ibmorjamn
Ambassador of Moar Jammin
Bruce and company are great story tellers.Gotta interject here: no man, they didn't lol but I'll tread lightly so this doesn't go off the rails into a religious debate, in keeping with forum decorum
The Satanic accusations came from the album cover The Number of The Beast and of course the song of the same name. The truth of that song in particular was that it was written about a nightmare that bassist and chief song writer Steve Harris had after watching the film, Damien: The Omen 2. The lyrics are actually from the perspective of a person stumbling upon a creepy Satanic gathering, being chased by them, trying to warn others of what they saw and ultimately falling victim to their work.
As for the album cover, the image of the Devil upon a creepy, swirling black sky and what appears to be Hell basically, drew the ire of certain religious folk. Yet if you look closely, the Devil is holding a marionette of their mascot Eddie. And if you look at the Devil himself, he has marionette strings attached to him and is being controlled by a much larger Eddie. So the joke is, Eddie is bigger and badder than the Devil himself lol
Throughout their entire discography however, I can only name one other song that mentions the Devil directly and that is The Fallen Angel from 2000's Brave New World album. It's basically John Milton's Paradise Lost and from the perspective of the Devil awaiting a rematch with "The One Who Cast Him Out".
As for every other Maiden song? It's super simple: they either mostly write about films, historical events, novels or social issues.
There is a long standing joke that a listener could learn as much history and literature by just popping on an album, than reading it in a book and they may have a point: during our 11th grade English literature class, we were supposed to read Samuel Taylor Colleridge's The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner. What actually happened was I gave my buddy @froman5150 my copy of their album, Powerslave, to listen and he actually ended up passing the following test without ever actually reading the textbook lmao True story!
Actually Halford I suppose wrote about some wicked stuff mostly gore, but the other stuff, well I won't mention because we already discussed that in another thread before and it became a mess. Keeping decorum is keeping the forum. Lol