine contenders.

Some who saw them thought his short hair was a totemistic statement. Actually, it was down to getting paint in his hair while working at an oil company shaping barrels. Either way, the band were deadly, leading to a 1979 live review of a show with Angel Witch and Diamond Head in Kerrang! predecessor Sounds in which writer Geoff Barton described the Maiden-headed bill as “The New Wave Of British Heavy Metal”.

“We’d always go out onstage in hostile mood, really psyched up for a fight, like we really had something to prove,” Paul recalled. “The thing was, we wouldn’t let up, even when we had them right where we wanted them. Song after song after song. Bang, bang, bang. We performed like our lives depended on it.”

His talents didn’t wither under the light of the studio, either. On Iron Maiden’s legendary Soundhouse Tapes demo from 1979, the frontman’s vocals are brilliant, matching the snarl of Lemmy with a similar sense of musicality to David Coverdale. But it was on the following year’s Iron Maiden album – following an appearance on Top Of The Pops in which they became the first band in a decade not to mime, surely a marker of the singer’s pipes – that the picture would fully come into focus.

Released the same week as Judas Priest’s British Steel in April 1980, it was an apt pair of records to recalibrate heavy metal for a new decade. Sharper, more aggressive, more direct, faster, harder and louder than their forebears, for many it is a marker between where heavy rock splinters off, and real, proper, unambiguous heavy metal done by design rather than accident begins.

On opener Prowler, the rollocking Charlotte The Harlot and ducking-and-diving Sanctuary, Paul’s all-guns-blazing, telling his tales of illicit shagging and keeping one hurried step ahead of the law with explosive energy. Meanwhile, on the more restrained Remember Tomorrow – a phrase taken from his grandfather – he showed quite what he could do when he opened his voice. Ditto on the epic Phantom Of The Opera, a signpost toward the sort of big ideas that would eventually become a keystone of Maiden’s repertoire.

Quickly, things picked up, and with it came attention. For someone so fond of being in the thick of it, Paul would later admit that he could get overwhelmed by fan encounters and not know how to react. On one occasion, he recalled heading out to a gig with his then-girlfriend and sheepishly leaving a Tube train before their stop when it filled with young fans. Less attractively, he also once threw a plate at a fan who was hassling him in a restaurant. “You’d think I’d won a Nobel Prize or conquered Everest, instead of poncing about onstage with a rock band,” he puzzled in The Beast.

For all this, though, he also knew they were onto something good. A tour of Japan saw them playing to enormous audiences (“I’d never seen such hysteria”), while a European run supporting KISS made him realise his band were in the big leagues. As did the sight of Gene Simmons in a Maiden shirt. “I thought, that’s it – the lunatics have taken over the asylum.”

The big moment came in August 1980, when Maiden hit the Reading festival, when they realised they weren't just doing alright: they were actually magnificent.

“At the end of the set when we were playing the final song, darkness began to fall and all these thousands of lighters went up in the air. You could see them for miles,” Paul would recall of the day. “It was the most emotional occasion I’d ever known. I looked over at Steve and he looked back across the stage at me, and I swear if we’d looked at each other a moment longer we’d have both burst into tears then and there, in front of all those people. I felt absolutely fantastic. I remember thinking to myself: ‘Fucking hell, I’m a rock star!’”

Capitalising on the impressive wind behind them, Maiden returned to the studio to record their second album. Where the first had been rough and ready, on Killers, with new guitarist Adrian Smith, you could already hear things becoming even sharper, more ambitious, wider in scope. Wrathchild, Purgatory and Murders In The Rue Morgue have the same grit as Prowler, but with more authority and confidence, with Paul’s vocals positively soaring during the high bits. On closer Drifter, meanwhile, a similarly smoky vibe to Remember Tomorrow shows off quite how much range he had in a small palette.

For their singer, though, something was already amiss.

“Because I didn’t believe in that musical direction 100 per cent, I wasn’t giving 100 per cent anymore. I tried to throw myself into work, as I had before, as I like to be full-on or not do it at all, but my heart was no longer in it.”

Even so, Killers confirmed Maiden’s status as the band for the new decade. But if he was a killer singer, he was also a deadly drinker. Even deadlier drug fiend. In later years, Paul would reference this as the sort of trouble boys in the band get into in the flushes of youth and success. But the mayhem that followed – trashed hotels, fights, injuries – began earning him a rep as a genuinely wildman of rock.

“I was a kid – 22 years old – and here we were headlining our own big tour and I didn’t know how to handle it,” he reflected later. “And of course I was doing a bit of speed and whatnot, to keep me going, and that used to make it worse. You’d be awake for days, but feeling really ill. And some nights I just didn’t think I was gonna make it.”

“It’s no secret, I was pretty out of control,” he said elsewhere. “It wasn’t just that I was snorting a bit of coke, though – I was just going for it non-stop, 24 hours a day. I thought that was what you’re supposed to do when you were in a big, successful rock band.”

As Maiden headed to America and things got bigger, Paul began to feel the strain. Though in an interview in issue three of Kerrang! he responded to the idea that he was diving into drink and drugs to cope with the burnout by saying “Tell ’em it’s a load of bollocks”, at the end of the interview he admitted to writer Robbi Millar as he headed home from New York to London: “God, I wish I was coming with you.”

Not long after, having played his final show with the band on September 10, 1981 in Copenhagen, Paul and Iron Maiden parted ways. Some say he was fired, with Bruce Dickinson already in the frame to take over, while Paul maintained in The Beast that it was a mutual agreement and that he’d resigned at the same time. Either way, so ended one of the most important partnerships in the history of heavy metal.

Paul continued to play music, first under his own name in Di’Anno, then with the thrashier, heavier Battlezone. In 1990, he formed Killers, with whom he would sing for much of the ’90s. In The Beast – a book more confession than memoir, in which he details a truly unpleasant amount of terrible behaviour – he records much of this time as being heavy on sex, drugs and booze, and by his own record he says trouble was never far away.

In 1993, he was deported from the U.S. following an arrest during a fight with his girlfriend at home in Los Angeles which had involved a knife. Calling the singer “a menace to society”, the judge sent him back to London, and he didn’t perform in America again until 2010. A year later, in 2011, Paul would be jailed in the UK for nine months on eight counts of benefit fraud for claiming over £45,000 under false pretence, claiming disability while being seen performing all over the world.

Latterly, he would mend relations with his former bandmates, and sing the praises of Bruce, saying that his successor was the right man for where Iron Maiden were clearly heading. For himself, he continued to tour, even when his health meant he had to perform in a wheelchair, playing for the last time on August 30 this year in Kraków, Poland. It was a set of Maiden songs. And why not? In The Beast, Paul says himself that, “Until my dying day, my name will always be associated with Iron Maiden. There you go, I said it.” For those years he was in the band, he was among the most important musicians in heavy metal history.

“I bleedin’ well helped to make them what they are an’ all,” he wrote in The Beast. “Whether they like it or not, I was a vital bloody part of Maiden, and I helped create that monster.”

Indeed, as Steve Harris noted in his own tribute, Iron Maiden wouldn’t have been the same without him. Nor, for that matter, would the world of metal that followed.

Read this next:

• “I couldn’t have started a punk band, that would have been against my religion”: The story behind Iron Maiden's debut album
• The story behind Killers by Iron Maiden
• Iron Maiden: Every album ranked from worst to best