2 Minutes To Midnight – Iron Maiden (1984)

Description

Additional information about this, Iron Maiden vinyl art.

Iron Maiden – The Artist

Iron Maiden are an English heavy metal band formed in Leyton, East London, in 1975 by bassist and primary songwriter Steve Harris. The band’s discography has grown to thirty-nine albums, including sixteen studio albums, twelve live albums, four EPs, and seven compilations. Pioneers of the new wave of British heavy metal, Iron Maiden achieved initial success during the early 1980s. After several line-up changes, the band went on to release a series of UK and US platinum and gold albums, including 1982’s The Number of the Beast, 1983’s Piece of Mind, 1984’s Powerslave, 1985’s live release Live After Death, 1986’s Somewhere in Time and 1988’s Seventh Son of a Seventh Son. Since the return of lead vocalist Bruce Dickinson and guitarist Adrian Smith in 1999, the band has undergone a resurgence in popularity, with their 2010 studio offering, The Final Frontier, peaking at No. 1 in 28 countries and receiving widespread critical acclaim. Their sixteenth studio album, The Book of Souls, was released on 4 September 2015 to similar success.

2 Minutes To Midnight – The Song

“2 Minutes to Midnight” is a song by the British heavy metal band Iron Maiden, featured on their fifth studio album, Powerslave (1984). It was released as the band’s tenth single, and first from the album on 6 August 1984. A protest song about nuclear war, “2 Minutes to Midnight” was written by Adrian Smith and Bruce Dickinson. The song title references the Doomsday Clock, the symbolic clock used by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which represents a countdown to potential global catastrophe. In September 1953 the clock reached two minutes to midnight, the closest it ever got to midnight in the 20th Century, when the United States and Soviet Union tested H-bombs within nine months of one another. The atomic clock, set at 12 minutes to midnight in 1972, regressed thereafter among US–Soviet tensions, reaching three minutes to midnight in 1984 – the year this track was released – and at that time the most dangerous clock reading since 1953. According to Dickinson, the song critically addresses “the romance of war” in general rather than the Cold War in particular. “2 Minutes to Midnight” is the band’s first single to exceed five minutes in length, it remained their longest until the release of “Infinite Dreams” in November 1989. to be released from the album British Steel by heavy metal group Judas Priest. The song was written very much in the same vein as “Take On the World” from Killing Machine (Hell Bent for Leather in the U.S.) and meant to be a crowd shout-along.

Nuclear Explosion – The Shape

This record has been modelled into the shape of a nuclear explosion. A nuclear explosion is an explosion that occurs as a result of the rapid release of energy from a high-speed nuclear reaction. The driving reaction may be nuclear fission or nuclear fusion or a multi-stage cascading combination of the two, though to date all fusion-based weapons have used a fission device to initiate fusion, and a pure fusion weapon remains a hypothetical device. Atmospheric nuclear explosions are associated with mushroom clouds, although mushroom clouds can occur with large chemical explosions. It is possible to have an air-burst nuclear explosion without those clouds. Nuclear explosions produce radiation and radioactive debris.

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