“I’d like to dedicate that one,” said Iron Maiden main man Bruce Dickinson cheerfully, after his band had limped through a wincingly out-of-tune multi-guitar pastoral interlude from the new A Matter of Life and Death (Sanctuary), “to fans of Keith Tippett, or maybe Arthur Schoenberg. . . . Do you like avant-garde music? . . . And I’ll kill the fucking guitar roadie later.” Hurrah for the good humor of Bruce Dickinson! It wasn’t the first balls-up: earlier last Friday night, with the stage at Agannis Arena suddenly darkened for the intro to “For the Greater Good of God,” the wobbling disc of a spotlight had wavered in panic across the set until Bruce interrupted the somber query of his singing (“Are you a man of peace/Or man of holy war?”) to say, “I’m over here. On top of the speaker. Twat.”

These small, Brechtian lapses in theatricality were easily forgiven. Iron Maiden are their own beast altogether: defiantly pretentious and yet dedicated to the delivery of old-school entertainment value. A Matter of Life and Death is a concept album about the Second and possibly the First World War, so the backdrops were full of skeletal tank crews and the music loaded with rat-a-tat drumming and folk-martial motifs, and the armored constellation of the lighting rig was in constant overdrive. They played the album straight through, the three guitarists skipping and mincing about the stage on unsteady little new-wave-of-British-heavy-metal legs while ultra-ham Dickinson tumbled winningly across the painted levels of the set (sandbags, barbed wire, etc.). I was amazed to discover that I was enjoying myself: it was like seeing Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. The folkloric totem Eddie — the monstrous icon of Maiden-ism — tottered out on stilts, khaki-clad and brandishing a Tommy gun, and the crowd roared happily to see their old friend.

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