Paul Di’Anno – Hell Over Waltrop

Label: Metville Records
Releasedate: 31-01-2020

This one requires a full disclaimer. My favorite Iron Maiden albums are the first two. I’m not going to go into a full thesis on how these are better or worse, if Paul Di’Anno is the real singer or not, that’s not the point. The point is that I can’t start to review an album of this artist without mentioning Iron Maiden. That pretty much is what happens the whole album of this live concert, you have the classic “jurassic period” maiden tracks that I absolutely love and then you have other covers, plus the originals that are sort of ok. It’s important to mention that this concert happened in 2006 with his German band “Phantoms Of The Opera” and that these recordings got finally recovered now. Also, it’s important that, in the meanwhile, Paul Di’Anno had major health difficulties due to motorcycle accidents and metal life. He recently announced that his final concert will be in august.

The man is a legend, for all he did with Iron Maiden and how he carried a carrier based on the extreme. We can only guess what would have happened if he kept singing in Iron Maiden. What would be the course of history? The fact is that some of those songs written between 1978 and 1982 are here. That made me go full-on nostalgia mode.

I’m not going to describe the songs written in the Iron Maiden times. You know them. If you don’t know them, don’t listen to them here. They are just perfect in whatever the situation. The production of this live album is awful but the vibe is just great and the fun takes over. The punk soul of Paul Di’Anno is evident when he is introducing himself as the “ugly spice” when he was with the former band “Spice girls” before he performed the song “Murders In The Rue Morgue”. And I hope, dear reader, you can get that this song is from another band, not the Spice Girls. Constantly interacting and growling like crazy and apologizing for “f***ing up” from time to time. He is not a good singer, but he is a fun one.
From his originals, the only song I enjoyed was “Living Dead”, but that’s the only one worth mentioning. There were covers of Alex Harvey’s “The Faith Healer”, mentioned as the “godfather of punk”, and “Blitzkrieg Bop”, by Ramones. The already mentioned punk soul is definitely there.

So, to conclude, if you are expecting a good album, if you are expecting an old glory of metal to come back and blast your mind, this is not it. If you are willing to listen to a man of your parents’ age nostalgic about the old times when metal was lacking flash and fireworks, when there was a filthy hole where you would see an even filthier band struggling to the top, that time before you were born, then this album is for you. I liked it because I have sympathy for the man that was there in the beginning, before the metal gods arrive at Olympus. Now that man is finishing his career and this is a glimpse of what it was at the beginning of the current century.

01 – Prowler
02 – Murders In The Rue Morgue
03 – Impaler
04 – Remember Tomorrow
05 – Children of Madness
06 – Marshall Lokjaw
07 – The Living Dead
08 – The Beast Arises
09 – The Faith Healer
10 – Phantom of The Opera
11 – Transylvania
12 – Running Free
13 – Blitzkrieg Bop
14 – Sanctuary

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