21. Two Minutes To Midnight
(Powerslave, 1984)
Punkte: 336
Votes: 31
Schnitt: 10,8
"'Two Minutes To Midnight' was released on Aug. 6, 1984, as the advance single from the group's fifth album, "Powerslave". The song addresses the threat of U.S. and Soviet tensions blossoming into full-on global annihilation, and kicks off with a dramatic guitar and drum intro that every dedicated metalhead has mimed in their bedroom at least a couple dozen times. Inspiration struck quickly and in an unlikely place for Iron Maiden's Adrian Smith and Bruce Dickinson when they wrote one of the band's most enduring anthems in less time than it takes to reheat a pizza. "That's basically a hard-rock tune," Smith explaines "I'm guitar-oriented. That's where my writing goes. I was sitting in my hotel room working on this riff, and there was a banging on the door. It was Bruce, who immediately demanded to be let in on the action. So I played him the music to it, and he had a bunch of lyrics. He started singing, and we had 'Two Minutes To Midnight'. We wrote it in about 20 minutes!". "With Cold War tensions at a high, and then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan expounding about the evil empire of the Soviet Union," as Dickinson noted in his 2017 autobiography
What Does This Button Do?, "the lyrics also came easily. The Doomsday Clock was ticking at two minutes to midnight and that sounded like a song title. It's a song about the experience of war. About the romance of it, and the horror of it, and the two things together, and the fact that, unfortunately, we're repelled and fascinated by it". The song was a big success upon release, hitting No. 11 on the U.K. charts, and No. 25 in the U.S. It has gone on to become Iron Maiden's sixth-most played live song of all time. It also spawned their first-ever conceptual video, which weaves a tale of spies, stolen warheads and an unsafely stored hand grenade. "These guys came in with this sort of high concept, with this guy on a computer," Dickinson recalls. "Back in the day, when this was made, they were the great unknown. Everything was computers. 'They're controlling you by computers,' you know? And the guy had glasses on and you could see his reflection on the scene, and we thought, 'Ohhh, that looks modern!". While hunting for the perfect setting for one of the video's scenes, the directors accidentally uncovered a piece of Iron Maiden history, which served as a reminder of how far Dickinson had come since joining the group. "They came with all these Polaroids of the locations, and one of the locations was for the mercenaries, when there's a shot of them all having a discussion," the singer said. "The guy goes, 'Oh it's this fantastic, dingy, grotty flat in this horrible, slimy East End tenement on the Isle of Dogs. You know, it's all boarded up, there's cat piss everywhere and it's just perfect! Here it is, this is where they'll be.' And I looked at it, and I went, 'I used to live there.'" (Classic Rock UK)
"About the politics of war and destruction, '2 Minutes To Midnight' makes a meaningful statement about the morality of warmongers and politicians. The most vivid images are summoned here to highlight the horrors of this world, and the "prime-time Belsen feast" probably refers to those terrible pictures that show up at almost every news bulletin on TV. Bergen-Belsen was one of the most horrifying concentration camps in Nazi Germany (although it is obvious that the sheer existence of such places was an insult to Mankind in itself) and the reference to such terrible events happening in "prime-time" seems to indicate that, although such things are still taking place nowadays in one form or another, they have become some sort of a show and no one pays much attention anymore. The title of the song refers to the Doomsday Clock, one of the most chilling and best known symbols of the nuclear age, representing how close humanity is to the brink of nuclear holocaust (midnight). The clock reached two minutes to midnight in September 1953, after the Soviets successfully detonated an awesomely powerful thermonuclear device. Today the clock stands at 1,5 minutes to midnight after little progress was made on global nuclear disarmament." (ironmaidencommentary.com)
"The subject of impending Armageddon has been a rich creative source explored extensively throughout the history of Heavy Metal, but never with more snarling swagger or momentous panache than on the lead single to 1984’s "Powerslave", the title of which references the Bulletin Of Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock. The brainchild of Bruce Dickinson and Adrian Smith, 'Two Minutes To Midnight'’s combination of gouging riffage (echoing, oddly, Riot’s 'Swords & Tequila') and arena-baiting chorus ("two minutes to midnight, the hands that threaten doom, two minutes to midnight, to kill the unborn in the womb’) still feels as unstoppable as an atom bomb!!" (Kerrang UK)
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Und: Wer ein Problem mit Oohoohoos hat, hat weder Maiden noch die Misfits je verstanden ... 
