Iron Maiden

Iron Maiden did not hire metal specialists. They hired the people who were making pop videos, and they hired them early.

David Mallet shot Run to the Hills in 1982 and The Trooper the year after. In the same stretch he co-directed David Bowie's Ashes to Ashes with Bowie himself — at £250,000 the most expensive music video made up to that point — and shot Let's Dance, Queen and Bowie's Under Pressure and Billy Idol's White Wedding. Mallet had co-founded the production house MGMM with Russell Mulcahy, Brian Grant and Scott Millaney, and those three names alone account for more than fifty videos on this site. Early-eighties music video was a small London business, and Maiden went straight to the middle of it.

Jim Yukich came next, directing Aces High, 2 Minutes to Midnight and Wasted Years while also working with Genesis, Phil Collins and Mike + The Mechanics — moving between Invisible Touch and Aces High without apparent difficulty.

The pattern held into the nineties. Samuel Bayer made Fear of the Dark in 1992, the year after Smells Like Teen Spirit. Dean Karr arrived at The Wicker Man by way of Marilyn Manson.

Whatever distance the band kept from the pop mainstream, the films came from inside it — shot by the same hands, in the same rooms, as everybody else's.