Iron Maiden’s angler guitarist Adrian Smith: ‘Fishing saved my life’

When Iron Maiden load up their trucks for their mammoth concert tours, it’s not just drums, guitars and amps they pack. Nestling among the heavy metal band’s stage gear will be telescopic carp rods, reel cases and tackle boxes.

The culprit is Iron Maiden’s guitar player Adrian Smith. A lifelong angling fanatic, Smith uses Maiden’s world tours as a chance to fish in far-flung places. His love of angling has seen him wrestle with a 100lb sturgeon in Canada’s Fraser River, have a near miss with a shark in the Virgin Islands, and get his line tangled with that of the late Addicted to Love singer Robert Palmer, who he encountered languidly fishing from his Bahamas balcony in his dressing gown.

“Fishing’s like meditation,” Smith, 63, explains. His compulsion to find water is total. At soundchecks before Maiden shows he says you’ll find him “behind the amps locked in conversation [with roadies] about tench or perch fishing”. Meanwhile evenings after concerts are spent back at the band hotel, glass of wine in hand, examining the tour itinerary to plot his next trip.

He thrives on what he calls the “delicious anticipation” of it all. “Everyone’s got their thing on the road. Some of the guys play golf, Bruce [Dickinson, Iron Maiden’s singer] goes flying on his days off, and Steve [Harris, bass player] has a full soccer itinerary mapped out. I’m out fishing,” says the one-time cover star of Angler’s Mail (biggest chub of the season, 2009).

Iron Maiden emerged in the so-called New Wave of British Heavy Metal scene of the early 1980s. They have since sold 100 million albums and remain a mighty touring machine, hitting the road on vast global jaunts on an almost annual basis. With his love of angling, Smith is tapping into something of a trend for famous people to extol the calming and restorative powers of standing on a river bank, rod in hand.

Comedians Bob Mortimer and Paul Whitehouse’s TV series Gone Fishing, now in its third series, has become a sleeper hit for the BBC. Meanwhile David Beckham and Rita Ora have emerged as keen anglers. Last week it was reported that Prince George will learn how to fly-fish at Balmoral. Smith describes Gone Fishing as “lovely telly”. “It’s nice to see them getting out there and showing fishing in a good light,” he says. In 2020, it’s cool to spool.

But Smith’s fishing is more than a mere hobby to counter the longueurs of touring. Angling was instrumental in saving him from the excesses of life on the road. The booze and drugs that went hand in hand with playing in a rock band in the 1980s left Smith burnt out and mildly depressed. He quit the band in 1990 for nine years as a result. Fishing played a big role in him refinding a balance in life and rejoining Maiden in 1999, as he explains in a new memoir Monsters of River & Rock.

The temptations of the rock 'n' roll lifestyle were everywhere on the road back then. Drugs – mainly cocaine – were freely available. “You didn’t even have to buy any. People always gave it to you,” he says.

The mantra on Maiden tours in the 1980s was ‘work hard, play hard’. Not that the band – five spirited young lads living out their fantasies – needed much encouragement. “We were quite young and all the crew were older than us, knew all the ropes, they led us astray. We had a good time, don’t get me wrong. But I personally had a few lows as well.”

Tours were exhausting, with Maiden sometimes playing close to 200 shows a year back them. In those days it simply wasn’t acceptable to admit that you were struggling, Smith says. “You just sort of got on with it. People would say ‘Stop complaining’.”

He realised he needed to slow down when a guest at one of the hotels they were staying in died. The band’s tour manager saw a body being stretchered out of the hotel lobby and thought it was Smith. “I thought ‘Hang on a minute’. I didn’t think I was that bad,” the guitarist says.

Fishing gave his life some much-needed balance. It helped break him out of the “tunnel vision” of touring. It aided his mental health. Smith had fished as a youngster. He writes evocatively in his book about growing up in working class East London surrounded by gasworks and concrete. He’d fish for sticklebacks in bomb craters on Hackney Marshes, finding “beauty” in the animals among the urban sprawl. Trips to fish for perch or roach with this father would end with Smith sitting outside a pub with a packet of crisps while his dad sang Sinatra or Perry Como inside. Smith paints a vivid picture. He became, appropriately, hooked on fishing.

He has since fished almost everywhere, from Kashmir and New Zealand to Florida’s Everglades and New York’s Central Park, which has Smallmouth bass in its Pond. In the mid-1980s he and his future wife (and prize-winning angler) Nathalie bonded on a six-week fishing trip to Canada which was only meant to last a week. It’s a neat irony that Maiden’s long-term manager is called Rod.

I ask Smith if there any parallels between fishing and being in a massive rock band. Or is the whole point that they have nothing in common? He says they are more similar than you’d think. Both involve long periods of inactivity punctuated by moments of intense action. “You can spend 22 hours on the road killing time and then two hours on stage under the lights. And with fishing you can sit there for hours waiting for a bite and then when you get one it’s very exciting,” he explains.

Music and fishing have another thing in common too: they’ve both become too easy. Smith believes that life is about the journey and, occasionally, the struggle. Gratification lies in the process as much as the result. With music, computer software like Pro Tools means anyone can be a musician. Likewise, over-stocked fishing ponds these days guarantee catches to the most amateur of anglers.

He believes this defeats the purpose. “You don’t even have to learn an instrument to play a song [today]. I hear music in gyms and it’s computerised, it’s soulless and I can’t stand it. With fishing, you can go to these over-stocked ponds and just stick your bait in and catch a fish,” he says. But such is progress. He jokes that jazz musicians back in the 1950s probably thought the electric guitar was “cheating” when it was invented. “That’s just life, I suppose”.

One band who can’t be accused of taking short cuts is Iron Maiden. They have remained alarmingly consistent and hard-working musical force for 40 years. Their sound is a thrilling cocktail of harmonised guitars, galloping bass, breakneck drums and singer Bruce Dickinson’s operatic howl (although Dickinson did leave for six years in the 1990s). Only two of their 16 studio albums since 1980 have failed to reach the top 10, and they’ve had number one albums in three of the last four decades.

Their last two releases – 2010’s The Final Frontier and 2015’s The Book of Souls – topped the charts, demonstrating an enduring appeal that other bands would kill for. The trick, says Smith, has been not to mess with the formula. While heavy metal contemporaries such as Def Leppard and M?tley Crüe embraced grunge, industrial and even dance music in occasionally laughable attempts to chase trends, Maiden stuck rigidly to their sonic template.

“Steve [Harris, Maiden’s de facto leader] has a vision and although we may have disagreed a little bit over the years, he’s been right to stick to it as it pays off in the long run. If you do jump on a trend, by definition that’s going to die out and you’re going to be left high and dry. So you’re better off just doing something solid and sticking to your guns,” Smith explains.

It’s in the live arena where Maiden excel. Their shows are epically bonkers. Over the years their elaborate stage sets have included jungle-engulfed Mayan ruins, Egyptian pyramids, a First World War trench and an Arctic wasteland. Lurking somewhere on stage on every tour is Eddie, the band’s zombie-like mascot who has appeared on all their album covers.

The last time I saw Maiden, a 15-foot animatronic Eddie stalked the stage in tribal war paint and a loincloth before having his heart ripped out by Dickinson (and tossed into the audience). The strange thing is, it’s all done with such a finely calibrated blend of conviction and knowingness that none of it feels ridiculous. It’s pure adult pantomime.

Of course, Covid-19 has stopped the live music industry in its tracks. Maiden were forced to cancel all 2020 shows of their Legacy of the Beast Tour and have rescheduled most for next summer. Smith says it’s not just bands who’ve been left twiddling their thumbs; the entire live music ecosystem is suffering. “It’s very tough at the moment right the way through. Even small rehearsal studios are closing down because bands are not rehearsing. Little bars and venues are shut or not having crowds in. You can only hope that they’ll come up with a vaccine. I don’t see any other way really.” He has “high hopes” the shows will happen as planned next year.

And when they do, you should scour the rivers and lakes close to the concert venues. You’ll see Smith there, rod in hand, thriving on the delicious anticipation of it all.

Monsters of River & Rock: My Life as Iron Maiden’s Compulsive Angler by Adrian Smith is published by Virgin Books