Vodka, kilos of caviar and a Russian minder: Iron Maiden’s 1984 World Slavery tour behind the Iron CurtainWhether a Maiden fan or not, this is a pretty cool article about their 1984 tour where they were the 1st western band to play behind the iron curtain in USSR held Eastern Bloc countries. It wasn’t that long ago that many Europeans couldn’t enjoy a simple thing like going to a concert. They made no money from the tour as the currency had no value in the west, so they had to spend every dime in the countries.
There were bathtubs’ worth of caviar. Vodka that turned the world pink. Secret swastikas, impromptu wedding gigs and, everywhere they went, Maiden-mania. When Iron Maiden became the first Western rock band to take a full production show behind the Iron Curtain on the 1984 World Slavery tour, they stepped into a world of hysteria, celebration and “eye-opening” poverty and oppressionThe only hint of Kremlin surveillance, they felt, came in the shape of Joseph, the personal security guy who was allocated to them from above. “He was Polish but he was Russian special forces,” Dickinson says.
“He’d been allocated to us probably to keep an eye on us or something like that. He was very straight and very serious. At first, he wanted to kill everybody. You’d get the kids jumping up and down, he’d go ‘I will kill them’, ‘no, no, don’t kill them, they’re friendly!’” One evening an accompanying photographer managed to get Joseph stoned while drunk on vodka. “We’d probably sabotaged a member of the Russian special forces,” Dickinson says. “He suddenly started explaining how to kill people with his bare hands.”https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/iron-maiden-tour-world-slavery-russia-b2594915.html